The Republic of Dissent

Your arsenal

Sugary excerpt of the day from Jessa Crispin's review of Sexy Feminism, the latest bling bling work on a comatose subject :

Perhaps my problem with it has more to do with no longer finding feminism to be a useful filter through which to look at the world. The Fourth Wave of feminism (apparently it is a thing, yes) looks exactly like the Third Wave of feminism, and endlessly recapping Girls doesn't seem to be making the world a safer place for women. The two "feminist" works I liked the most recently actually didn't have that much to do with outright feminism: Depression by Ann Cvetkovich and Why Love Hurts by Eva Illouz. (Also: Monoculture by FS Michaels.) They were more about, how do we live within this structure -- or outside this structure -- that was built by the patriarchy without losing our minds. This is the way things are set up, by capitalism and by that whole white male thing, and let's write about what that does to a person. Not just women, which is an important part of it. It has nothing to do with the rejection of feminism, and Brazilian waxes never come up for debate at all! It's about feminism just being one weapon in your arsenal. Your mighty, mighty arsenal.

En quelle année sommes-nous ?

A powerful speech and then nothing as usual!

From Helen Epstein :

The administration’s neglect of human rights in Africa is a great disappointment, since the president began his first term by laying out ambitious new goals for the continent. In July 2009, when his presidency was only six months old, Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the point from which millions of African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. He called on African countries to end the tyranny of corruption that affects so many of their populations, and to build strong institutions that serve the people and hold leaders accountable. The speech seemed to extend the message of his much-discussed Cairo address a month earlier, in which he called for a new beginning for Muslim relations with the West, based on non-violence and mutual respect. Many thought that the policies of the new president, himself of Kenyan descent, would depart from those of the Bush administration, which provided a great deal of development aid to Africa, but paid scant attention to human rights.

After more than four years in office, however, Obama has done little to advance the idealistic goals of his Ghana speech.

Oh Well as the one himself once said words matter and the trouble here starts with the fact that having an 'african' policy doesn't mean much for there is no africa. Moreover, the saddest fact  is that reality when it comes to Obama's deeds in countries on the african continent doesn't matter because of the worst and most dangerous anti-intellectual form of identity politics.

I bet that at least some Nigeriens are happy to have a drone base in Niamey.

The Closet, the sexual revolution, and the female condition

From Nidra Poller:

Contraception and abortion alone could not bring about the desired transformation of the female condition. They were the technology. The metaphysics was what has become known as “gender studies.” In the early days of Women’s Liberation it was makeshift ideology peddled in volumes of look-alike fiction and non-fiction best sellers shouting that maternity was a drag, femininity a hype, sexual differences induced by cynical manipulation, love and marriage an extension of the military industrial complex, and men were chauvinist pigs. No more pink for girls and blue for boys. Sexually marked toys were not abandoned but switched: cars and trucks for girls, dolls and tea sets for boys. Women wanted, or were told they wanted, something called equality.

The harbingers of this “sexual revolution” were, more often than not, closet lesbians. Later we not only discovered that they were lesbians telling heterosexual women to kick their men in the balls and out of their lives, they were also playing stereotypical sexual roles in private, some as simpering mistresses to others more macho than any man could be.

I'm so speechless that I've lost my French!

'Breeding' women who can't win

Awesome stuff from Hilary Mantel:

Marie Antoinette was a woman eaten alive by her frocks. She was transfixed by appearances, stigmatised by her fashion choices. Politics were made personal in her. Her greed for self-gratification, her half-educated dabbling in public affairs, were adduced as a reason the French were bankrupt and miserable. It was ridiculous, of course. She was one individual with limited power and influence, who focused the rays of misogyny. She was a woman who couldn’t win. If she wore fine fabrics she was said to be extravagant. If she wore simple fabrics, she was accused of plotting to ruin the Lyon silk trade. But in truth she was all body and no soul: no soul, no sense, no sensitivity. She was so wedded to her appearance that when the royal family, in disguise, made its desperate escape from Paris, dashing for the border, she not only had several trunk loads of new clothes sent on in advance, but took her hairdresser along on the trip. Despite the weight of her mountainous hairdos, she didn’t feel her head wobbling on her shoulders. When she returned from that trip, to the prison Paris would become for her, it was said that her hair had turned grey overnight.

Antoinette as a royal consort was a gliding, smiling disaster, much like Diana in another time and another country. But Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished. When it was announced that Diana was to join the royal family, the Duke of Edinburgh is said to have given her his approval because she would ‘breed in some height’. Presumably Kate was designed to breed in some manners.

Beauty is always unproblematic and uncontroversial when it is/appears to be empty and yes, David Cameron can't read.

Sexual rights

Food for thought from Alice M Milller via Balkinzation:

Contemporary sexual rights work has some of this same tendency in the hands of the nations who have picked up the standard as part of their geopolitical positioning.  Moreover, perhaps because sexual rights has had to gain credibility as a form of rights work, advocates have often mistaken respectability for respect.   There are many moments in which ‘progress’ in the sexual rights claims of one group has been made by the strategic clambering of one group  up the ladder of respectability over the backs of others.   Some sub-groups ascend the sexual hierarchy by conforming to as many of the prevailing standards of sexual legitimacy as possible.   Other advocates seek the longer and more difficult route of changing the standards of sexual legitimacy for everyone. Think of the respectability attached to monogamy, sex without money, regulated fertility.  These short cuts to advance by groups are not new problems, or unique to sexuality, nor are they likely to end—they are part and parcel of social struggles. 

