The Republic of Dissent

On Africanity and literature

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

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

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

Medicalizing human behavior and justifying vileness

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

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

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

Human rights and the deification of traditions

Tzvetan Todorov on human rights:

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

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

America's infatuation with war

Thanks to John Quiggin’s post at Crooked Timber, I was able to read a worth reading article on the American conservative on American wars written by Andrew C. Bacevitch.  He makes the point that America is good at starting war because it is a political tool, which influential ideologues love to advocate , and yet it is also at finishing them for precisely the same reasons for  with gruesome realities, comes the realization that war cannot be an end and itself and a fix all for everything tough foreign policy question. He isn’t wrong. Sugary excerpt:

An alternative reading of our recent military past might suggest the following: first, that the political utility of force—the range of political problems where force possesses real relevance—is actually quite narrow; second, that definitive victory of the sort that yields a formal surrender ceremony at Appomattox or on the deck of an American warship tends to be a rarity; third, that ambiguous outcomes are much more probable, with those achieved at a cost far greater than even the most conscientious war planner is likely to anticipate; and fourth, that the prudent statesman therefore turns to force only as a last resort and only when the most vital national interests are at stake. Contra Kristol, force is an “instrument” in the same sense that a slot machine or a roulette wheel qualifies as an instrument.
To consider the long bloody chronicle of modern history, big wars and small ones alike, is to affirm the validity of these conclusions. Bellicose ideologues will pretend otherwise. Such are the vagaries of American politics that within the Beltway the views expressed by these ideologues—few of whom have experienced war—will continue to be treated as worthy of consideration. One sees the hand of God at work: the Lord obviously has an acute appreciation for irony. […] The impetus for weaning Americans away from their infatuation with war, if it comes at all, will come from within the officer corps. It certainly won’t come from within the political establishment, the Republican Party gripped by militaristic fantasies and Democrats too fearful of being tagged as weak on national security to exercise independent judgment. Were there any lingering doubt on that score, Barack Obama, the self-described agent of change, removed it once and for all: by upping the ante in Afghanistan he has put his personal imprimatur on the Long War.

The problem comes from the fact that America is a hegemon and that it has had that status for a long time. Few countries (not to say no country) become superpowers, hegemons without believing in the use of force and without using it to protect its interests and enforce its vision of the world. America is in the unique position of being a hegemon with a few ascending powers, but no equals for the most. Too often, because it doesn’t have to compromise or to take into account the sensitivities of an equal, many of its ideologues with clout assume that its incredible military might can quickly and inexpensively resolve every issue. They take the view point that that even if it isn’t successful, the use of force is a way to dispel the notion that America is weak, a power in the decline , or an nation that can messed with. Thus, they always support the notion that war even when it doesn’t solve any issue is almost always a more effective tool than the exercise of any kind of soft power.  The problems is that America faces a dilemma every time it finds itself within a war, which might be unwinnable; it has to decide whether surrender is a defeat and within American political culture, it almost always is and costs a president all of his political capital. This fact explains why it is nearly impossible for any president given those facts especially when he is a Democrat easily be tarnished by the cowardice accusation, not to fall within  the trap of forgetting that wars almost always have no positive consequences when the objectives are unclear or constantly changing and more importantly when victory is solely defined as avoiding defeat and humiliation.

A lethal sentimentalist education

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

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

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

Bitter

As a Francophone and Francophile, I'm beating myself up over the fact that I just can't like the Saints. It has a lot to do with the fact that they killed my Favre fantasy. The Superbowl just showed that coaching matters and that sometimes when you are outmatched, you have to be more gutsy and outsmart your opponent, that is what the Saints and their coach did. The Colts thought they had won it in the first quarter and essentially lost when after going for it on fourth down in their second drive of the fourth quarter when they were up by one point, they chose not to go for it again and instead choose to kick the field goal. That turned the game especially since the kicker missed the field goal. Sean Payton was unafraid to lose and that helped him to make wow calls. Peyton Manning got rattled because he never gave the Saints' defense enough respect and lost his patience once his team got down by a touchdown. Wow...I guess I was right for when the game didn't become a blowout, the Saints started to believe in their own destiny and the Colts to doubt theirs. American Football is football, but it can spectacular.

Superbowl Sunday

I haven't decided whether to watch the game today. I'm not thinking much about it, but I just don't want to have to think about the fact that Favre ought to be playing in this game and that he isn't because Fate is a mean and bitter old guy who hates life as if she was a beautiful woman that he could never have. In any case, I may watch the game with the sound turned down, but I'm thankful that it is on CBS, which means the commentary won't be syrupy, at least I naively hope so.

