Globalclashes

Adieu tristesse

Well, the time has come for me to take some time off to prepare not only my move to New York, but also to adapt to a job change and yes, to have finally a real vacation in a heavenly place outside the US where I can soak my damaged feet in salty water. I’m taking the end of August and the whole month of September off although there is a good, but a small chance that I may be back before the beginning of October. Anyway, in the next few weeks, I will move to Manhattan, change job, have a vacation, start a new job, and come back to this blog to write with some renewed energy. Since May of last year, I’ve been having an atrocious time, which led me to function in permanent crisis mode and to live in a state of permanent anxiety. This period is coming to an end and I believe that things will not only get better, but that I’m going to have an outstanding end of the year, which I hope the quality of my posts will reflect. So there it is, I’m finally done crossing a tunnel, which made cross not only the heart of the darkness, but also despair and self-derogation. The journey is done and fortunately, I’m able to say Adieu tristesse instead of Bonjour Tristesse. See you October.

Simple wisdom

Potentially hollow deep thought on a Sunday: the challenge of moving at a slowing is to convince one self that one isn't falling behind or just being lazy, but being smart by realizing that life is marathon and that everything isn't about speed. The events, which I enjoyed the most watching at these Olympics were both the women's and men's marathon, which were won by unexpected runners (a Romania mother of 38, Constantina Tomescu-Dita and a 21 year old Kenyan Samuel Kamau Wansiru) who pace themselves remarkably well and then took a chance by running away from the field at a moment when they least expected. The lesson for life might just be that patience and guts are a deadly combination.

Anticlimactic

The word of the day is “anticlimactic.” It illustrates so many of the main events of this year especially Obama's announcement of its Vice-president, which as I said on Thursday everybody in DC with some political sense knew already. Nevertheless, his campaign and the press tried to build up the climax when they knew very well that there was little chance that the decision could live up to the hype given the fact that three months from now it won't make a difference except of course if there isn't a happy ending to just another pathetic episode. What a way to ruin people's weekend by forcing them to watch political pundits salivate and fall all of over themselves in a pitiful attempt to compete with the Olympics! I'm wondering what the answer is going when someone dares to ask the question what does Biden has that Hillary (I think it would have been a nightmare for her if she had been the choice because then she would have been blame for every single thing that will go wrong. But it was nevertheless a mistake of Obama not to as least act as if he wanted to choose her) doesn't? I know the answer and it is that he is more than “likable enough” not only to Obama, but also to the press and the new Democratic establishment. As the Brits would say: Wicked!

The joys of multilingualism

Agnès Poirier attempting to convince the Brits to give up their “monolingualism” to open themselves to the world by learning new languages:

I don't know what's most irritating though: the abyssal linguistic ignorance of the British or their worn-out excuse to justify it, which always comes with a coy smile: "Our nation is simply not good at languages." I have kept hearing it ever since I set foot in Britain, and I'll happily throttle the next person who dares say it to me. Linguistic weakness is not a congenital disease; it's not in your DNA any more than loving Château Haut-Brion 1989 is in mine. Being good at languages only requires political will, state intervention and cultural rigour. In Europe, learning two foreign languages is compulsory; if it wasn't, we'd all live in a Tower of Babel and be at each other's throats.

Multilingualism is not only about escaping foreign tricks and avoiding insults on Italian trains; it is also pure unadulterated joy. Ah, the délices, if slightly sadistic, of reading Proust in the text rather than in Moncrieff's outdated translation; oh, the allegria of laughing with Carlo Goldoni at his Venetian comedies; hey, the fun of hearing King Juan Carlos of Spain tell Hugo Chávez to shut it. Multilingualism makes mental and geographical borders disappear, annihilates chauvinism, and educates the world citizens of tomorrow.

However, before you reach the many ecstasies of multilingualism, you must go through the hardship of learning. I promise you, the rewards are worth all the pain.

If Poirier finds the Brits to be monolingual, I wonder what she would say of Americans and if she believes the French are as good with languages that people from Northern Europe.

Ghost Town

DC is a ghost town right now because everybody is waiting for certain political announcements, which aren't going to make the difference, which the wait for them suggest that they will. We go through the same thing every 4 years. The only difference this year is that both candidates might be tempted to tempt fate and to make choices, which highlight the concerns that voters already have about them. I know who Obama is going to pick (I am about 91% sure that I know. I live around Obamaniacs who can't keep a secret). I don't know who McCain is going to pick, but I am sure that he will react to Obama's pick or non-picks. The one thing I'm going to say about Obama's pick is that if he loses, people will point to his choice as a missed opportunity in an attempt to rewrite history and to make people forget that presidential candidates almost always win or lose elections on their own merit even when they pick the wrong person to be their vice president. which I'm not saying is the case in this situation. To end this post on a puzzling note, I've realized that it is easy to write in French than in English when I'm not feeling well, which surprises me because English is my lazy language.

