The Republic of Dissent

On Africanity and literature

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Chinua Achebe and his influence on "Africa":

As a university student in the 1950s, in addition to reading Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Coleridge, Achebe also read Joyce Carey’s "Mister Johnson," a novel set in Nigeria, which Time magazine had named the "best book ever written about Africa." Achebe disagreed. Not only was the Nigerian character in the novel unrecognizable to him and his classmates but he also detected, in the description of Nigerians, "an undertow of uncharitableness ... a contagion of distaste, hatred, and mockery."
There has been much written about Chinua Achebe’s "Things Fall Apart" as a response to Mister Johnson, and one likes to think that Achebe would have written his novel even if he had not read Cary’s. Still, the prejudiced representation of African characters in literature could not but have had an influence on Achebe’s development as a writer. He would, years later, write a famous essay about the portrayal of Africans in Joseph Conrad’s classic novel "Heart of Darkness," arguing not that Conrad should not have written honestly about the racism of the time, but that Conrad failed to hold an authorial rejection of that worldview.
The strangeness of seeing oneself distorted in literature – and indeed of not seeing oneself at all – was part of my own childhood. I grew up in the Nigerian university town of Nsukka in the 1980s, reading a lot of British children’s books. My early writing mimicked the books I was reading: all my characters were white and all my stories were set in England. Then I read "Things Fall Apart." It was a glorious shock of discovery, as was "Arrow of God," which I read shortly afterwards; I did not know in a concrete way until then that people like me could exist in literature. Here was a book that was unapologetically African, that was achingly familiar, but that was, also, exotic because it detailed the life of my people a hundred years before. Because I was educated in a Nigerian system that taught me little of my pre-colonial past, because I could not, for example, imagine with any accuracy how life had been organized in my part of the world in 1890, Achebe’s novels became strangely personal.

Adichie's assertions bug me. They do because she focuses on differences, which to her seem to be fundamental. Her use of the expression "unapologetically African" is problematic (it would have been less controversial is she had said used the word Nigerian even though the use of the word unapologetically would have remained a problem). Africanity doesn't exist. In fact, it has never existed. It wouldn't presumptuous to presume that Chinua Achebe is very different than his ancestors and that in fact, when he wrote Things Fall Apart he focused on his desire to be himself rather than on his Nigerianity or Africanity (although for him, being Achebe might have meant be a true Nigerian and African). What I'm trying to see is that people cleverly used Africanity to defend their individuality and unfortunately often to justify differences that reason and decency (due seldom to their lack of imagination and knowledge) cannot. The point is Achebe's greatest achievement wasn't the affirmation of an identity, but the creation of one, one, which was solely his. People who look like him or have commonalities with him don't have to embrace it, but solely to recognize and not to delegitimate. At the same time, those who do as Adichie shouldn't equate with Africanity as a way to argue that there is just the Chinua Achebe's way to show that one comes from Africa. Adichie conveniently ignores that issues of identity have plagued Africans precisely for the  reason that because they is no agreement on a definition, the focus is placed on  resentment, victimization, the colonizers, and the fact that Africanity means to "unapologically" be different than them and to confront their contradictions.
The reason why I have argued that there is not such a thing as "African literature" or even as "African writer" is simply those popular and narrow categories don't mean anything. I have the strong suspicion that writers from the continent have too many essential differences to be put in one narrow categories and that when they are not ideologues or marketers would acknowledge that neither their nationality nor the fact that they are from a vast and heterogeneous continent defines their writing.

Medicalizing human behavior and justifying vileness

Good, but limited point, (which makes it too easy to make) from Gideon Rachman on Zuma, his wife, children, polygamy, and sex therapy:

Despite having three wives and a fiance, Zuma’s latest was conceived with yet another woman. I saw Zuma questioned about his polygamy at Davos and he faced down his critics without embarrassment. But this latest episode has actually forced him to apologise. So what are we to conclude? Polygamy good, adultery bad? Nineteen children fine; twenty children way over the top?
Helen Zille, the leader of the Democratic Alliance, is quoted as saying - “We believe President Zuma needs sex addiction therapy, as was recommended for Tiger Woods…” This strikes me as a ludicrous attempt to medicalise behaviour that may be reprehensible - but is also, frankly, how rich and powerful men have behaved for centuries. Should all those Turkish sultans with their harems also have been sent for sex addiction therapy?

Are we always going to allow/justify/excuse/dismiss manly particularities because they have always existed? If that's the norm, can we all be allowed to be manly and to follow the example of Jacob Zuma or is this permissiveness solely applies to  despicable men's actions supposedly justified by history, nature, and culture?

