The Republic of Dissent

Thankfully, hope is dead

Sentence of the day from Marbury:

The 2008 Obama campaign was particularly good at creating the sense that there was a place, just out of frame, in which "all political contradictions are solved".

I can't believe people bought it.  Well, that just shows how little I know about how conforting it is to choose blissful ignorance  . 

The appearance of toughness

Former National Intelligence director Dennis Blair on the use of drones by the Obama administration:

It is the politically advantageous thing to do--low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.

 Boy did Obama punk the Norwegian Committee which gave him the Novel Peace Prize believing that he would be a worldly American president because he asserted that he was a citizen of the world!

When cock is politics...

Sugary excerpt of the day from Jennifer Thorpe's take on the whole Brett Murray's Zuma painting (The Spear of the Nation) with his cock exposed:

Zuma has characterised himself as a man’s man. He celebrates a masculinity that emphasises sexual virility and supports polygamy in the face of an HIV epidemic spread by multiple concurrent partners; a masculinity that emphasises that men take sex when they want it and, despite being accused of rape, never once says that violence against women is wrong; and a masculinity that is heteronormative and homophobic (see comments about pushing down gay men, and appointment of John Qwelane and Mogoeng Mogoeng). His masculinity has been the core of his politics thus far, and perhaps the core appeal to those who vote for him. When it is under threat the very core of what he stands for is under threat. That the painting was defaced by men is interesting and reflects that perhaps these scary sentiments about manhood and its untouchability are shared by many other men, not only Msholozi.

For now we’ll have to see what happens in court for Zuma and for the two men who defaced Murray’s painting. In the meantime state resources will be spent in court cases that focus on what it means to be a man. The politics of the cock are alive and well. And this whole saga had taught us all that they are not up for discussion.

 I have to admit that I believe that the painting to be on point for it goes to the core of what/who Zuma is and why his politics are problematic: they  justify the worship of the cock, any vile behavior in the name of a non-existent africanness which force morality, ethics to be about who people are (which is determined by their race, gender, class for individuality isn't allowed)  rather than about what they do.  This explains why Zuma can rape have manly sex with a HIV positive woman and still become president of South Africa.

Ugly inconsistency

^{I agree strongly with Martha Nussbaum when she says this (hat tip: Norm Geras):}

(...) And there’s the argument that the burqa objectifies women. I think the fact that women are often treated as objects for male use and control is a real problem. But let’s also think about porn magazines, the treatment of women in advertising and in the media, where women are treated as consumer objects and are encouraged to package themselves for male use and control in a way that eclipses their individuality. If you go to a high school dance, girls are wearing identical micro-skirts and packaging themselves as objects for a simulated group sex ritual that takes the place of dancing. There are lots of practices in our society that objectify women, unfortunately. To complain about one that happens to be the practice of the minority religion and not to examine yourself and the many ways in which you participate in such practices is terrible, especially when the force of law is brought to bear. In America, fortunately we don’t have bans on the burqa and the headscarf. But the French would ban you from walking down the street in a burqa, while you could wear a micro-skirt and your 4-inch heels and they’d think nothing of that. I think it’s just an ugly inconsistency.

Out of Commission

I' m dealing with some fairly serious health issues, which make it impossible to blog until I get better. So blogging will be nonexistent until June or it may not be if I recover  quickly.

A sugary excerpt to say au revoir from Cornell West on Barack Obama:

When you mobilise the legacy of Martin [Luther] King and put a bust of Martin King in the Oval Office, people elevate their hopes. Martin King is not just every brother (...) It’s like a novelist being obsessed with Tolstoy or Proust and then he ends up writing short stories that can barely get into some middlebrow magazine. Hey, you got our hopes up man! I was expecting Proust or Tolstoy, instead it would barely get in Newsweek.

I agree with West! Saying it obliges me to come back quickly for it bugs me that they are a part of what might be my last blog before a while.   