Migraines

I'm suffering from migraines, which I believe are just a way for my body to evacuate my extreme anxiety and the powerlessness that I feel at this moment and that I'm condemned to accept in order to move forward. The advantage of a migraine and I have to look extremely hard to find one is that it makes you want promise to stop complaining when it stops and to just focus on what is within your control and not everything else. Summer is almost over. It was as morbid as the winter, but with  the help of my migraine, I have to say that I'm looking forward to the rest of the year which is condemned not to be good, but to be extraordinary.

History is only history

Greg Waldmann reviews Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams:

The Return of History and the End of Dreams is more of an extended essay than a book. It’s barely over a hundred pages long (though not priced accordingly), and its scope is limited. Kagan’s essay exists primarily to roll back the supposed complacency brought on the now two-decade old argument of Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man. It’s difficult to see the need for this. Terrorism and the ascendance of the world’s major autocracies have brought home reality with repeated hammer blows over the last ten years; the reader gets the feeling that Kagan needed something to set himself against in order to give cause for his essay and in order to structure its arguments.

[…]True to form, however, Kagan’s observations lead to overly generalized conclusions. He’s again constrained by space and the oppositional character of his work. We are not, Kagan says, entering a period of international convergence, but instead a “period of divergence.” Reality is a bit more muddled. The “twin realities of the present era” as he sees them can instead be viewed, in light of the economic and political convergence of the 1990s, as countervailing trends. The economic integration of the world still proceeds apace, Europe is still attempting (albeit in a fumbling way) political unity, and billions in the most disparate nations of the world still aspire to the benefits of democracy.

[...]This is sloppy work: the use of the indeterminate pronoun “they” ascribes undue emphasis on Americans’ knowledge of policy and their capacity for agency. It also – and not incidentally –unburdens governments of responsibility for the actions they take, and unburdens writers of their responsibility to think.

I find authors who pretend to use history to make sense of the present and to predict the future arrogant, which wouldn’t be a fatal flaw if they weren’t also as presumptuous and as flashy as psychics who make yearly flamboyant predictions about the future. The problem of course is that they haven’t read Hannah Arendt well to realize History is about the past and not the future and that it isn’t a predetermined force of what is happening or is about to happen. I have stopped taking seriously authors such as Kagan because their analysis is too pop and too fluffy to lead to substantive and constructive discussions.

Cold War Addiction

I have the strong suspicion that Frank Furedi’s reading of the conflict between Russia, Georgia and the West is at least 67.79 % right:

According to the story being peddled by a new generation of Cold Warriors in London and Washington, the world is confronted by a ‘resurgent’ Russia bent on becoming a new superpower. They claim that the Caucasian crisis is the outcome of the expansionist ambitions of Moscow, and that unless the Russians are stopped in Georgia then the Ukraine will be next – and before too long Europe will face the military might of its old adversary.

This fantasy of the ‘Rise of Russia’ overlooks the fact that Russia is a relatively feeble and divided nation. Yes, it possesses oil and other important commodities, but it is a conservative and even defensive, status-quo power. There is little doubt that Russia is dominated by an authoritarian and self-serving regime, which is capable of ruthless and violent behaviour. But its recent actions in response to the invasion of South Ossetia by Georgia are no different to those that would have been undertaken by any regional power confronted by a similar challenge.

(…) What is puzzling about the current situation is not Russia’s response to the Georgian invasion but the reaction of the West, particularly the US. Future historians will surely ask the questions: Why did the Bush administration embark on a course of an aggressive foreign policy towards Russia? Why encourage former regions of the old Soviet Union to join NATO, knowing that it can only provoke and humiliate the Russians? And most importantly, at a time of global uncertainty why open up a possibly dangerous conflict on a new front?

The West has a cold war addiction because it is nostalgic of a time when foreign policy was simple and when, without much effort, it could always argue that it had the high moral ground. In other words, some want to bring back the Cold War because it is familiar and because they feel certain that it will take them to a playing field in which they can win even though the times have changed. It is difficult to either patronize or dominate Russia after Bush claimed to have seen the beauty of his soul and after Sarkozy went to Moscow to play nice with Putin after pretending with stupid male and adolescent arrogance during his election campaign that he would take him on. The point is that the West doesn’t want to make this situation one where testosterones and manliness are the sole criteria for victory and where might make right because there is no leader in the West that is as full of menacing testosterones as and more manly than Putin.

The beauty of power or the power of beauty

After reading the following sugary excerpt from Chrystia Freeland’s lunch with Ukraine’s premier, Yulia Tymoshenko, I am wondering why are guys men never almost face the accusation that they use their sexuality, their looks to gain what they want especially when what they want is political power. I mean is there any doubt that if when a politician looked like Tom Cruise and is talented that he has a lot more opportunities to reach political heights and sometimes to even do it extremely fast? It helps to look good and to be a charmer especially when one is involved in a job that requires seduction and persuasion like politics. The point is that only women (remember Ségolène Royal) are penalized or to be criticized hypocritically for the fact that they are perceived as trying to make the most of what nature gave them, because then they become either as dangerously manipulative as Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction or as stupidly beautiful and shallow as Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. Only women are required to be gender neutral and asexual in almost everything they do:

I’ve just arrived from an America greatly confused about gender and power and beauty, and her matter-of-factness intrigues me. Yet to Tymoshenko – a self-made millionaire, mother and the most powerful European female east of Berlin – none of this seems complicated. “If we are speaking about what is more important for a woman, her work or her looks, the answer is obvious,” she tells me, looking a little perplexed that the conversation has drifted to such self-evident matters. “She will choose to look good, above all else, even at the cost of her work.”