Human rights and the deification of traditions

Tzvetan Todorov on human rights:

I’m not against human rights. Who could be against human rights? But I’m a little sceptical about their use. It seems to be that the preliminary of human rights is indeed something that we should cherish very much, which is the capacity of finding a common ground. I observe, however, and I think that’s why I have this sceptical view, that human rights nowadays are used as a kind of instrument for justifying our Western superiority. And as soon as we observe that somewhere rights are not exactly accepted in the same way, we consider these countries definitely inferior and maybe even deserving punishment.
I think that we in the West are very proud of our traditions and justly so, but we still have a lot to learn from the Chinese traditions, from the African traditions, from all sorts of ways of being elsewhere. We need to pay attention to these rather than extracting one savage habit such as clitoridectomy, and say, “Well, how can you do that?”

I disagree with him for two simple reasons. The first is that I don't think that there is such a place as the "West" and the rest for this distinction comes from the denial of the reality that the world is too small and the west has become the rest and vice versa. This fact doesn't mean that we are all the same, but rather that differences cannot longer be sacred and justified by invoking a glorified past or unchallengeable faith in the divine. My second reason for disagreeing with Todorov is that although I'm to acknowledging the human rights are problematic especially in the sphere of international affairs, that reality doesn't mean that cultural differences are legitimate excuses/justifications for barbarism and cruelty. Culture doesn't justify anything and more importantly, traditions can be barbaric, grotesque, and unique without using the human rights criteria or comparing them to what others or to use a lauded term "civilized" people do. It is always important to pay attention to savage habits because they affect more often than not an incredible amount of people.

A lethal sentimentalist education

It is rare for me to say, but Melanie Phillips is absolutely right when she writes this:

Cynical as this may sound, there is no doubt that appealing to public sympathy is now a way to score political points or a 'get out of jail free' card in public debate.
We see this when politicians use personal adversity to tug at the heart-strings. And what all but silences any cynicism is that such politicians' personal anguish is all too real.
We saw it over David Cameron's disabled young son, Ivan, who, before he died a year ago, featured in many moving interviews with Cameron and accounts of his family life.
Some found this tasteless and exploitative; Cameron himself simply said that Ivan was a part of his life he was not prepared to conceal.
What was undeniable was the wave of public sympathy this engendered for Cameron, and the way this humanised the hitherto callous and uncaring image of a Tory politician.
Now we learn that in a forthcoming TV interview, Gordon Brown is overcome by emotion when talking about his daughter who died in 2002, ten days after being born prematurely.

The politics of the Me era is about feelings and images (the two are interrelated). People both want to watch grand spectacles, which explain why politics is more theatrical and to feel/get "the self" of their politicians so that they can be reassured that later s/he will feel their pain. It's not about empathy, it's about egocentrism and the increasing difficulty for uncultured or discultured electorates to resort to cold analysis when it comes to politics.

For Women, it is always about love and pain

For some reason, Toril Moi's review of the latest English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe in the London Review of Books bugs me . I shouldn't say "for some reason" for I know what it bugs me. It seems that the fact that Beauvoir is the author of Le Deuxième Sexe has given all of her biographers the manly obligation to prove that she was a woman first and foremost and thus very much guided by her womanhood, not her brain or any type of rigorous analytical enterprise. The presumption is that those "facts" should lead to the logical conclusion that her work is secondary to the one of Sartre because when she thought or wrote, she never stopped to be the Castor, a woman with a big derrière who sought love everywhere else even in literature and philosophy when he refused to give it to her. Outrageous excerpt:

The roots of The Second Sex are here, in Beauvoir’s realisation that her life had been affected in countless ways by her having been born a girl. This massive book was written fast: the first volume appeared in Paris in June 1949, the second five months later. But Beauvoir did not spend all the intervening time on her analysis of women’s condition. In January 1947 she travelled to the United States for the first time, and in 1948 she published America Day by Day, a deeply perceptive book about the experience. Moreover, she met Nelson Algren there. The writing of The Second Sex thus coincided with her discovery of America and with her passionate affair with Algren. It also coincided with Sartre’s transatlantic affair with the New York-based Frenchwoman Dolorès Vanetti, which caused Beauvoir much pain.
That much of Beauvoir’s personal experience went into the making of her investigation of the situation of women is beyond doubt. Judith Okely has drawn attention to Beauvoir’s ‘hidden use of herself as a case study’ in The Second Sex. The urgency of her style, the conviction that every scrap of evidence must be piled up to show the world the truth about women’s condition, surely comes from a sense that she was, after all, writing a kind of confession, offering the public intimate and unsettling truths about herself, and about other women.

Boy, women really do have trouble taking each other seriously or rather they have this disturbing notion that seriousness is equated to manliness and womanhood (I hate that word) is a particularity. I have yet to see Sartre's sex life been given the same dehumanizing and belittling treatment.

