Globalclashes

Une chanson douce et simple

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

Picky women

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

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

Different realities

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

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

The death of idealism

I agree partly with Ian Buruma on this:

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

Unconscious

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

Vibrant recent history

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

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

Defining national identities

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

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

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

Light Mourning

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

African literature

Interesting thoughts from Aaron Bady:

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

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

Consenting to sex

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

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

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

The essentiality of oral sex

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

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

Les mêmes choses

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

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

Daylight saving hour blues

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

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.

Ubuland

I found this video of Idi Amin Dada, the former dictator of Uganda talking his ability to dream the future not only funny, but enlightening. Not very much has changed for the perceptions remains and when one looks at things today in Uganda and elsewhere, it is difficult not to think of Alfred Jarry's famous play Ubu Roi  except that here it is not the French middle class, which is at the center of the theater of the absurd in this case. What is alarming is that there are some who believe that Dada was great partly because he was a thorn to the sides of the Brits and to the Israelis. In other words, the standard for political greatness in many African leaders is standing up to the former colonizers and to foreigners and being a menace to the world as leaders such as Dadis Camara and Omar Al Bachir show just to name two of them.

Moving past Blair

I agree with Agnès Poirier on her conclusion that Blair wouldn't make a good president for Europe:

There is a stronger argument still against Mr Blair’s candidature: he’s not the intellectual heavyweight and above-all-parties moral figurehead that we Europeans need to represent our old and proud continent. (...)What Europe needs is a figure that can incarnate the very idea of Europe, not a schemer who can pull his weight in the negotiations of banana exports. What Europe needs is a wise leader whose personal experience of the ordeals and triumphs of the 20th century makes for a commanding figure in the world, somebody who makes people stop and listen. Who would a busy Barack Obama take immediately on the phone? An Einstein or a Blair?(...) Tony Blair may be a talented and savvy political figure, but he shouldn’t be Europe’s first choice. Let’s aim higher. Europe deserves it.

I don't think that Blair is lightweight. I just thinks that he represents the past and that Europe needs somebody who doesn't have all of his political baggage to help it move forward and not to go back to some of the gray zones of Blairism. When I think of Blair, the first thing to my mind is the Yo blair incident in which he accepted to be treated with too much nonchalance by Bush (At least Angela Merkel was repulsed when Bush rubbed her shoulders in an inappropriate manner ). That episode and his actions in the later years of his time at Britain's prime minister force one to question his ability to question wrong actions motivated by good intentions and to not be religiously ideological.

Sarkozy and the expensive shower

This excerpt from the Guardian  on Sarkozy's expenses during his presidency of the EU is perplexing because it shows that he has lost touch with reality since it is a mistake that he wouldn't have made before becoming president when he was very much aware of how the French perceived their politicians :

French financial watchdogs slammed Nicolas Sarkozy for spending £160m during his country's six-month stint in charge of the EU – including £250,000 on a personal presidential shower that he never used.
The vast expense is set out in a report blaming poor management and a lack of transparency by the president's staff.
Costs soared because so many of the EU-related events were organised at the last minute, said the report.
On one occasion Sarkozy triggered the cancellation of an entire EU event he was due to host in Evian, because he wanted to sleep in his own bed at the Élysée palace. By then, hundreds of journalists, EU officials and national delegations had either already arrived in Evian or were on their way.

We knew that Sarkozy had expensive taste and that he liked bling, but having a shower build in times of crisis is outrageous, but I don't think any of this will affect greatly Sarkozy's political fortunes as long as he doesn't have a credible opposition. In other words, there is no audible alternative to Sarkozysm.

PS: The shower didn't cost 250, 000 euros to be fair since the price includes offices and other stuff which had to be build just for the occasion (is France a developing country to need to build infrastructure when it receives heads of state?). I'm wondering how it is possible to spend more over 5000 euros per person for a reception and almost a million euro a day just because France is presiding the EU.

Hating the rain

I'm having a terrible week. What is it with New York and the rain this year? I have decided to try to get a flu shot just because it would be a nightmare in my current condition if I get any type of flu this season. Man and I thought the Fall would be lovely, well, I guess I just can't predict anything. I'm rereading David Mitchell's Cloud Altas and it's so good that it almost makes me feel warm.

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).

Yankees Hater

Well, as all passionate Red Sox Fans, as soon as the Sox are eliminated from the post-season I become a passionate Yankees hater. Thus, I hope that at least the Angels take the series to Game 7. However, I have the sick feeling that this year might be one of those cursed years when the Yankees are just destined to win it all. It will hard to be in New York  for the day of the parade. The first thing I see from my window is my neighbor's Yankees flag, which I have to fight the urge to burn it.