Saving women from brown men

I agree with Kweli Jaoko on this with the usual caveat that I don't agree with the west/rest division:

The banality, say, of tweeting and hashtagging, is part of the socio-historical through which misogyny becomes reflexive. Banality becomes the training we put ourselves through to make misogyny reflexive. What might it mean to understand misogyny through the kind of training that produces reflexes? Certainly the banality of tweeting and hashtagging labors to traffic the misogyny of #TeamMafisi and pass it off as ordinary, everyday, as part of the affects and intensities exchanged through the internet, and therefore something one must put up with. The fallacy is that misogyny is slightly inconveniencing.

As Western media deploys an Orientalist lens that locates rape and misogyny squarely in India—meaning, in the Global South, outside the West, and, yet again, as the need to save brown women from brown men—I would like us to think locally. Misogyny is not just a problem in India; in Kenya; or on Twitter. It is a problem everywhere, including here in the West from where I write.

Well it is always easier and satisfying even to criticize the barbarians rather than to recognize the world has, how should I put it, a woman problem!

Bad-man stories

Sugary excerpt of the best article I read last weekend from Scott Reynold Nelson on Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, which I'm planning to see because of what Roger Ebert said about it and because I don't want Spike Lee to be right in this case :

Immediately after the Civil War, African-American men built these powerful, folkloric characters in a world where slavery had ended but attacks against black men and women had intensified. The stories of quiet, unpredictable, and violent men who were fearless and died at the end could be simultaneously cautionary tales about the dangers of challenging white authority and covert stories about the thrill of resistance.

They are fantasies about striking back. Yet they are frank about how dangerous fighting back could be. Bad-man stories passed into rhymed insults called "the dozens," then into blues songs, then into rap, and finally into hip-hop.

They were also emulated and twisted by white interpreters into "coon" songs popular for decades, then by Jim Croce in "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," and finally wended their way into blaxploitation films. Indeed, the stories have been so distorted that it is difficult to learn about the original songs, the parodies having outshone the originals. The legendary African-American bad man became irresistible to white interpreters simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the image of a quiet, violent, fearless black destroyer. The bad-man story that freed people told about slavery and its aftermath was quickly converted into the story of the sullen black stranger, the zoot-suit Negro with a razor in his pocket, the dangerous ghetto demigod.

Viva Europa!

From the great Pankaj Mishra:

The European idea of the nation-state, realized after much horrific bloodshed in Europe itself, was always a poor fit for Asia’s diverse mosaic.

Joseph Roth, who grew up in the multinational Hapsburg empire, was appalled by the imperatives of modern nationalism, according to which “every person must belong to a definite nationality or race” in order to be treated as an individual citizen. Roth, a Jew, suspected that members of minority groups, like himself, would be relegated to third-class citizenship, and vicious prejudice against them would be made respectable in the new nation-states built on the ruins of multinational empires.

The ethnic cleansers of 20th century Europe proved him right. It required a monstrous crime and a repentant political imagination to institute peace between warring European nations and soften attitudes toward minorities.

The battle against bigotry is far from over; Europe’s long and violent past today looms over its inevitably multicultural future.

Ah I have always found fascinating the idea that some things are inevitable especially when it is based on the assumption that ethnicity is destiny and identity!

The ignorance of voters

From the great Ilya Somin's comment on Citizens United or rather to a comment by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni in Slate on that infamous case:

The problem with modern voters is not that they are selfish, but that they are often ignorant and irrational. That problem cannot be solved by restricting corporate and union-funded political speech. Obviously, corporate and union-funded speech sometimes seeks to exploit political ignorance. But the same is true of speech funded by the media, political parties, activist groups, and others. In a political environment where the electorate is often ignorant, whoever is allowed to engage in electoral speech has a strong incentive to take advantage of that ignorance.

I agree with Somin even though I am trouble by the elitism (but right) of our shared viewpoint. However, my discomfort is soothed by the realization that America and Americans don't want an educated citizenry because of the belief, that politics is about identity and that illusory thing called culture. In other words, people should always vote who they are and never what they know.

In Obama's America it isn't knowledge that is power, but identity.

Blood and memory

Sugary excerpt of the day from Lynn Parramore :

Cultural memory and prejudice form strange currents in the Southern mind. The power of the fear and antipathy of the black man has been diluted, but it’s still there, and it's easily stoked by unscrupulous politicians. But it’s easy to just stop there, and you won't have a clear picture if you do.

If you look closer, there’s something else. The Harley Davidson guys and their Southern brethren who put rebel flag stickers on their rides are signaling that they still strongly identify with a war in which their ancestors found themselves on the wrong side of history and fought a losing battle. White men in other regions of the country don’t really get what it feels like to know that your people were defeated in a war by their own countrymen. There’s a feeling that they lost so much for this Union to stay together that they’ll be damned if they are going to admit another defeat by recognizing that America is currently in decline. That is too much for the heart to bear.