Spinster fear and sterile, but eternal musings

Before quoting Jessa Crispin's article on Elizabeth Gilbert and her two books, I have to say that I like Gilbert. I like listening to her talk because she gives good lectures. The trouble is that I just don't like reading her books because they make me want to slam my head against the wall while crying in a Nancy Kerrigan fashion "why? why?" What I'm trying to say is that we are in 2010, women should just get over the perpetual quest for self, perfection, candid feminitude, balance, and just embrace complexity and their imperfections while just living their life the way their want to without making excuses, without needing to bash others on the head with their deep, but sterile thoughts.  Here is the sugary excerpt:

These are the accusations against Elizabeth Gilbert I have read: treacly, annoying, feminist, insincere, spoiled. Then there are the more brutal ones: bitch, dyke, cunt. The most common, however, was "selfish." How dare she? How dare she leave her husband to travel? How dare she write a book about it? How dare she fall in love again? And with a Brazilian! How dare she... what? Attain happiness? Or at the very least, put a stop to her death wish? That bitch, that dyke, how dare she walk away from her man?! Doesn't she understand that this is the shameful masculine territory? It's just as bad when men do it — we're not saying it isn't! — but women are supposed to be above all that, all of that free will stuff. Really. How dare she?
Now of course there is the follow-up, a book examining the state of marriage after Gilbert discovered she had to marry her Brazilian lover for him to attain citizenship. As a history of marriage, Committed is a thoroughly unnecessary book. There are a ton of books on the market telling us that marriage is a raw deal for women. Men thrive in marriage, they are healthier, they earn more money, they are happier. These gains appear to be at the expense of women, as they do not thrive in marriage. Quite the opposite. There are the added hours of housework, a decline in earning power, the depressed libido. Then there are the rates of divorce and infidelity, that sticky statistic about the chances of a woman being murdered by her husband. We know all this, and we get married anyway. If this is the paradigm, why do we cling so tightly to it? And why do we freak out when someone rejects it?

Haiti and the lazy culture

I don't know what to say about reading Peter A.Coclanis's oped in the Wall Street Journal on Haiti. I'm speechless, but here is the part that sent me in a state of shock (which isn't bad because it made me pensive):

Haiti is by far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Some 98% of the country is deforested. It lacks many of the fundamental institutions necessary for a vibrant economy, such as a reliable police force, protections for private property, and schools that boost literacy rates. Just 50% of Haiti's population is literate now. Haiti also lacks a culture that encourages a strong work ethic, the accumulation of capital, and the passing of assets on to future generations. Realistically, building an economic base for Haiti will take generations.
Before the quake there were more than 10,000 nongovernmental organizations in Haiti feeding the poor, providing health services and much more. This fact alone should give the world pause. Haiti doesn't need to be rebuilt. It needs to be built from the ground up.

Can a culture encourage people to be lazy? And if it is the case, is it still culture, but nothing more than the sum of received ideas and perceptions? Is the problem of Haiti, that Haitians aren't working hard enough or rather that they haven't had tried things that work precisely because the world's and their state's emphasis has been on charity and on aid? My guess is that the point in my last question is the right one.But in any case, Coclanis has the merit to say things that need to be said and to point out the difficult fact that Haiti has to be built and not rebuilt, which is essential to help people understand that aid is nice, but something more here is needed.

Degendering Writing

Claire Messud on Women, literature, and the need to degender writing so that they can be considered as writers, plain and simple and to give them the opportunity to be read.

Just over ten years ago, the Modern Library compiled a list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century: only nine of them were by women, and Edith Wharton accounted for two books. Were there really only eight women writers of major significance in those 100 years? Not in my personal canon, at least. When, in 2006, the New York Times ran a list of the best American fiction of the past twenty-five years, Toni Morrison’s Beloved was pronounced the winner; but she and Marilynne Robinson (for Housekeeping) were the only women out of twenty-two titles (and that’s counting Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy and McCarthy’s Border trilogy as a single book each). Just last September, when the international literary magazine Wasafiri solicited responses from twenty-five global writers about the work that has most shaped world literature over the past quarter century, just four women—Elizabeth Bishop, Mildred Taylor, Toni Morrison, and Quarratulain Hyder—were on the list. And this is in a world where women account for 80 percent of fiction readers. See “Why Women Read More Than Men,” by Eric Weiner.
Here’s the deal: men, without thinking, will almost without fail select men. And women, without thinking, will too often select men. It’s a known fact that among children, girls will happily read stories with male protagonists, but boys refuse to read stories with female protagonists. J.K. Rowling was aware of this: if Harry Potter had been Harriet Potter, none of us would know about her.
(…)American literature is world literature. This is fiction for a global generation. Here are some fine examples of it, by a diverse group of immensely talented young writers who just happen to be women. I’d like to think that Elizabeth Bishop could not object.

Colonial arrogance

It is because of statements such this one that I have never been able to know quite what to make of Wole Soyinka (I have always thought that his writings were too restricted and restrictive, but that doesn't mean that he isn't a good writer):

England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it. Remember, that country was the breeding ground for communism, too. Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there.(...) Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.

Why do I have the unsavory feeling that too many greater of certain epoch are incapable to accept that Africa got decolonized over 40 years ago because they cannot let go of a world were there has to be the colonizers responsible for all the ills of the world and the colonized, eternal victims of history?