Extraordinary Sarkozy

I don't disagree Bruno Bernard with on this :

Sarkozy was extraordinary in the sense that he was fundamentally different from the traditional French political elite, a lawyer of Hungarian descent born and raised in a Parisian suburb. Unlike France's new president, there were no grandes écoles, no political rural roots and no bourgeois family for Sarkozy.

This fundamental difference is why people elected him in 2007 and why they rejected him in 2012. The French liked the unconventional candidate; they never liked the unconventional president. They had been accustomed to distant fatherly figures and instead they got France's first president of the 21st century: pragmatic, proactive, transparent and media savvy.

 Bruno Bernard just narrows the picture in order to focus on the trees to assert how beautiful their leaves are to avoid seeing that they disfigure the forest.

Winning by default

I agree with Paul Krugman on this:

Hollande’s victory in France is no more a harbinger of a general leftward shift than Rajoy’s victory in Spain a little while ago heralded a general rightward shift; these are just the “outs” benefiting from the fact that they aren’t in, and the economy stinks.

Sarkozy made it easier for the focus of the election to harsh economic times by behaving unFrenchly.

France wasn't waiting for Superman

John Lichfield writes a spot on 'obituary' of Sarkozy presidency :

Mr Sarkozy wanted to break the mould of French politics and French society. He wanted, as Margaret Thatcher did in Britain in the 1980s, to mess with the mind of France: to make the country more outward-looking, more confident and more entrepreneurial.

As recently as February, he invited Chancellor Angela Merkel to be his de facto running mate and argued that France should be more like Germany. He ended up fighting for political survival by aping the navel-gazing, ultra-nationalist language, themes, and tactics of the far-right National Front.

Historians will decide whether the people of France defeated his plans to drag the country into the 21st century; or whether Mr Sarkozy – despite his flag-waving – proved to be a man who did not understand France and could not lead his country through a time of crisis and shifts in global economic power.

I have to say that yesterday was one of those moments, when I felt greatful that France wasn't America and that the French aren't Americans for they don't believe, for long, in fairy tales and in unsophisticated super-heroes who can't transcend their frailties.

Sarkozy est 'mort,' vive François Hollande!

Flaubert, Madame Bovary and style

Sugary excerpt of the weekend from Kate Summerscale :

Writers before [Flaubert] had agonised about style. But no novelist agonised as much or as publicly, no novelist fetishised the poetry of “the sentence” in the same way, no novelist pushed to such an extreme the potential alienation of form and content (Flaubert longed to write what he called a “book about nothing”). No novelist before Flaubert reflected as self-consciously on questions of technique. With Flaubert, literature became “essentially problematic”, as one scholar puts it.

Or just modern? Flaubert himself affected a nostalgia for the great unselfconscious writers who came before him, like Molière and Cervantes; they, said Flaubert in his letters, “had no techniques”. He, on the other hand, was betrothed to “atrocious labour” and “fanaticism”. In different ways, the modern novelist is shadowed by that monkish labour. [...]So what did Flaubert mean by style, by the music of a sentence? This, from Madame Bovary – Charles is stupidly proud that he has got Emma pregnant: “L’idée d’avoir engendré le délectait.” So compact, so precise, so rhythmic. Literally, this is “The idea of having engendered delighted him.” Geoffrey Wall, in his Penguin translation, renders it as: “The thought of having impregnated her was delectable to him.” This is good, but pity the poor translator. For the English is a wan cousin of the French. Say the French out aloud, as Flaubert would have done, and you encounter four “ay” sounds in three of the words: ‘l’idée, engendré, délectait.’ An English translation that tried to mimic the untranslatable music of the French – that tried to mimic the rhyming – would sound like bad hip-hop: ‘The notion of procreation was a delectation.’

I have always wonder whether Emma Bovary was stylish because she was real or real because she was stylish. I am making the assertion that Gustave Flaubert filtered his style to make reality 'artistic' as some filter their wine to make it more palatable by erasing its imperfections and often diluting its complexity.  

