The Republic of Dissent

Se souvenir des belles choses

My goal for the rest of the year and of my life is to focus on the good and to remind myself of the beauty that there is in the world when things get tough. In any case, just because I need to meditate, I will see you on the first Monday of 2010. Happy Holidays. I have two suggestions if you are looking for a good wine and a great book to finish the year with a bang: The Muri Gries Muller Thurgau, which is an affordable Italian white wine with enough complexity to make you forget that it didn't cost you the moon and the Letters of Samuel Beckett, which just shows those of us with self-doubt that even the greatest Francophone writer of the last century went through uncertain times. Merry Christmas and Happy new year !!!!!

The Childish season

Well, it is impossible not to munch on these words from John Gray given that it is almost Christmas :

The essence of the Christian religion, for example, is love. In that case, how could Christianity have anything to do with religious warfare or persecution? Such blemishes can only be the result of a perversion of Christian teaching, which in its original purity contained nothing hateful. No doubt much that is odious has been done in its name, but Christianity - the essence or spirit of the religion - is innocent of all evil. This is childish reasoning, if only because it fails to understand that like every religion Christianity is made up from a variety of sources, not all of them wholly benign. Pure Christianity is a figment of fundamentalism, a way of thinking that is typical of the childish mind.

The perpetual identity question

Agnès Poirier on what it means to French:

Eric Cantona didn't pull his punches when asked about the national debate: "They talk of the Marseillaise, of the French language, but politicians are asses. To be French is to be revolutionary and refusing all this politicking crap."
Precisely. Historical events have shaped the French mindset more than any debates will. The struggle of the French revolutionaries and the first republic up in arms against all the monarchies of the continent was the start of a profound shake-up and national identity construction. The Napoleonic setback and royalist restorations throughout the 19th century sharpened the minds, created deep national divisions, but also prepared for the glorious revolutionary episodes of the second republic (1848-1852) and the Commune (1870). The Franco-Prussian war, the Dreyfus affair, the Third Republic, the law of separation of church and state, followed by the two world wars, Vichy, the Résistance, the Algerian war and decolonisation at large made France as we have known it to be: confrontational, contradictory, unruly, restless, but also profoundly republican and secular.
And let's remember that, according to the National Institute for Demographic Studies, a quarter of the French have at least one grandparent born outside France.

Everything is white

Walking in New York is painful .The snow is omnipresent and is melting to form a staining sea of crap, which just ruins your clothes or your shoes if you are not careful, but again it is difficult to be careful while walking in New York while frantically talking on the phone among people rushing to find a last minute Christmas gift. In any case, I wondered, as I was walking in the streets of Manhattan, why New Yorkers reelected Mike Bloomberg when it is painfully clear that the city needs somebody who is aware of the fact that others cities such London, Paris, and Madrid are catching up by having Mayors who are Sarkozyingly ambitious not just content with the status quo.

The ownership of words

Interesting sugary excerpt from Stanley Fish responding to the criticisms for his positive review of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue:

”Law and Order” creator Dick Wolf could not possibly supervise, never mind write, every script churned out by his production company, and yet TV critics have no hesitation in saying about a particular episode that it conveys Wolf’s usual message or embodies his vision of society. In his new book, “The Audacity to Win,” David Plouffe, campaign adviser to Barack Obama, recalls that when Obama decided to write his famous “race” speech, he said, “I know what I want to say,” and added that he would call the speechwriter “and give him some initial guidance.” The rest is history and everyone refers to the speech as Obama’s. In the same way, “Going Rogue” is Sarah Palin’s book, for good or ill. If I may mix metaphors, the issue of ghost writing is a red herring, a point made inadvertently by those posters who both deny Palin the title of author and excoriate her for her lies. If she didn’t write the book, she can’t be lying in it, and if she can be called either a liar or a truth-teller, she wrote the book.

As someone who skimmed Going Rogue, I have to say that it makes Sarah Palin likable, but it doesn't doesn't scare me or make willing to agree with her politics because on the contrary to the majority of Americans, I don't believe that likability is the key component to electability and to ideological discussions. May be the reason why I have never been able to hate or to despise Palin is that one of the most important lessons that I have learned the last few years is that people who hold beliefs, which I find ridiculous and despicable can be decent individuals and people who agree with me can be despicable and intolerant people. That doesn't stop the debate or make their view point acceptable, it just stops discussions from becoming petty, personal, superfluous, and apolitical and to become too infected to be productive.