The era of narcissism

I agree with Chris Dillow on this even though I would make the following distinction, we like in an era where the focus in more egocentrism than on narcissism because I'm not sure that people actually love themselves, they just think that they are the center of the universe, that politics is solely about them and that bad people are evil because they are not like them:

When someone says “I am a Christian” or “I am an atheist”, the emphasis is entirely upon the “I”.
In this sense, we are living in an era of narcissism - albeit in perhaps a different sense from Christopher Lasch’s - in which the self is all-important.
Which raises a paradox. We think of the modern, post-Enlightenment era as being defined by liberalism and the scientific method. But these have in common the belief that propositions are separate from the individual - that the individual is a disembodied subject distinct from his beliefs. However, our public life effaces this distinction, whereas - as Sennett pointed out - people in the 17th and 18th century had a strong sense of a distinction between the public and private person.

Seeing something new in Shakespeare

Great stuff as always from Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyblog:

(...) Heritage stops us seeing Shakespeare for the troubling and unsettling writer that he manifestly is: "The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say." The times are ever-troubling; and it is always the time to speak in a heartfelt way against the present's deadening cant. These are not sane times; Lear is as untimely as it has ever been.
Shakespeare was writing when what constituted the written English language, what constituted the very tools which he went on to fashion into the best ever expression of those tools, was still particularly unsettled. And how he wields words seems to reflect a view of the self that suggests that what constitutes the self -- fashioned on the stage merely by the playwright's words, of course -- is itself ever-unsettled. Shakespeare’s language is an erratic, antic, fizzing brew which captures, and expresses existentially, a particular take on the non-fixity of the human state. He is a poet not of an age, but for all time because time is written into the ambiguity -- the play -- of his writing, and into the ambiguous, uncertain, unanchored, disarranged characters he sets before us. His language moves -- his characters move -- as we move as time moves...

As a Francophone, it was easier to like Shakespeare and to penetrate his writings in spite of their presumed and assumed difficulty and inaccessibility (the difficulty of a language or rather of the writing of an author is seldom an obstacle for a Francophone because French is an extremely difficult language to master) because I thought that he was a greater and more improved version of Corneille. I have always hated Corneille because I thought he made reading French an unnecessary unsavory experience despite having the best ingredients just because he must have thought that his works was too good be for the masses. In any case, I agree that Shakespeare's language moves. I would like to think that the reason for this is that like Balzac he could never really fall in love with his writing and therefore continuously thought of it as something that must not be allowed to kill his plays. The reason why there isn't a Shakespeare in French theater (Molière doesn't even come close) is that it is harder to make French move as characters do simply actions always overwhelms the language or language overwhelms the characters. Thus, it is not a coincidence that French theater needed Beckett and that it has been difficult for it to replace him.

Resfreshing silliness

Unlike some people, I love the fact that Martin Amis attempts to pick a fight with Coetzee by asserting that he has no talent. Coetzee is a big boy. He can defend himself. Writers don’t have to have a disingenuous deference to their peers. Hearing one saying that another sucks even when it comes out of bad faith, is refreshing and good for the writing soul. That said, I’m going to wait before I read Amis’s latest while enjoying Coetzee’s Summertime.

Culture as a justifcation for the indefensible

I cannot stand Jacob Zuma for so many reasons and reading that he's using his culture to defend or rather sacralize polygamy doesn't surprise me. It is just a reminder that we live in the age of excuses not of reasons where cultures, traditions, religions, all the crap that kill intellectualism are prevalent precisely because people don't know how to reason and to justify the fact that they are blindly following their most base urges or living ascetically. If "Culture" is a good excuse for despicable differences then there shouldn't be any problem welcoming the Taliban and other extremists on the international stage and to accept stoning, female circumcision, honor killings and whatever else.

The ideological warfare over women's bodies

Unconvincing and creepily artificial arguments against the Burqa (burka) from Alice Thompson in the London Times:

Face time, face-to-face, losing face, all these phrases show how we rely on scrutinising each other’s reactions, as do concerns about Botox and facelifts. The burka is not an invisibility cloak, it’s a passive- aggressive statement, a rejection of the community. The person wearing it is signalling that either she or her family wants her to remain apart from society. It implies that wearers believes that British men may become dangerously lecherous if they see their faces and that British women are too provocatively clad. Like smoking, wearing a burka doesn’t affect just the wearers, but those around them, who may feel shunned. With full-body tattoos, face piercing and a hoody, you can still smile to show that you are a friend.
(...)That doesn’t mean that Britain should ban the burka in public places. We don’t want the police stripping off women’s outer garments in the street. The French have gone too far by prohibiting the wearing of a full veil on public transport.
But we should make it clear that people should not be allowed to cover their faces when it impinges on others, That includes women working in schools, hospitals, courtrooms, shops and the service industries.