Aah, I have to admit this type of analysis just drives me bonkers for it evokes the despairing consensus in America that identity and culture are solely about collective memory and history.  I resent that idea because it takes me back to the Fascist dictum that people think with their blood.

Successful integration and assimilation

A troubling assertion from Anatol Lieven:

White middle-classes in America have become more accepting of people of other colour (at least in public), without by any means necessarily becoming more tolerant of people of other culture. Successful integration still requires assimilation to conservative middle class values, including nationalism and religion.

I wonder what does Lieven mean by 'people of other culture' and  whether to him people of other colour are different than  members of the American white middle classes.

 

Unfriendly ghosts

This from Ta-nehisi Coates depresses me deeply even more than America's collapse in the Ryder Cup yesterday :

It's all well and good to say black people should be more like Martin Luther King Jr. But it should be noted that the country answered King's hypermorality with unremitting violence, culminating in him being shot in the head.

At one point does the past stop to condition the present and to determine who/what people ought to be. I know race is comfortable and sells, but come on at some point it becomes no much irrelevant as a rotten and shackling concept.

To beyond the placid glitz I don't think 'black people' should be lie Martin Luther King, they should just be themselves which means taking the risk to accept that 'blackness' is not an identity.

Self-pity and piety

I disagree with Anouar Majid on this:

Muslims are struck in an impossible bind: They are totally dependent on the West for all the good things in life but are fanatically attached to religion as a marker of their separate identity. By being unable to be fully Western, they have forced themselves into an orthodox corner. Fanaticism is the result.

Westerners and Western-educated folk who apologize for Muslims by invoking the depredations of the West are not helping make things better. Muslims don’t need to indulge in a victim mentality; they need to develop their societies, build stronger economies, cultivate the arts and and encourage innovation and critical thinking in all fields. Neither self-pity nor piety will get them there.

Question:  do we choose who we are or are we just always part of a whole we didn't choose?

Motherhood as extra-training for women

Quote of the year from Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, who epitomizes the fact that the end of Apartheid in his country didn't mean the end of misogyny:

I wouldn’t want to stay with daughters who are not getting married. Because that in itself is a problem in society … Kids are important to a woman because they actually give an extra training to a woman, to be a mother.

The other invisible blacks

Sugary excerpt of the day from Jina Moore :

In American newspapers and on American TV, Africans remain objects—of violence, of poverty, of disease, and ultimately of our own compassion. Like the abolitionists’ stories of the Jamaican slave revolt, our compassion narratives ultimately are not about the people in whose name they are told. They are about us. We like these stories because at some level, we already know them, and because they tell us we are caring, and potentially powerful, people.

As always I have to assert that 'Africans' don't exist.  Africanity is  the first, most potent and seemingly most invicincible colonial invention.

 

 

 

Macho politicians

I agree with Chris Dillow on this with one caveat, I am trouble by the assertion that certainty and overconfidence are masculine traits:

Politics is still dominated by the silly masculine traits of certainty and overconfidence.

Why? Here's a theory. What people (or the media?) want from politicians is not an ability to take decisions, which requires the recognition of uncertainty.Instead, they want is a false sense of certainty, a "strong leader" with a "clear" direction. And this demand favours macho politicians, even if they are poor decision-makers.

The meaning of America

Sugary excerpt of the day from Stanley Fish commenting on the dishonest, vile and more importantly willfully stupidly ideological 'documentary' on Obama from Dinesh D'Souza who must have perfected at Dartmouth what seems to come naturally to him, prostitution :

(...) the meaning of America is continually contested in essays, books, backyard conversations, talk shows and, most of all, in elections. It is often said, and it is true, that the opposing parties in an election have “different visions for America.” There are many ways of describing the alternative visions offered to us in a year like this; but describing one of them as un-American and its proponent as a foreign intruder is not to further discussion but to foreclose it and to replace the contest of ideas with the rhetoric of demonization. (Democrats have been as guilty of this as anyone.) Obama may have a vision for America that you don’t like, but it is a vision for America put forward by an American. If you don’t like it, vote against him, not in the name of Americanism but in the name of the ideas and outcomes you, also an American, prefer.

Via Professor Bainbridge, a pick to illustrate this point and the futily of the attempt to de-americanize Obama:

In short, Obama is as American as apple pie.  Unfortunately that fact isn't enough to make him a good president.

I found it thought-provoking, compelling and even morbidly ironic that Obama is considered "foreign," European, and even socialist when it is Mitt Romney who spent critical parts of his youth in France. It tells me that Romney is actually more worldly than Obama and that fact explains, in great part, in my opinion, his obvious discomfort with his political 'family.'       

The exoticism of people of color

I agree with Zadie Smith on this:

(...) people of colour do not think of themselves as exotic or other to themselves. We think of ourselves as white people think of yourselves, as central to ourselves, and not some stylisation, political points, added extras: none of those things. We are ourselves.

I hate with a passion the expression 'people of color!' It is as repugnant as 'human beings with a uterus' would be.

Caste

Interesting and informative stuff from Thenmozhi Soundararajan:

Caste exists wherever Indians exist and it manifests itself in a myriad of ways. The Indian diaspora thrives on caste because it is the atom that animates the molecule of their existence. In the face of xenophobia and racism abroad, many become more fundamentalist in their traditions and caste is part of that reactionary package. So, what does caste look like in the US?