To put it differently, I have always preferred Anna Karenina to Emma Bovary because I sensed that the former wasn't just a stylish idea of what female amorous angst ought to be.

R.a.c.i.s.t

Words to munch on this weekend from Belle Waring slamming the idea  hat racism has nothing to do with normalcy :

If someone is “a racist” it is not because he is a like a Nazi with a uniform and everything, and pledges allegiance to the flag of racism, and goes around shouting “I hate Mexican people!” Well, to be fair, he might shout that if he were drunk and had smoked some of the cottonmouth killer, or were on MySpace. And those dudes in Stormfront exist. And racist skinheads too dumb to join Stormfront. Nonetheless, in ordinary speech one only means “hey, he said a thing that was racially prejudiced,” or “she told a racist joke,” or “he threw a crumpled-up beer can at that broke-ass African-American gentleman walking right beside the road (South Carolina doesn’t hold much truck with sidewalks) while shouting ‘f%cK you n1gger!,’” or “she collects these weird racist yam crate-labels from Louisiana in the ‘30s and I am not sure her motives are entirely pure.” (May God help me on this one, a collector sells them in Takoma Park at vintage fairs and sometimes I succumb. They’re so cool! She’s a 65-year-old Black lady, so she’s off the hook. OR IS SHE?!).

I agree with Waring. Nevertheless,  I wish she wouldn't stop at the surface and question also the assumption that all racist acts are equal and that all racists are the worst  people in the world.  For example, Belle Waring asserts that for all of his 'nice' deeds and 'normal' life, George Zimmerman, the shooter of Trayvon Martin, is a racist. I wonder whether if he has to be a racist, to be guilty and also whether it is possible for him to be racist and not be guilty.

In short, is the racism of the shooter in this case the sole determinant of guilt? I don't think that it is. 

 

The end of the exception française

Brendan O' Neill on the French elections:

The theme of this campaign is not ‘Should France be run according to left-wing or right-wing principles?’, but rather ‘Is France most threatened by Eastern immigrants or Anglo-Saxon culture? By poor foreigners or the princes of finance? By global jihadists or the “global mafia” (Le Pen’s term for the banking industry)?’. All the candidates share an obsession with the porousness of French borders, a feeling that the Republic is fragile and that it is all the fault of various ‘tribes’ or ‘mafia’. Here, we can glimpse the most significant thread in the campaign: a profound misunderstanding of what is driving the crisis of values in modern France, and a lack of any serious political language with which to address it.
All the candidates look outside of France for the source of the republican crisis. They correctly sense that the values upon which modern France was founded – democracy, equality, liberty, universalism – are held in low esteem today. But they wrongly pin the blame for this fact on either immigrants who refuse to embrace French culture or on a foreign-imported ‘religion of competition’. (...)If the Republic is fragile, it’s because the French elite itself is incapable of upholding the values upon which it was built, not because some Muslims have turned up or because Anglo-Saxon bankers are running riot. It is the inability of French leaders in our relativistic era to assert republican values unapologetically which leads them to launch phoney wars against fantasy external infiltrators instead.

I agree mostly with O'Neill despite the fact that  he is simply showing that there is no exception française.  France, as most countries undermined by a potent nostalgia for an idealised and glorious past due to their fear that the future will be bleak because they losing control of the world,  prefers to look outward for causes to its existential angst to avoid shaking their comfortable reality.

Veiled Frenchness

Jeremy Harding describes a scene of Sarkozy's last big meeting before Sunday's vote:

‘You’re 200,000!’ Sarkozy announced triumphantly, before he laid into the opposition’s preference for the red flag over the tricolore, quoted from Lamartine and promised a new kind of entrepreneurial capitalism to replace ‘finance capitalism’, but he’s been saying that for a while.