Yeah right...! In today's modern societies, don't we have the right to be loners and to say "fu*k you" to the majority as long that we don't harm anybody? How come these types of belittling and paternalistic arguments are only used when women are choosing a path that a society believes is wrong not only for her, but for their ideas of what she ought to be? It reminds  me of what too many parents do when their daughters want to assert their individuality in ways, which shock their value system or which they believe which have her labeled and thus scarred for life (she will never be able to get married). In any case, Thompson undermines her own arguments by rejecting a ban on the burqa, which shows that like me, the sight of a woman in burqa makes her feel uncomfortable, but that unlike me, she cannot tolerate/accept that discomfort because she believes that women can't be individuals, but should always be selfless and think about others. I'm tired of the idea that a woman's body is never solely her own, but instead always a vessel or symbol. When I see a woman with a veil, I have to remind myself that she has the right to do as she pleases with her body as long as she isn't engaging in obscene behavior. It seems to me that all of the discussions about the burqa and about whether to ban it in France and elsewhere just show that women are still the main instruments in an ideological, political and religious battlefield where the main combatants don't really care about their self-hood, but solely the preservation of their own misogynistic,but comfortable traditions.

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.

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 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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Great writers, huge egos, and blind spots

I agree with this even though I happen to enjoy immensely both Martin Amis's and Philip Roth's writings (Roth is one of the greatest novelists. He should have received the Nobel prize for literature if he wasn't such a acerbic manly man, which just proves the fashionable and consensual nature of such prizes):

When writers like Amis, or Philip Roth – who declared this week that novel-reading would be a fringe activity in 25 years – make their apocalyptic proclamations about the state of publishing, it seems apparent that their pessimism may in fact be rather strongly influenced by anxiety that their new work no longer carries the kind of cultural clout they have grown used to, not because people aren't reading novels, but because people aren't reading their novels. And part of the reason for that may be that with the bulk of modern consumers of fiction being women, the particular brand of literary writing in which a particular aptitude for fellatio suffices as characterisation for a woman is less interesting, or resonant, than it once was.

Zouk is the new Jazz

Some have trouble acknowledging it, but the best French music in our time is made in the West Indies. Now, what does that tell us is about French national identity (I have Eric Besson, the French immigration minister, om my mind) if the the Brel and Gainsbourg of today live in the DOM-TOMS? All you have to do is to listen to this song to get it. Zouk is in my opinion what Jazz was 50 years ago, that is at it. Since I just can't just write a cheerful post on a artificial day, I just hope that Zouk doesn't get Americanized in the bad sense of the word (yes, there is such a thing as good and even great Americanization).

Writers and political ideologies

I just finished reading Enrique Krauze's piece in the New Republic on Gabriel García Márquez in which he discusses Marquez 's politics and its effects on his writing by focusing on Gerald Martin's biography. Unfortunately, I think that Krauze's piece suffers from its lack of conciseness and cohesiveness and its author's inability/unwillingness to just say or rather just write what he means rather than beating around the bush to cover his biases and partiality. This lack of conciseness explains why the sugary excerpt of the article is found in its conclusion, which has to merit to try to make a point:

Gabriel García Márquez is not a hothouse writer. He claims to be proud of his work as a reporter. He promotes journalism at an academy in Colombia. He has asserted that the news story is a literary genre with the potential to be "not just true to life but better than life. It’s as good as a story or a novel, but with one sacred and inviolable difference: novels and stories permit unlimited fabrication but news stories have to be true down to the last comma." How, then, to reconcile this declaration of journalistic ethics with his own concealment of the truth in Cuba, despite his possession of privileged inside information?
Eventually history makes both aesthetic and moral judgments. Aesthetically speaking, it is a little premature to say that García Márquez is the "new Cervantes." But in moral terms, certainly, there is no comparison. A hero in the war against the Turks, wounded and maimed in battle, castaway and prisoner in Algeria for five years, Cervantes lived his ideals, his tribulations, and his poverty with Quixote-like integrity, and enjoyed the supreme freedom of accepting his defeats with humor. There is not a trace of such greatness of spirit in García Márquez, who has avidly collaborated with oppression and dictatorship. Cervantes? Not by a long shot.
The beauties of the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez will survive the twisted loyalties of the man who created it, just as the work of Céline survives his passion for the Nazis and the work of Pound survives his admiration for Mussolini. But it would be an act of poetic justice if, in the autumn of his life and at the zenith of his glory, he disassociated himself from Fidel Castro and put his influence at the service of the Cuban boat people. There is no point in hoping for such a transformation, of course. It is the kind of thing that happens only in García Márquez novel.

Something bothers me about Krauze's argument and his indictment of  Gabriel García Márquez, it is the fact that the context is blurred or rather tainted by an unwillingness to consider the fact that politcs aren't science and that writers's ideologies cannot be examined without considered the totality of the circumstances of the times within which they live. It is misleadingly shameful to compare Márquez to Céline without explanations or even an argumentation and without at least trying to be logical to the end. What I mean to say is that if Márquez is Céline, and thus Castro is Mussolini or Hitler what does that make Nations and their leaders that have good relations with Cuba and with the Castro ? Is Sarkozy, Neville Chamberlain because he sends envoys to Cuba? What should we say of Lula ? The goal isn't here to clear Márquez of any responsibility for his political ideology, but to point out that a writer's political ideologies cannot be judged without a deep and complete analysis of the context within which he writes. Louis Ferdinand Céline was a vile anti-semite, but he was living in  time where being antisemitic was tolerated in French society to say the least; that doesn't excuse him  but it matters. Context here is key to have make an informed judgment, but I wonder if that what was Krauze wants more than to beat on Gabriel García Márquez like a drum for associating himself with Castro.