Tymoshenko cheerfully talks about the differences between men and women in a way that would shock most of us “we-are-all-equal” western feminists. Here are a couple of my favourite assertions: women are better at taking care of things – both kids and countries – than men: “You know how, when a family breaks up, in most instances, the child stays with the mother? She is the more reliable caretaker. It is the same with a country. I simply think that we are more reliable and we are more able to give up living a normal life in order honourably to fulfil our responsibilities.”

Male voters are inevitably sceptical about female politicians: “Every man thinks he is more capable than any woman. This is normal. Women don’t criticise them for this ... In fact, we support them in their sense of superiority.”

Her sensible bottom line when I ask her if being a woman has been a political disadvantage? “Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it helps.” From a politician who uses her beauty as cannily as any supermodel but who also terrifies notorious Russian oligarchs, that sounds like a fair assessment.

Les choses de la vie

A classic, which makes life meaningful and worth living. Madonna is fifty today and my mom just a little bit older, what else do they have in common apart their birthday: they are both exceptional women people. Romy Schneider is, in my opinion, easily in the top 5 of the greatest actresses ever. She's so classically beautiful that her beauty becomes an inconvenient because it is so mesmerizing that people forget that she is acting not just being.

Jenseits von Gut und Böse

When I was young, my favorite philosophy book was Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) because I love Nietzsche's take on morality and ethics. I wanted to believe (I still do) in the will to power. However, everything changed when I read Camus's L'Homme Revolté (the Rebel) that I understood that rebellion cannot be an end, but a means to an end, and that all revolutions fail because they all have within themselves the seeds of their own destruction (extremism and absolutism).

What's the point of my ramblings? Well, I ran across an Obamamaniac this morning who tried her best to convert me to her new religion. She was a nice woman in her sixties who couldn't believe that somebody couldn't enthusiastically support Obama like some Evangelical Christians cannot believe that people can be content without Jesus’ gin and juice. It took me back to my Jenseits von Gut und Böse days and to this need that we all have to believe in glitter for glitter's sake and to make fluff sublime. It is impossible to understand Camus and to be a pious Obama's disciple. It is impossible to have understood the existential lessons of the twentieth century and to believe seriously that the "Yes, we can" has the same power as "I rebel therefore we exist" when it is just the political equivalent of  Nike's"Just do it" a slogan that is popular because it is empty and means nothing because it just affirms that coolness is everything.

Thus, the existential question of our time is once again who do you want to be and whether you believe that only revolutions can redeem grave injustices. I am on the side of those who say no to easy and pop solutions because to be human isn't about reflection, but about giving meaning to our existence by beefing up our fluff, taking responsibility for our actions, and acting to own up to our desires. There can neither be absolute justice nor absolute freedom. It is not enough to be Meursault and to refuse to lie.

Reviewing History

Timothy Snyder’s review of Mark Mazower’s book on Hitler’s Empire is so appealing that it makes an immediate entry in the list of books that I have to read before the end of the year.

Walking on broken glass

I'm not enjoying the end of the summer in spite of the Olympics or maybe because of them. Anyway, I'm currently on a standby because I still have to move out of DC and to find a place in New York. Those two things, I'm afraid, are going to take the little bit of energy that I have left. It is decided: I'm going to take a vacation in September. It is frightening to realize that one can never get use to instability especially once it has caused mental weariness.

Hidden Identities

Globalized beauty

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on racism, dark skin and globalized beauty:

For those who make and break images, decide who is gorgeous and who is not, light skin and hair and eyes easily please the eye, affirm superior human status. Racism is a given, an understanding infused through the business. Top model agencies will tell you that eager Asian, Arab and black models may look exquisite and flawless, but find it almost impossible to enter, survive or let alone thrive in that hostile habitat. I have written about this abhorrent exclusivity for more than 20 years and to do so again feels like failure.

The beauty and fashion industries still maintain a closed shop when it comes to the selection and promotion of models. In women's magazines, on catwalks, even shop dummies, dark skin is rarely seen. They say it is because customers are put off by such unexpected, outlandish images of loveliness even though a recent special issue of Italian Vogue featured only black models and was sold out worldwide.

[…] And now, with 21st-century globalisation, the ugly rejection of darkness is getting even worse. European definitions of attractiveness – from thin body shape to light colouring – are sweeping the non-western world, making most populations feel envious and sometimes desperate. Ten years ago beauty lightening creams had all but vanished from these places as native pride grew and health risks were better understood. Today these products are shifting like never before. A trader in Acton has just been convicted for selling banned, toxic, whitening creams which can cause burns and rashes.

The issue is a lot more complicated than Alibhai-Brown is willing to acknowledge for after all self-derogation has as many internal factors as it has external factors. It is impossible to watch this commercial of a popular lightening cream featuring a famous actor (Shahrukh Khan) and not to realize that the issue is about much more than the dark color of one’s skin.