Quite like in India, it is the smooth subtext beneath questions between uncles, like, “Oh! Where is your family from?” It is part of the cliques and divisions within those cultural associations where Indians self-segregate into linguistic and caste associations. It continues when aunties begin to discuss marriage prospects. They cluck their tongues softly, remark about your complexion, and pray for a good match from “our community”.

 

Sex without guilt and everything else

Sugary excerpt of the day from Linda Kelsey on Helen Gurley Brown:

During the 14 years I worked at Cosmopolitan, in two separate stints, rising through the ranks to the position of editor from 1985 to 1990, I wrestled with what critics saw as the contradictions at the heart of the magazine, but I also firmly believed – and still do – that the enduring success of Cosmopolitan is down to the fact that it has never shifted its focus from the things that really matter to young women, as laid down in the blueprint set by Helen Gurley Brown when she launched US Cosmo.

What are these things? Love, of course. And sex. And work. And men and relationships in general. These are the priorities in young women’s lives and in the 40 years since Cosmo launched in the UK, these priorities haven’t changed. What has changed dramatically is women’s sense of empowerment. Women are more confident in every aspect of their lives. They assume equality rather than having to fight for it every step of the way. They are in no hurry to marry or have children, though most still want to have a long-lasting partnership and a family. They are free to enjoy sex without guilt.

But are they still vulnerable? Of course they are. Do they still worry whether he’ll ring or notice their cellulite. Don’t we all? Do they still find it hard to negotiate relationships? Well, that’s the nature of relationships. Do they have sexual hang-ups? Not all of us have the sexual sangfroid of Samantha from Sex and the City.

I have nothing to say. 

Being and action

Sentence du Dimanche from Chris Dillow:

There's a difference between being a woman and acting like a woman.

I suspect that Dillow is right, but for some reason that irks me.

WASP

At last Walter Mead says what I have been saying for 4 years, Obama is a WASP:

In his own way, however, President Obama is one of the neo-Waspiest men in the country. He is not a product of Kenyan villages or third world socialism. He was educated at the Hawaiian equivalent of a New England prep school, and spent his formative years in the Ivies. He has much more in common with Harvard-educated technocrats like McGeorge Bundy than with African freedom fighters and third world socialists of the 1970s.

Barack Obama is neither a citizen of the world nor an exotic creature, he is as American as Georges Bush!

Contrary to her nature...

The sentence of the day from a post from Annie over at Harry's  Place:

Lets praise this black person who, unusually, is able to act contrary to her nature and be objective in considering the legal position.

The idiosyncrasies of an exceptional nation

Roger Ebert on the Aurora tragedy:

True, there is no way we can defend ourselves against insane shooters. But I suspect Australia, England, Germany and Canada have about the same percentage of crazy people that we do. It's just that they can't get their hands on firearms so easily. Nor do they sell assault rifles over the counter in those nations.

You know what? The hell with it. I'm tired of repeating the obvious. I know with a dread certainty that I will change nobody's mind. I will hear conspiracy theories from those who fear the government, I will hear about the need to raise a militia, and I will hear nothing about how 9,484 corpses in a year has helped anything. That is a high price to pay. What depresses me is that half of my fellow countrymen are prepared to pay it.

The trouble with Roger Ebert's view point isn't that it is wrong, but rather it ignores the singularities of America. For most Americans, it is those singularities that make America America. 

Gun control is not at the center of American politics precisely because Gun control advocates refuse to believe that the issue isn't about reason, safety, common sense and what is sensible in the rest of the world, but rather about Americana, identity, emotionality, the need for Americans to remain faithful to what they consider the ideals and the ‘being’ of their nation. The point isn't that guns are as American as apple pie, but rather than the NRA (National Rifle Association) has been more effective than its adversaries in making Americans fee that it is and in making guns part of the American imaginary and of their way of life.

I've learned the hard way that the surest way to lose a political debate in America is to compare the American way of life with the ones of the rest of the planet because Americans don't like to their country to be compared to others for they believe that comparisons diminishes its exceptional nation and its greatness .

You don't compare Michael Jordan unfavorably to Steve Nash when you want him to listen to you or to convince him that you are right .

Processes of individuation

Thought-provoking stuff from Kris Coffield:

It's easy to metaphorically claim that our processes of individuation are colonized by prior experience. Conscious, material changes are often induced by phenomeno-affective events. Just consider the obvious case of a solder returning from war with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, after seeing his comrades killed by an improvised explosive device. What is far less obvious, however, is the narrative dimension enjambing affectivity. One can't reduce everything to narration, as some misguided postmodernists do. That said, there exists a very real sense in which selfhood is ideated, as well as individuated, such that our introspective beliefs become more than egoistic Quinean existential qualifiers. In other words, the myths we tell ourselves about our 'selves' are every bit as fictional, textual, and material as other fictions, while remaining integrally related to our individual being, and sense thereof.

White supremacy

Sugary excerpt of the day from Junot Díaz:

White supremacy is the great silence of our world, and in it is embedded much of what ails us as a planet. The silence around white supremacy is like the silence around Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, or the Voldemort name which must never be uttered in the Harry Potter novels. And yet here’s the rub: if a critique of white supremacy doesn’t first flow through you, doesn’t first implicate you, then you have missed the mark; you have, in fact, almost guaranteed its survival and reproduction. There’s that old saying: the devil’s greatest trick is that he convinced people that he doesn’t exist. Well, white supremacy’s greatest trick is that it has convinced people that, if it exists at all, it exists always in other people, never in us.