The farce in Congress

I'm watching the whole Healthcare masquerade (news conferences by different members of congress posing and grandstanding for the cameras) and I want to puke, to say things bluntly. Where is  the POTUS?  Where is the king of the world to put his foot down and to take control of the process and to fulfill the promises of the people who believe that he was going to bring change in Washington? I thought that he was the Michael Jordan of America politics and the one thing about Jordan is that he knew how to close a game and to win it by taking the last show. People can say whatever they want about George W. Bush but he knew how to shove bills he believed (ideologically and erroneously) were good for America down the throat of Congress and yet, he never had the presumption of competence and of political savoir-faire that Obama has.
Come on, America why can't you let go of the fact that abortion isn't the center of every issue and the body of a woman doesn't belong to anybody, especially not to people who believe that there is a man upstairs talking to them and angry that little women are choosing not to become mothers when nature or whatever else is telling them to?

Sparks

I'm in a desperate need of a spark...

Accepting Cablinasians

I agree with John McWhorter on this:

That is, Woods long ago declared himself to be “Cablinasian” to Oprah, and America has bought it. And it is of a piece with so much else: it’s the America whose youth have embraced hiphop as mainstream music. It’s the America who thrill to a 24 on television with not one but two black Presidents, and then elected a  real one.(...)Tiger Woods, in designating himself truly a mutt rather than Black By Default, is ahead of the curve. There are those who think he was supposed to declare himself “black” because of how, say, police might see him. But to do that would be to deny that his Thai mother contributed half of his genes and raised him – raised him, unable, as someone not Black American, to do so as a Black Mother. So, Tiger was brave enough to – brace yourself, Soul Patrol – be what he is. Two things. Not just black – and not even mainly black.
Something we can all agree on – in fifty years a lot of people will see it as odd that in our times that was seen as news. We’re mixing, a lot. There are now increasing numbers of self-avowedly “biracial” people – the days I knew as a kid when the black-white “mixed” kid was faced with having to “admit” that she was “black” when she was about thirteen, crying at forums where such issues were discussed out of ambivalence over disowning her non-black parent, are past. Tiger isn’t, from what is evident publicly, especially deep – but he’s prescient. He is the future, just as FDR, hardly deep himself, gave us Social Security, the FDIC and so much more. Sometimes we need to hearken to people who are not given to thinking too very much.

I'm wondering if it is possible to make the choice not to be black by defaut and to have a future in American politics.

Fiction and Darkness

Chinua Achebe on Conrad's Heart of the Darkness and its racism:

I did not see myself as an African in those books. I took sides with the white men against the savages. In other words, I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man in his hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. The white man was good and reasonable and smart and courageous. The savages arrayed against him were sinister and stupid, never anything higher than cunning. I hated their guts.
But a time came when I reached the appropriate age and realized that these writers had pulled a fast one on me! I was not on Marlowe’s boat steaming up the Congo in ‘Heart of Darkness’; rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces.”

I've always wondered how much racism is acceptable for books who written in times when the prejudices which they transcribe were the norm. In other words, should we be able to read Conrad, Voltaire, or Céline without feeling not only guilty, but dirty? Can any work of fiction ever be equated to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kempf ? My only problem with The Heart of Darkness has always been the chosen limitations, which Conrad placed on the story because he was aware on his superfluousness and the subjectivity of his experience in the Congo and of the fact that he needed to give his readers what they wanted. I would have love The Heart of Darkness to have been more graphic, that is for example for "the savages" to either eat the "whites" on the boat or for the "civilized" people to just massacre them.  What I'm trying to say is that fiction has a right to racist, grotesque, vile or whatever else, the problem is its infeudation to biography or reality, when it is asked to represent the world as it should be or even as it is. Achebe seems not to be able to accept the fact that racists or rather prejudiced people can be good and even great writers and that to me is disappointing.

The pink season

Nothing to say so...

The end of American exceptionalism

I would like to be able to disagree vehemently with Nick Cohen on this, but I cannot because experience has shown me that he is, alas, in part right when he makes the following point although it takes him to another direction than I because I don't make the mistake of confusing a symptom with the disease:

Pride in American exceptionalism ran through Obama's Nobel peace prize acceptance speech. "In many countries, there is a deep ambivalence about military action today," he told his doubtless deeply ambivalent Norwegian audience. "At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America." He would take no notice of it. "Make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida's leaders to lay down their arms." Obama drew a map of a pacifist Europe, unwilling to face reality, and a tough-minded but idealist America ready to defend civilisation with "the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms".
Nowhere has American satisfaction with its uniqueness been more noticeable than in the applause it awards itself for its treatment of immigrants. Articles contrasting the success of the US in integrating Muslims against the failures of Britain have been a regular feature of the American press. Liberals emphasised that immigrants who wanted to leave their old identities behind were helped by a constitution and bill of rights that accepted them as equal citizens.
Conservatives claimed that immigrants could not sit resentfully at home living on welfare payments and developing sectarian grievances, as they could in corrupt Europe, but had to find jobs that inevitably brought them into contact with Americans from other cultures.
(...) Depressingly, Americans seem to be as bad as the British are at recognising the differences between Islam and Islamism. They can no longer, however, get away with pretending that Islamism is an un-American disease. Trying to explain the rise of religious hatreds and identity politics, Obama said in Oslo that "given the dizzying pace of globalisation, and the cultural levelling of modernity, it should come as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish about their particular identities", which was true enough in a platitudinous way.
I wonder if he yet understands that Americans are not exempt from the manias of our time and that his formerly special country is not looking so exceptional any more.

Racial essentialism, hybrid culture, and America

I almost agree totally with Scott McLemee responding to the criticisms of his post expressing disappointment with Cornel West's latest work:

The most important premise being that no white writer can say anything critical about a black writer without having vile and probably violent motives. This axiom is typically nested, in turn, within an assumption that American life is best understood as having two distinct cultural complexes. One is coded white and the other black. They are accessible via distinct (and well-guarded) entrances, and obey incommensurable zoning codes. You are supposed to stay in your proper matrix.
A system of internal colonies, between which a spirit of mutual disinterest prevails, is not my idea of a good society. As a basis for cultural criticism, “separate but equal” is not that appealing a principle. Nor do I feel deeply accountable to any “tolerance” found choking on its own stifled aggression. My sense of life owes a lot to the work of C.L.R. James, who thought that the multiracial crew of the Pequod was what made Moby Dick such a touchstone to understanding American possibilities.We should leave racial essentialism to the stand-up comedians who finesse it best. This is a hybrid culture. That is perhaps the one good thing you can say about it. I don’t intend to give that up.

I'm wondering looking at America with some distance (though with adoring eyes) whether the fact that it has a hybrid culture means that it can become a society where racial essentialism isn't in fact its essence. I have come reluctantly to the realization that America is a country, which accepts that origins, race define who people are and acceptable to criteria to form legitimated communities. The American societal model is one where every single member of society has to choose a group, a community to become to avoid marginalization at the best and castrating powerlessness at the worst.

Insight

Valuable insight from Juan Cole on Obama, his latest great speech and his possible futures:

Obama implied that peaceful conflict resolution is preferable, but that challenges do arise that require a military resolution. But he has unwittingly stacked the deck in favor if the military-industrial complex by adopting Bushian rhetoric at key junctures--speaking of enemies as 'evil,' militarizing the response to terrorism, and asserting false equivalences that help make war seem inevitable.
Obama has yet to decide whether he is a visionary or a technocrat. The prize committee hoped for the former. In this speech they got the latter.

I'm starting to believe that Bush changed America or that at the very least he comforted its belief in Messianic leaders and its responsibility not to be good, but to fight evil and the evil doers. It may not be possible for Obama to reverse the trend in great part because doing so means taking the risk to become a midget president. Obama will always benefit from the comparison and from the presumptions that being cultured, worldly (in the American sense of the terms), and less abrasive give him. It is bitingly ironic, but not too surprising that the Change president has became the do not rock the boat president, but again can you change profoundly a country who needs Disneyland and who has to believe in evil, almost as much if not more, than it believes in purity and the good?

The common tale of a nation divided

Interesting bit from R.W. Johnson's article in the London Review of Books on next year's soccer football world cup in South Africa:

The World Cup, it is everywhere said, will market South Africa around the world, create jobs and be highly beneficial to the country’s development. In fact, it will be very much for the delectation of the well-off. At least in ancient Rome the poor got to see the chariot races and gladiatorial contests, but there is little chance of the same happening here. In practice, one may be sure, it will be the new elite who will flock to the games in their Mercs and BMWs. It is quite common in South Africa for higher civil servants or mayors and councillors from poor areas to award themselves trips to the Olympics or other such international events, often taking hundreds of hangers-on with them, all paid for from the public purse. There is little doubt that the World Cup, being local, will see more of that sort of thing than ever.

The value of political speeches

I have to admit that since we have entered the Obama era, I am confused about what makes a political speech valuable and why political eloquence has become more important than anything else. Is it that it makes the person who is giving it popular and likable or that it advances a political goal other than the one to get the speaker elected? I'm confused. Does America really want to be a country where words matter more than deeds and become solely weapons designed to dismiss alarming realities? Obama's speech today was great, but what does it change? Does it make his Afghan strategy more viable than it was before ?  I think that the answer is no, but I'm wondering if one is willing to accept that Obama is neither Jesus nor the Antichrist, why his speeches would matter more than his deeds as if they were either divinely or evilly inspired and can thus either make the disabled walk or turn the patriots blind. I hate the politics of personal sublimation with as much passion as I hate the politics of personal destruction.