Guys, love, and stuff

I don't know about you but watching two guys men talk about love just make me realize that romance, love, relationships are the new spirituality tools to make people avoid facing the scary reality existence is absurd and that sex can be satisfying, valuable in itself. I find the religionization, the merchandization of love, sex, relationship creepy. Something tells me that very soon there will love classes in colleges.

Inhibited speech

I agree with Tim Black on this:

This act of searching out offence and proclaiming the depth of one’s feelings from online rooftops threatens free speech. Not because it’s censorship in the official sense – at least, not yet, although the thousand or so urging the Press Complaints Commission to intervene or the person complaining to the police might yet make it official if they get their way. Rather, the danger of such a vast explosion of offence-taking is that it inhibits, creating a ‘you-can’t-say-that’ culture in which one is scared to speak one’s mind, whether its contents are moronic or not.
‘Offensiveness is part of life; the politics of inoffensiveness is a threat to free speech and open debate’, argued O’Neill. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing in the Independent today, disagrees, arguing that freedom of speech is fine as long as it’s not ‘without restraint’. But what else is ‘restraint’ but unfreedom? She’s not defending free speech, she’s defending non-offensive speech, where it’s fine to voice an opinion ‘until people’s deep feelings are roused’. And that is the problem. When feelings, especially hurt ones, are given such elevated public value, where it’s enough to claim that ‘the bad Daily Mail columnist hurt my feelings’ for the offending interlocutor to be shamed into silence, then there is no longer free speech. There’s only inhibited speech.

Women as horses

How cute is Chris Dillow to write this:

I’ve never seen the point of marriage. For me, women are like horses - nice to look at, interesting to ride, but too much trouble to keep.

My guess is that after reading  this for some women he has just become the cutest blogger on earth. But seriously, he is making a larger point on marriage, which is relevant precisely it shows that it is as useful a societal and human construction as religion.

The invisibility of objects

Interesting, insightful, but I'm afraid this sugary excerpt from Brett from Harry's place a bit problematic:

I find it particularly upsetting when, in the heat of summer, I see Muslim men wearing fashionable and season-appropriate clothing while their wives trail behind in a black tent. But, if some adult women choose to be oppressed in this way, that’s their business, not mine. But it is curious that primarily male Islamists - though of course often fronted by fundamentalist women - have made it a “human rights issue” to “defend” this “right”. Only a fool would believe that this is out of genuine concern for women’s rights rather than a means of providing an acceptable cover for perpetuating patriarchal domination. Acceptable, that is, to the confused cultural-relativist faux-liberal mindset.
I have noticed an escalation in these demands. First there was a call to “defend” the hijab. Now there is a call to do the same for the niqab - which covers the whole face, effectively cutting a woman off from society in the most basic way - and, I’m pretty sure, a demand to accept the full burqa, Taliban-style, can’t be far off.
To repeat. I think a consenting adult should be able to wear what they like subject to reasonable limits, but I won’t pretend there is anything innocent about the niqab. I won’t pretend that it is merely a neutral item of cultural apparel and is in no way designed to oppress and exclude women.

For some reason, this line of reasoning takes me to Sartre's play No exit and to one of its characters Estelle who wanted to a being in itself, a mirror, an object. To be upfront about what bugs with the current debate on women, the so-called women's rights, feminism, islamism, and whatever is precisely the idea that a woman's choices are never truly her own. No woman is an island. A bitch is just a bitch but a BITCH and moreover a veiled woman whatever her situation, her dasein, is an Estelle. That to me is a problem because it is patently obvious that in any society, no matter how civilized/modern, a woman who makes the wrong choices, who stands out, who rubs people the wrong way, who provokes, who shames/humiliated/dominates/infuriates/manipulates/submits/ easily, too easily becomes an object or rather a being swallowed by nothingness.