I am going to munch on Díaz words for a bit while wondering what the impact of his argument would have been if he had used the word 'men' instead of using  'white.'

Moving past the race talk

As always great stuff from Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. Happy Independence day!

Putting an end to France

Alain Badiou on France, its present  and its future or rather lack of one:

Identities here are more frozen. It’s a country in latent crisis, a former planetary great power, with a particular universality, which does not know what to do with its lost greatness. From this point of view, France is at least as much a world being unmade as a world being made. My proposition is that we have to put an end to France. (...)I’ve thought for a long time that France should merge with Germany. I’m very happy, moreover, that other people, such as Michel Serres, now share my opinion. There is no future for France alone. The European combination is teetering, as we’ve seen with Greece, and everyone understands that France and Germany form the hard core of Europe. A merger would make it possible to stand up to the other economic great powers, which neither France nor Germany, nor Europe, is capable of doing today. The French and German economies are already intertwined, so let’s have this hard core realized politically! That could be in the form of a federal state, as is already the case with Germany.

It's good to see that some things never change and that Badiou is still a bold idealist at his best and an unadapted and stubborn ideologue at his worst.

Identities

Sugary excerpt of the day from Noman Geras:

A different kind of analogy may serve to underwrite the meaningfulness of people affirming their English identity, despite the lack of any parsimonious definition of Englishness. Think of sporting allegiances. Supporting a football (baseball, cricket) team makes sense to millions of people, where the identification amounts to not much more than wanting one's team to win, taking an interest in its long-term fortunes, the players who play for it, and so on. Being a supporter - of Manchester United or Liverpool, the Yankees or the Red Sox, Australia, England or the West Indies - is, or at least can be, a form of identity-affirmation on quite a 'thin' basis, when judged against life's other concerns. Some people, uninterested in or hostile to sport as a major preoccupation, find this difficult to understand, but they shouldn't. We are who we are and look for markers of this. Even if we are believers in universal rights, global justice, human equality, few people are satisfied with the identifier 'human being', and a sporting allegiance is merely part of that more general phenomenon. How much less puzzling is it that someone might feel attached to their much 'thicker' national identity and what they see in it of positive value...

I have a small question: Are people who they say/think that they are or simply what they do?

 

Colonial mentality

One of my favorite songs at the moment is Fela Kuti's Colonial mentality. I find it to be both profound and hip while disagreeing fully with its title and its message, which is a proof of the universality and greatness of Kuti's music (it is difficult but to enjoy it, I have to ignore his politics and his misogyny).

I stopped a long time ago to believe that there is such a thing as blackness and africanness/africanity.  I have realized that the quest for authenticity  is similar to Caligula's destructive and impossible one for the sun in  Camus's play in the sense that it always ends with a witch-hunt for there must be monsters to blame for shortcomings and traitors to chastise for their refusal to be 'true africans' or whatever else is considered to be pure or socially acceptable.

Colonial mentality is a great song with a political message that I despise because it is culturalist and defines identity in terms that are too absolute and too reactionary to be productive.  To put things bluntly,  since existence precedes essence, what matters is the choice for people aren't being in themselves. Whether a mentality is colonial or not is no longer an essential question for what matters is individuality and responsibility. That said, the song is awesome and Fela Kuti's message is worth listening too because although his conclusion is erroneous,  it is both legitimate and pertinent while being too self-absorbed and ideological to be complete.

 

Trayvon Martin

Before commenting on the Trayvon Martin case, I have decided to wait, learn more and meditate to avoid just feeling outrage.  It isn't constructive and reinforces a narrative of powerlessness, which bugs me.

Racial obligation

I agree with Ilya Somin on this:

No one has a special moral obligation to another person merely because they happen to share the same race or ethnicity.

Political tribalism and identity politics

Sugary excerpt of the day from John Quiggin over at Crooked Timber:

(...)there’s a striking difference between Republican tribalism and the kind of identity politics that has long characterized parts of the left. Left identity politics typically involves focusing one aspect of your identity (gender, sexuality, race, religion, class) and organizing around issue that affect the relevant group. We spent a lot of time in the 70s arguing over whether gender trumped class and so on, and getting nowhere, with the result that the left side of politics, to the extent that it can be viewed in these terms, is, as Haidt puts it, a coalition of tribes.

But that’s not true of the right – it’s core tribal appeal is to white, anti-intellectual, non-feminist, non-poor, Christian, heterosexuals who identify themselves, and others who share all these characteristics as “real Americans’. The problem they face is that each of these taken individually is a majority characteristic, the majority of people deviate from the model in one way or another. So, the way to defeat Repub tribalism is to peel off everyone who is on the wrong side of one or another of their culture wars, and reduce them to a minority.

Quiggin is almost right for the wrong reasons. American politics suffers from the focus placed on identity instead of actions.  To use Quiggin 's terms, I don't think that political tribalism is worse than identity politics, I just think it is a different strain of the same bacteria that is ruining the political discourse in a  country that desperately needs to talk about its present and its future. The issue is that it s obsessed with its past and its essence when what matters is its actions and the welfare of its citizen not the salvation of their soul .