The train

I had a great long birthday weekend. It was fun even though every time I take the train in the US, I wonder why don't Americans take public transportation more seriously especially in a times when climate change is no longer a joke. In any case, when you take the train in New York to go to Philly or anywhere else, the ride is long even if you take the Acela Express (The fastest train but still not even close to the TGV) because no efforts are made to make it a unique experience. To come back to my long and short vacation, I think that maturing is about realizing that life is a lot like law school (unfortunately) in the sense that it is a marathon not a sprint and that you have to pace yourself and to keep your focus not to miss the train to your destination. One of the major differences between life and law school is that you get more chances and, more often than not, more choices (which can be a bad thing) to become top dog or to simply be happy.

Celebration

I'm going to be lost in the middle of what I hope will be meaningful and inspiring activities this weekend and at the beginning of the week because Tuesday is my Birthday. So posts might be rare or they might not be for I'm an addict to blogging. I will be back Wednesday as an older and hopefully more mature and inspired woman person.

Conservatism

Sam Tanenhaeus's latest, The Death of Conservatism is on my must-read list for the end of the year even though I find the title of his book io be a pompous cliché designed to create buzz. Anyway, he is fun to listen to, which I hope means that he will be fun to read for those things don't always go together.

Prudent censorship

Reading this sugary excerpt leaves a bitter taste in my mouth because of my anxious apprehension that it is a sign of things to come for we are in a world where taking offense or crying wolf put a stop to necessary interrogations and deserved criticisms:

There is, however, a glaring omission in The Cartoons that Shook the World. None of the twelve cartoons has been reproduced in the book. In August, Yale University Press announced that it would suppress the controversial images, citing advice from a handful of academics, diplomats and journalists, including Marcia Inhorn, John Negroponte, and Fareed Zakaria. According to the publisher, “the decision rested solely on the experts’ assessments that there existed a substantial likelihood of violence that might take the lives of innocent victims.”
Klausen reluctantly agreed. After all, by her own count, the publication of the cartoons had already been responsible for at least 200 deaths and 800 additional injuries. Yale University Press had to tread lightly, and it was certainly within its rights to do so.
To justify its decision further, the publisher noted that curious readers could easily view the cartoons online. Here, at least, Klausen is clearly at odds with her publisher. In the text, she warns readers that “the longevity of such sites is unpredictable and they are often marred by obscene commentary and misleading translations of the Danish captions.” 

For some reason I'm reminded of the second debate of the 2000 Presidential election  where to any timid criticism Gore made, Bush responded smartly that he was hurt because his heart was being questioned, which killed a debate, which he feared. If our biggest concern becomes to bow to the sacred and to the fanatical and absolute adoration that people have for it, why don't we just pass laws forcing us to love and to respect each other and not to question any religious or personal  beliefs..It's scary that we live in times where the heart and the divine are annihilating reason.

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Luck and victory

I agree with Juan Cole on this:

There is a sense in which the easy victory that American Special Forces operatives -- allied with the Northern Alliance -- won over the Taliban in fall of 2001 proved a fatal, siren call, inviting Bush and the arrogant men around him into the Iraq quagmire. As it turned out, the victory in Afghanistan was declared prematurely. (The previous administration suffered from a tendency to premature ejaculations, as on the deck of the USS Lincoln on May 1, 2003.) The Taliban were not gone, but merely changed the color of their turbans and faded away to fight another day. Their opposition to the new order was joined by some of America’s former allies among the Mujahedin (whom Ronald Reagan had lauded as "freedom fighters"), such as Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbadin Hikmatyar. Obama is in danger of being misled by the inside-the-Beltway think tank consensus on what happened in Iraq, and of applying those "lessons" to Afghanistan. Even if the two actually resembled one another, the Washington story about Iraq is full of holes. But they are very different countries, societies and situations. Bush caught a break with his surge, inasmuch as it coincided with a massive shift in the local power balance. Obama will have to be very lucky indeed to catch a similar break in Afghanistan.

Nothingness

I have nothing to say,but that's due to the fact that I'm too tired and way too busy. I can't believe that we are in December 2009 ! I have decided not to have any material Christmas gift this year, just some positive and inspiring thought to make a difference. This decision may mean that I'm either too cheap this year or just too original, or just both.