Cultural cloning

Hum, I'm tempted to agree with Samir Shah on this ( I think his main point can be made about the US, France or any other country dealing with a population, which is diverse and mixed), but it would be too easy and moreover, I have the feeling that he is only offering part of the picture even though it is one, which I find both uplifting and depressing because it leaves open the possibility that race doesn't have to doom the future of a country and to pollute its politics:

The plain truth is that Britain is developing an underclass who share more in common with each other than they do with other members of their own ethnic group. What are these traits? Everyone will have their own theories. But here are mine.
The first impediment to progress is a community’s determination to cling on to elements of their own cultural traditions and ways of life. Parents from certain Muslim groups, for example, have a tendency to bring up their children in such a way that they never interact with members of other cultures — restricting the ability of their children to get ahead. Then take the ‘babyfather’ phenomenon. David Cameron has urged Afro-Caribbean fathers to attend to their parental duties — an issue because half of black children live in lone-parent households, double the ratio of whites. Jack Straw made this point rather well with the surprisingly pithy ‘Lads need Dads’. The need for a father is not specific to children of any race.
If we are to hunt for discrimination in 21st-century Britain, then we should look at other factors that make us different. Each distinguishing feature — class, culture, accent, being Northern — plays a part. For example, in some liberal industries such as the media, being right-wing doesn’t help. But why should this surprise us? The kind of people who make decisions — white, middle-class, metropolitan, liberal, male — all think that the best people for the job are, er, white, liberal, metropolitan, middle-class and male. To describe this phenomenon as ‘institutional racism’ (as many are inclined to do) misses the problem by a country mile.
The real problem is what I call ‘cultural cloning’ — the human tendency to recruit in one’s own image. Recruitment, instead of being about picking the best people, becomes a process of finding people like the ones already there. The overwhelming need for a kind of cultural comfort blanket takes precedence over every other consideration — and rules out those whose backgrounds don’t quite fit. This is what a 21st-century Equalities Commission should have in its sights. Cultural cloning is, in my opinion, the main source of discrimination in Britain today.

Family

Agnès Varda on Family and her feminist principles:

I think we need to have a nest of something which is family, and whenever it goes very well—some families don’t get on that well—but we need the idea of family—the concept more than this one and this one. It’s peaceful to think about the family as a group. I totally believe in extended families, and the good friends I have—I see them all the time. We choose our family—the family of what we believe in, people who share our opinions—it can be political, it can be artistic, it can be a position, as feminism. I quit seeing some people who were saying bad things about women; I don’t even want to meet them or see them.

Well, a least she tries to practice what she preaches.

A beer and six cane strokes

Thought-provoking story in Der Spiegel about a woman in Malaysia sentenced to six cane strokes for having a beer in a hotel:

The whole thing began in July 2008. Kartika took a long weekend trip to a beach-side hotel in Malaysia with a few friends, a relaxing break from the stressful daily grind. Her husband, Muhammad Afandi Amir, watched the children while she was gone. Born in Singapore and a member of the country's Muslim Malay minority, he makes his living as a computer technician.
In the afternoon, Kartika checked into the Legend resort hotel in Cherating, whose slogan is "discover heaven on earth." The hotel has an international clientele, so the six guests from Singapore aroused little interest when they met up in the hotel bar in the evening and ordered a small Tiger Beer each.
Beer is available throughout Malaysia. The 7-Eleven convenience store chain, for example, offers nine different varieties, from Singapore's Tiger Beer to Guinness from Ireland and Carlsberg from Denmark. About 26 percent of Malaysians are of Chinese descent, while 8 percent are of Indian descent and 12 percent belong to indigenous populations. The alcohol ban affects only the Muslims, including the 53 percent of the population who are Malays. These last are the group that has steered the country's fortunes since its independence. Shariah law also affects only the Muslims, and is enforced especially strictly in three of Malaysia's 13 states. The Legend hotel is located in one of those three: Pahang.
The young women in the hotel bar raised their glasses to each other at around 6 p.m. Kartika was the only Muslim in the group -- the rest were Chinese and Indian. None of them seem to take particularly seriously the strict alcohol ban that applied to Kartika. The waiter didn't seem to care either; at least, he didn't ask to see her identity card, which would have shown her religious affiliation.
Half an hour later, religious police came storming into the hotel foyer. Was it a routine check? Or had an informer in the hotel blown the whistle? Kartika was the only one brought in to the station, where she had to give a urine sample. The police questioning lasted until 6 a.m. And at some point during her interrogation, Kartika admitted to occasionally posing for advertising photographs in Singapore. The keepers of the country's religious code were suddenly all ears.

The past, the present, and the future of feminine beauty

Wow ! It's official, women are doomed ! (Hat tip: Feminist philosophers )

Poland, France, and Anti-Semitism

Interesting comparison between Poland and France and the way their society deals with anti-Semitism from Konstanty Gebert;  he seems to imply that France deals well with Anti-semitism I disagree strongly with him because I don't think that laws can eradicate bigotry, on the contrary they tend to victimize the bigots thus giving them  too much of the spotlight, which enable them in turn to become larger than the hate they spread:

Because Polish anti-Semitism is as widespread as it is skin-deep. Let me explain. Take France. In France they had very strong laws against public expressions of anti-Semitism. If you express anti-Semitism in public you can be seriously penalised. This doesn't necessarily affect what Monsieur Dupont says at his dinner table (and I've sat at some of those dinner tables – I know) but in public if somebody makes an anti-Semitic statement you'd better believe he or she is serious, because they are willing to take the rap.
In Poland, anti-Semitism is not penalised, period. Just recently, the public prosecutor in the town of Krakow closed the investigation into soccer fans yelling "Gas them!" to the fans of another club which is labelled as Jewish because, historically, like 70 years ago, it had been Jewish. So they yelled "Gas them," and they yelled, "We'll always triumph over you, you fucking Jews," and the public prosecutor decided such contents do not constitute a crime and dropped the case. And this comes in the wake of similar statements by different public prosecutors. So anti-Semitism isn't penalised, therefore it becomes a convenient venue for the expression of frustration. So if somebody says in public it's all the fault of the Jews and they should be kicked out of the country, this does not necessarily mean, as it probably does in France, that he is a dyed-in-the-wool and dangerous anti- Semite. It might mean that he had a bad day at work, full stop. This is no less excusable morally...

Something useful should follow lamentations

My only comment from this sugary excerpt from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is ah, ok because it is depressingly funny and I have to admit that I have trouble taking it seriously not because what she is asserting isn't true but simply because after a while when one hears the same sad story over and over  of Cinderella, her step sisters, mean people, the cruel world, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that it isn't about gender or even about egalitarianism and that it isn't just in the Kingdom of Denmark that something is rotten. Because I'm a tender soul, I'm not saying that Alibhai-Brown should stop whining but simply start to be useful or at least provocative. Here is a suggestion, she should write a column on Sarah Palin and the fact that she is the epitome of the unsavory reality that the most effective misogynists in modern societies are women. Sugary excerpt :

Ours is the age of verbal debauchery and libertine sexism. No wonder so many mourned the passing of Keith Floyd, a brilliant but excessively self-indulgent TV cook and an anti-hero who, from all accounts, failed his women and children.
And so they mount, unpleasant examples of lionised famous men, dead and alive, for whom women are but dishes on their polished tables. The new hagiography of Alan Clark gives his fans yet another chance to relish the old rogue, a racist, poisonous predator. Roman Polanski, who was convicted of raping a frightened 13-year-old, a criminal who has too long escaped punishment, is defended by various artists – including Martin Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein. And now the American TV host David Letterman has told the world he had sex with women who worked on his programmes. Power can be an aphrodisiac. But did some of those who satisfied his lust do so because they felt they shouldn't refuse? He is still laughing. They might not be and the revelation will hardly reassure the woman he married this year, mother of his five-year-old son.
Blokes have never had it so easy and most women still don't get a place at the top tables. Those who do are then punished for their audacity.

Perplexed and saddened by BHL

I respect Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL). I don’t always agree with him, but I have never thought that he was a man without substance. Therefore, I’m disappointed to see that he is supporting Polanski by using arguments that he himself would find laughable and disturbing in he weren’t so close to the situation. I was listening to him on Tom Ashbrook’s radio show On point yesterday and I had to wonder if people who are willing to defend Polanski at all cost have any credibility left on any other issue whether it is a moral, a social, or simply a political one. I’ not sure that I will be able to listen to BHL discussing other subjects such as Iran, French politics or anything else and wonder whether he thought what he is saying through or whether he is just too close to the trees to even imagine that there might be a forest there. BHL recently wrote, a book, Left in Dark Times, about the sad state of the extreme left in which he argues that that left was vanishing because of its willingness to give up its moral compass to save its dying ideology. Listening to him today, I wonder if the decay is further along and more widespread than he thought. It seems clear to me the elites and the creative class in the most modern of our societies only people believes that the law and other societal norms don’t apply to them because they are on top because they are good, better people and therefore do not need to be judged and tread as the masses. Because it is clear that BHL is supporting Polanski because he is Polanski and therefore cannot be responsible for any indefensible (morally not legally) action and should not be condemned because he has given so much to society with his craft.

Bling bling and humanitarianism

Outrageously funny ! (hat tip: Alice Fishburn)

Biases and biases

Chris Dillow has a great post on the supporters of Roman Polanski and the problems of the arguments that they use to defend him. Sugary excerpt:

Having decided that Polanski is a good man, people refuse to believe that he can have done a bad thing: “It wasn’t rape-rape” says Whoopi Goldberg.
The error here is to exaggerate the extent to which character determines actions, and to fail to see that good people can do bad things under certain circumstances. It’s in this context that Polanski’s being a victim of the Holocaust is ironic. That episode teaches us that ordinary people can do atrocious things.

What I have been wondering if whether the reactions be different if the illicit act, which Polanski had, to use an euphemism, had been with a boy of 13 instead of with a girl of the same age. Would people be as willing to argue that it wasn't rape rape and that the child in this case in some way agreed to have sex with the charming genius so wounded by fate? My answer is a resounding no because people in our societies are most willing to fight back against the sexualization of little boys than the one of little girls. To put it differently, Michael Jackson would have had better luck escaping wide spread public condemnation if his accusers had been little girls because there is within our society the accepted belief that a girl's body can provoke/awaken the sexual desires of manly men.

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

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.

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."