A spat erupted just in front of me and a woman fought her way to the edge of the crowd in tears, her hands pressed either side of her hijab. ‘I’m French after all,’ she shouted. Someone in the crowd had thrown a racist insult. ‘This is why France will never lift itself up,’ she said, shaking with rage. Moments later a poor white family – too poor for this rally in a slick part of town – were being questioned by the police.

I'm afraid that the divisive identity politics, which focuses on the idea that immigration is a threat to 'French identity' is here to stay.  Sarkozy has americanized French politics by shifting its focus from deeds, gravitas and grandeur to being and nothingness,

Wishy washy and fluffy francophiles

Adam Gopnik on the French presidential elections and the more than likely future french president François Hollande:

But it’s entirely likely that, after the second round of voting, on May 6th, the next President of France will be François Hollande, the inoffensive, myopic, weight-conscious Socialist candidate, a man so milky-mild that one has to project onto him a secret life to make him seem not just a fully credible politician but a fully credible human being. (And, indeed, Hollande’s love life is more intricate than one might expect: having fathered four children with his lover, the previous Socialist Presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, he left her, or was left by her, for another partner, meaning that his Presidency could include a role for an ex-mistress who is also a would-be queen.)

The strength of Hollande’s candidacy speaks mainly to the weakness of Nicolas Sarkozy’s, and the pervasive sense that his free-market reformist project has failed. After the twelve dead-man’s-float years of the Chirac Presidency, it was hard not to root at least a little for Sarkozy, and, in truth, his economic record, given the circumstances, is far from the worst on the Continent, or off it, for that matter. Yet he quickly came to seem arrogant instead of energetic, and he never quite shook a reputation, earned in the first days of his Presidency, for flashiness and bling. Even his marriage to Carla Bruni, and the child they had together, left the French unmoved. People will forgive a short man with a beautiful wife if he seems sufficiently surprised; Sarkozy seemed merely showy, and his energy, over time, merely antic and self-pleasing.

I have to admit that I like Adam Gopnik a lot, but that I am increasingly irritated by what he writes about France because it is so obvious that he is too much of a romantic to understand and to accept certain realities.  One only needs to read what he was writing about Sarkozy about five years ago to get the fact that Gopnik writes about France the same way BHL (Bernard Henri Lévy) writes about America  that is with passion, but not much more than superficial analysis.

The press and the Church of the Savvy

Sugary excerpt of the day from Glenn Greenwald:

When I first began writing about politics, I mistakenly thought that the bias of the Bush-worshipping establishment media was a pro-GOP bias. It isn’t (and it’s obviously not a “liberal bias”). That’s not how they function. They aren’t nearly so substantive as to be driven by any sort of belief or ideology or anything like that. Their religion is the worship of political power and authority (or, as Jay Rosen says, their religion is the Church of the Savvy). Royal court courtiers have long competed with one another to curry favor with the King and his minions in exchange for official favor, and this is just that dynamic. Political power is what can give them their treats — their “exclusive” interviews and getting tapped on their grateful heads to get secret documents and invited to White House functions and being allowed into the sacred Situation Room – so it’s what they revere and serve.

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.

 

White man's international justice

Adrian Hamilton on the Charles Taylor's trial by The Special Court for Sierra Leone and its verdict:

Taylor's trial still has the smack of white man's justice to it – and not a little hypocrisy.

Taylor has been condemned for stoking up a rebellion in another country with appalling consequences for its civilian population. But what else was the West doing when it armed the Taliban to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, and how else would you describe the calls to send arms to the insurgents in Syria, however noble their cause?

Taylor's defence was right on one point. He wouldn't be there if his machinations had suited our purposes.

I don't agree with Hamilton's phrasing, but it is pretty clear that the trial of Charles Taylor was problematic for reasons that have nothing to do with white man's justice. The case against him was weak and its prosecution inadequate. It doesn't mean that Taylor wasn't responsible, it means that the process to determine his guilt was flawed. However, the essential question remains about the adequateness of the tools to achieve international justice and about how fair and equitable does the process have for its verdict to be just instead of just being about retribution.

Dangereux!