How cute!

The sentences of the week and possibly of the year are from Anita Diamant:

The basic insight of feminism is that women are human beings. I don’t think you can be a serious Jew and not be a feminist.

Ow, I'm all verklempt! I just wish someone would explain to me what it means to be a feminsit!

Abominations and equivocations

It's rare, but I disagree with Glenn Loury and I have to admit that the way he phrases the issue galls me because it gives his viewpoint the appearance of reasonableness, when it is everything, but reasonable, although it isn't illegitimate.

You are who you are truly in bed!

Sugary excerpt of the day from Norm Geras:

A psychiatrist once told me that you can get to know people's real natures in bed, and that our sexual personas were the truest manifestations of our actual natures. But we are often ashamed by our true natures, partly because they can conflict so horribly with the characters we present on the pavement or by the fireside. As a result, we do our best to keep our secret lives just that.

I want to agree with Geras. I cannot disagree for I know he is on to something, but I cannot agree either because I know that for too many, sex has become about performance or rather performing.  Ah la jouissance n'est plus ce qu'elle était parce qu'elle a été désinfectée par sa banalisation et une gourmandise niaise (There are advantages to learning/knowing French, one of the non-negligible ones is to fully get me).

Herman Cain's African-Americanness

As always great stuff from Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.  Didn't I make the point since the beginning that Herman Cain was a race man?

Embarrassment, race, and identification

Ta-nehisi Coates is embarrassed by Herman Cain:

Fallows finds Herman Cain likeable. I feel utterly embarrassed by him. It's not his politics -- I've never felt embarrassed by Condi Rice, Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas. It's more akin to feeling I got when Jesse Jackson got caught claiming he wanted to cut Barack Obama's nuts off. Or watching Marion Barry attack black people for moving out of the city. There's a hucksterism there that transcends.

I agree that with the assessment that Cain is not a serious candidate for POTUS, but Coates's embarrassment makes me cringe because of what it shows about America, Americans, and identity politics. 

To the contrary of Coates, I'm not embarrassed by Herman Cain because I do not/cannot identify with him. I don't think he represents me and more importantly, I do not feel that I have to delegitimate his point of view to show that he is wrong and that he is just a race man and wrong on the issues.

In short, I think the unseriousness of Herman Cain's candidacy doesn't mean that he is an embarrassment for he is just wrong.  That fact makes very much like Obama for there is a lot to admire about him, but very little that shows that he would make a good POTUS unless you agree/identify with him

J'aimerais pouvoir aimer Herman Cain...

Jonathan Capehart on Herman Cain and racial politics:

Cain is now the second African American Republican of late to brand the Democratic Party a plantation. Rep. Allen West (Fla.) said so during a Fox News interview in August. He also likened himself to Harriet Tubman. File that one under “delusions of grandeur.”

There are plenty of things to say about the Democratic Party and how it has let down people of color in general and blacks in particular. But invoking slave imagery is unnecessary. And it is especially galling coming from a member of a party whose policies and politics generally speaking haven’t been exactly welcoming to African Americans.

Is Capehart right? Yes, but Herman Cain isn't disgustingly wrong, he is just wrong and not playing racial politics in  the expected way. I'm trying to say that Capeheart is slamming Cain solely for using racial politics to support the 'wrong policies' when he should be slamming him for being as much a race man as Cornel West and Harry Belafonte for they agree that race matters, but just disagree as to how and as to the consequences of what for them is an existential fact. Those three manly men  have another thing in common: a huge ego who convinces them that anybody who kind of looks like them ought to think like them.

My problem with Cain is that he loves too much Hermain Cain and can't get out of his own way to see the big picture and to have empathy for those who in spite of their best efforts, not because of race or anything else, can't be Herman Cain. In short,  Herman Cain is too Hobbsian for  his own good and not really able to get past race because of his ego-centrism.  I would love to be able to love Herman Cain for he almost has the right tune when it comes to affirming that individuality matters, but I cannot.  He is too comfortable playing racial and identity politics instead of sticking to what matters.  Cain takes too much pleasure in fighting perpetually old and passé rumbles in the jungle (it is a sign of a lack of imagination) and desacralizing an undivine and unsavory histoiry.

Anger and the 'black' president

Conclusion of John McWhorter's interesting article (I swear that I don't go looking for articles on Obama and race, they are just finding a way to me) advising Obama to become angry for America needs an Angry Black president:

Don't worry about people saying you're an Angry Black Man. For one thing, your supporters think Angry Black Men are prophets anyway. As for the other side, almost none of them will dare haul this out, just for fear of alienating the center with racially unsavory language of too obvious a nature.

And as for those who will -- and they will -- just own it. Again, the sky will not fall. After all, you are angry (I presume), and you're black, too. The country could use an Angry Black Man president just about now.

I have a lot of respect for John McWhorter, but his words make me uncomfortable they are racializing an issue that is  already very polarized. Lastly, I have to admit that it's extremely tiresome to have too many Americans make race the essential element of Obamism (which partly confirms its vacuity) and to put on the shoulders of Obama all the frou -frou of an imagined and superficial blackness. What is alarming is that the fact that many Americans are advising Obama to play a role and to become someone else just shows that for them, race skin color trumps/kills/negate/obliterate individuality.

By the way, America doesn't need an angry black president, it just needs, as always, a good president.

The unbearable futility of the erotic capital and of feminism

Nichi Hodgson 's 'review' of Catherine Hakim's Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital made me laugh to tears. Sugar except:

The reason women have failed to capitalise on their erotic capital, says Hakim, is the fault of feminism allied with Christian conservatism. Puritan Anglo-Saxon feminism, including post-feminism, Hakim claims, is "profoundly uncomfortable with sexuality, and frames it in a relentlessly negative perspective." As such, "feminists have been so brainwashed by patriarchal ideology that they have been quite unable to understand how sexuality and erotic capital can be sources of erotic power." Feminism has established a "false dichotomy" between beauty and brains.
While I doubt Hakim would recognise a post-feminist if fondled by one in a bi-curious flurry, she seems to be blaming mind-body dualism on feminists, despite identifying "Western thought" as its source elsewhere in the book. She also seems to have missed the point of what feminism has ever wanted from sex. A minority of radicals excepted, all feminists have ever asked for is women's stake in imagining and enacting sexual desire. Employing your erotic capital may be sensible opportunism but it's also pretty boring manipulating men whose sexual fantasies are predicated on the script for a "Girls Gone Wild" episode; depressing too, if these same men constitute your pool of potential life partners.(...)That erotic capital enhances professional, market-place performance makes perfect sense. But applying it to personal, intimate relationships overlooks one very important point. You don't need to be living in a tree house and swapping sacks of millet for acorns to want to leave commercial transactions at the bedroom door. In the Anglo-Saxon West, now that we don't need to marry to preserve family fortunes, secure male heirs or find someone to "keep" us, some things are worth more than erotic capital­-love, for example.

My view on Hodgson's take of Hakim is that it is unnecessary and a further indication that too many still don't understand that there is a difference between feminism and femininity and that feminism is to women's identity and rights (I have an deepening aversion for the term women's rights) what socialism is to liberalism/progressivism. It is tiresome even though often comically entertaining to see women still elevating and generalizing their personal views and differences as if speaking as a woman or as feminism means speaking for women and representing some other than an individual and therefore limited (and often irrelevant) viewpoint.

Race and American delusions

I have a problem with Bill Benzon's post on Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad at the Valve in which he compares them to Ike Turner and Sam Philips and finishes by suggesting that the solution is to get beyond the boundaries of language. Sugary excerpt:

The point of this exercise, no, this demonstration, is that language and its reasonings and arguments cannot, in principle, encompass everything. That life itself is greater than language goes without saying – or does it? What matters is how we conduct ourselves around and about, in the shadow of, language.

Because I believe as Eluard that les mots ne mentent pas, I have a problem with  what Benzon is demonstrating.  The attempt should never be to get beyond the boundaries of language, but to acknowledge them and to break them down. 

I know I promise to stop bashing constantly Obama (I believe that I'm doing it rationally and analytically), but I believe that his 2008 campaign showed that Benzon is wrong and that America's problem with race isn't about its people not being able to get along, but rather about their need to believe that race is all encompassing and that  it is about something grand, when it is about petty stuff and about that itch that Benzon seems to have to want Achebe and Conrad get along.  It is far too obvious that Achebe didn't want to get along with Conrad, but needed to punch him in the gut to affirm his own existence and to define in his own terms what it meant or rather didn't mean to be 'african' (my contention is that it doesn't mean anything for Achebe has much more in common with Joseph Conrad than he does with Ferdinand Oyono).

In short, my point to Benzon, to America, and to Americans  is get over it already! Race isn't about race and instead of obsessing about getting along or pretending that you want to or that you do get out your own way and stop being so self-involved!

Women, men, and writing about sex

Something about this passage by Monique Ruffey bugs me:

(...)sex is still riddled with social stigma and taboo. Church and state still patrol what is deemed OK, moral, loving and safe. Anyone who chooses to write about sex will attract stinging criticism from the moral right and so, relatively speaking, sexual memoirs are still rare. And they are mostly written by women.

Men, by and large, leave this subject alone. Somewhere it's a given that men don't have anything too reflective to say about sex, or they feel silenced by feminists. Where is the male Suzanne Portnoy, the male Melissa P? What men will write honestly about their highs and lows, their triumphs, their sexual sorrows? What man is brave enough to express himself freely about his desires? Few. My guess is that male sexuality has been so heavily associated with violence that men suffer an even stronger taboo than woman. Best keep quiet.

Really? I must be living  in a different planet than Roffey for it seems to me that the problem about sex or rather about your sex life is that you have to be able to view it about than a pornographic and a solely pleasurable/carnivorous experience, which makes it a challenge difficult for both sexes, but particularly for men. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

Shoot the Slut

I agree almost completely and for different reasons with Amanda Marcotte on this:

We’re in the throes of a cultural bout of misogyny, and its focus is on sex. And the people who pay the highest price are women whose access to abortion and contraception is threatened by this national game of “Shoot the Slut”. 

The word 'slut' is in need of a re/definition and an explanation of why being a slut is the worst thing that a woman can be.