The cover of the next edition of the Economist making the argument than the more than likely future president of France, François Hollande, is 'rather dangerous':

It is very difficult to take the Economist's views of French politics seriously for although most of its analysis are pertinent, it never reaches the right conclusions in great part because it never understands that France isn't Britain as most American commentators don't understand what it means to a French socialist.

The post-post partisan president

Fascinating (and old) stuff from Ryan Lizza:

Obama sprang coatless from his limousine and headed up the steps of Will’s yellow clapboard house. He was greeted by Will, Michael Barone, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Lawrence Kudlow, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan. They were Reaganites all, yet some had paid tribute to Obama during the campaign. Lowry, who is the editor of the National Review, called Obama “the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement.” Krauthammer, an intellectual and ornery voice on Fox News and in the pages of the Washington Post, had written that Obama would be “a president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin,” who would “bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan.” And Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and a former aide to Dan Quayle, wrote, “I look forward to Obama’s inauguration with a surprising degree of hope and good cheer.”

Over dinner, Obama searched for points of common ground. He noted that he and Kudlow agreed on a business-investment tax cut. “He loves to deal with both sides of the issue,” Kudlow later wrote. “He revels in the back and forth. And he wants to keep the dialogue going with conservatives.” Obama’s view, shared with many people at the time, was that professional pundits were wrong about American politics. It was a myth, he said, that the two political parties were impossibly divided on the big issues confronting America. The gap was surmountable. Compared with some other Western countries, where Communists and far-right parties sit in the same parliament, the gulf between Democrats and Republicans was narrow. (...)If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign, it was the idea of post-partisanship. He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, reflected on Obama’s heady appeal: “Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.”

What happened? Well, one thing it is impossible to be a cultural icon for what one 'is' symbolically and to unite a country that is in the midst of vicious and anti-intellectual culture wars. In short, Obama got elected for what he appeared to be and couldn't do what he wanted to do not only because experience matters, but also because his symbolic self got in the way of his political aspirations.

Misogynistic Vatican

Sugary excerpt from Garry Wills on the Vatican's slap of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious:

Last week, following an assessment by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican stripped the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing most American nuns, of its powers of self-government, maintaining that its members have made statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle has taken control of the Conference, writing new laws for it, supplanting its leadership, and banning “political” activity (which is what Rome calls social work). Women are not capable, in the Vatican’s mind, of governing others or even themselves. Is it any wonder so many nuns have left the orders or avoided joining them? Who wants to be bullied?

It is typical of the pope’s sense of priorities that, at the very time when he is quashing an independent spirit in the church’s women, he is negotiating a welcome back to priests who left the church in protest at the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. These men, with their own dissident bishop, Marcel Lefebvre, formed the Society of Saint Pius X—the Pius whose Secretariat of State had a monsignor (Umberto Benigni) who promoted the Protocols of the Elder of Zion. Pope Benedict has already lifted the excommunication of four bishops in the Society of Saint Pius X, including that of Richard Williamson, who is a holocaust denier. Now a return of the whole body is being negotiated.

Just another proof that Sarah Silverman is right when she proposes to sell the Vatican to sell the world.

Distinctions et différences

The Economist's Élysée blog asks and answers the question of whether 18% of the French are racist because they voted for the extremist right candidate Marine Le Pen for president:

All this to say that it is too simplistic to see Ms Le Pen’s score as a mere manifestation of French racism. Nor is it simply a protest against the system. People like her, and are not afraid to say so, in a way that few were about her father. Her electoral success reflects, rather, a mix of disappointment with Mr Sarkozy, despair at the level of joblessness, bewilderment in the face of globalisation, frustration at the impotence of Europe, and disillusion with the political class.

I concur, but I wonder if the same point could be easily made about American Tea Partiers. Somehow I doubt it, which is sad because asserting that people are racist solely because of their politics pollutes all conversation and of course infects the political debate.

That said, ignorance isn't a political opinion.