Class and class

Sugary excerpt of the day from the always pertinent Chris Dillow:

Successful power structures persist in large part because the way in which power is exercised is hidden from us. The importance of class and the lack of discussion of it are two sides of the same fact.

For some reason, I have this unnerving feeling that we are back in the time of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Molière) when class was determinative, what saddens/disturbs me is that that reality is true particularly in America where there is a strong and maniacal denial about the existence and the relevance of 'class.'

Réflichissez-vous!

Paul Berman needs to revise his French, but that said he makes a decent point on the impact of the DSK affair on the French-American relationship when he says this:

The more he is defended, the thicker and chillier will be the trans-Atlantic fogs, in the future. Dear champions of DSK, réflichissez-vous! But no one is going to reflect. Anyway, a bit more caution on the part of his loyalists would scarcely help, at this point. The ocean-liner of American justice and the ice floes of French conspiracy theories are already bobbing in one another’s direction, and nothing is to be done about it, and, oh dear, has anyone figured out what to do next, post-collision?

Since my bet is that DSK is going to be acquitted , I think that it will become only more obvious how different France is from America, even from Obama's America and there is as Jean Daniel of the Nouvel Obs would say a 'civilization gap' between America and France, which is essentially created by both countries's fanatical beliefs that their way is not only the best, but the only way to civilization. I'm still wondering why being part of an older county makes one more civilized or less barbaric.

Old and new lefties

Interesting stuff from Chris Dillow:

We old lefties see politics as one activity among others. We see no connection between Marxist politics and Marx’s, ahem, colourful sex life. And I, for one, have combined leftist politics with jobs in the City and non-political journalism.
The newer left, though, is less compartmentalized - hence the slogan, “the personal is political” and the desire to politicize everyday life.
On this point, though, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I’m tempted to defend my conception of politics on the grounds that it is more liberal: seeing everything as political is the road to fanaticism and totalitarianism.

I'm just confused about one thing, does being a Leftie is about politics or something else? Does it matter? I have to admit that I'm bothered with the idea that the personal is political because it makes politics sentimental. It reminds me of the 2008 Democratic primaries or even of George W. Bush in the 2000 election when in response to critical examinations of his record as Governor in Texas, he would talk about how hurt he was that people could question his heart. In short, the idea that 'good' people are good politicians bugs me and is moreover dangerous. That isn't to say that the personal doesn't matter or is irrelevant, but simply that more often than not, it is a part of a wider context and can be unessential, but titillating.

Obama is Swiss

The sugary excerpt of the day is from Mick Hume's interesting take on Obama, Libya and interventionism:

The response of US president Barack Obama, aka the West’s commander-in-chief, has apparently evolved from speechlessness to impotence, leading one veteran commentator to wonder, in an ironic reference to the debate over Obama’s ‘true’ nationality, whether he might actually be Swiss. The administration quickly shot down European kite-flying about setting up an immediate no-fly zone over Libya. US commanders pointed out to their European partners that this would involve a full-scale military operation against Gaddafi’s air force. Some might naively wonder why that would pose such an insuperable obstacle to the mighty US air force. But after the damage done by Iraq and Afghanistan, the US authorities lack the political authority and will to impose themselves on Libya and fear getting dragged into another civil war.

The trouble is of course that Obama suffers from a lack of imagination due to the fact that in spite from what people wants to believe about his "difference" he is a typical president who has trouble accepting powerlessness and not making every crisis about America and his own political legacy. When I hear Charlie Rose for example repeating his delusion that the fact that Obama spent some time in Indonesia when he was a kid gives him a different world view, I shake my hand and realise how americancentric even the most cultured and most worldly American are to be able to transform insignificances because they seem peculiar into essentialities.

Outgrowing Black history month

One comment: I don't think that enough Americans want to 'overcome;' (my point here isn't just  abou 'race') too many want to hang on and to never let go because their past defines them. I'm still waiting for John McWhorter to define what he means by postracial because when he was supporting Obama, it seemed to mean something elses that it means now.

Culture of poverty

Sugary excerpt from Stephen Steinberg's must-read essay in the Boston Review on the return of the culture of poverty arguments:

Notwithstanding the election of Barack Obama, the last 40 years have been a period of racial backlash. The three pillars of anti-racist public policy—affirmative action, school integration, and racial districting (to prevent the dilution of the black vote)—have all been eviscerated, thanks in large part to rulings of a Supreme Court packed with Republican appointees. Indeed, the comeback of the culture of poverty, albeit in new rhetorical guise, signifies a reversion to the status quo ante: to the discourses and concomitant policy agenda that existed before the black protest movement forced the nation to confront its collective guilt and responsibility for two centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow—racism that pervaded all major institutions of our society, North and South. Such momentous issues are brushed away as a new generation of sociologists delves into deliberately myopic examinations of a small sphere where culture makes some measurable difference—to prove that “culture matters.”

I don't believe in culture even though I'm a strong believer in free will in the sense that I'm convinced that personal decisions matter especially in difficult circumstances. That said, I think that blaming poverty on culture is as stupid as asserting that race  determines culture. What I'm trying to say without finding the words to do so eloquently is that culturalism is dangerous because  it encourages both scapegoating and prejudices, without the important acknowledgments that who people are matters and that the type of society within which they evolve has a role in what they are and can become.