By the way, my prediction is that if it isn't a blowout, the Saints will win because then, they will have the sense that this is their moment.

For Women, it is always about love and pain

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

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

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

Spinster fear and sterile, but eternal musings

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

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

The neverending culpability of the West

What is wrong with Karen Armstrong? When she writes about her experience at a conference in Cairo, I have to wonder in what she lives:

(...)if the professors felt so enraged, what on earth could it be like on the streets of Cairo, where this level of frustration, aggravated by economic and political discontent, could make many people easy targets for extremist propaganda?
But the mood of our conference changed. During the last session an American theologian managed, with some difficulty, to take the floor and spoke on behalf of us all. We had, he said, been deeply impressed by the pain in the room; we knew that "the eight horrible years of George W Bush" had inflicted grave damage on the region, and would do everything in our power to work with Al-Azhar for a better future. Immediately, one of the most vitriolic of our assailants responded with generosity and the conference was finally able to issue a firm and positive joint resolution.
So far, Obama has not given the concrete sign that we felt was essential. But the Chilcot inquiry has also raised hopes. If there is any hint of whitewash or cover-up, the consequent disillusion will only exacerbate an already inflamed situation. In Cairo, we discovered that a frank acknowledgment of culpability could turn things around. In our dangerously polarised world, we may not get such an opportunity again.

Wow....I think that for one Karen Armstrong is way to religious to understand the Camusian difference between culpability and responsibility, and she fails to get the fact the problem here isn't for the west to acknowledge some type of culpability to turn things around in the streets of Cairo or Islamabad, but rather to live by its own ideals while stopping to treat the poor as victims and as incapable of taking control of their own destiny.  Karen Armstrong has a Mother Theresa like view of international affairs for she believes in guilt, in atonement and in all the disturbing sentiments, which always to Imperialism, paternalism, and just wars, which are later found to be unwinnable. The point here is that the "West" which doesn't exist except in the mind of those who love to divide the world into archaic categories doesn't have to bear a cross for the fact that shit happens and that more often that not, it strays away from the least unjust path because it is too complex and because it believes that national interests justify the use of any means. Thus, the question here is solely one of responsibility and of the continuation of Hobbes's state of nature in spite of progress and modernity. To put things simply: should we just accept that we are all barbarians and be done with ethics and accept that might makes right.
The goal of the Chilcot inquiring shouldn't be the same as those Witch trials in Salem that is to burn the guilty to appease angry mobs. The aim should be to make those who had power to assume responsibility of their mistakes in judgment and more importantly to force the electorate to realize that democracies only function when they realize that  they shouldn't be waiting for "the one" but rather should force the imperfect leaders that they have to live by the principles that make their country what it is.

Disaster tourism

Kara C. McDonald makes a point on Haiti and the potential damages of disaster tourism especially when it is made by celebrities:

(...) many of Haiti's visitors have had legitimate reasons for wanting to go: coordinating assistance, bringing closure to families, bearing witness to the disaster, determining the ground truth for needs assessments, and strengthening the case to donors. But the credibility and visibility given to visitors increases the incentives for others to try to go. Sadly, and as shocking as it might seem, the Port-au-Prince crisis risks becoming a destination for "disaster tourists." Thus, international and local officials should vet each prospective traveler, determining his or her potential contributions and urgency to the recovery effort.

Haiti and Avatar

Thought provoking and more importantly necessary statements from Giovanni at Bat Bean, Beam (hat tip: Daniel Trilling) comparing Haiti and Avatar (which I haven't seen because I don't want to, I still haven't digested the overkill that there was for Titanic):

The comparison may seem outrageous, but note what these two sets of comments have in common: the idea that analysis is inappropriate, criticism and a sense of time or history not befitting the moment. A large-scale human tragedy calls for immediate action; a spectacular movie calls for immediate enjoyment. In both instances, reflection is grossly inappropriate, even offensive; thus Hallward and Calder are not chastised for being wrong, but for speaking out of turn.
I guess this would also not be the time to reflect on information as spectacle and entertainment, a concept so naturalised and ingrained that raising it in the most innocuous of circumstances is bound to get you labelled as a Neil Postman wannabe, or worse. Let alone at this moment, when the circumstances are all but innocuous. So I probably ought to refrain from pointing out what everybody knows, namely, that Avatar is owned by a company called News Corporation, whose principal, one Rupert Murdoch, is a fanatical supporter of Western imperialism, both military and economic. Yet the film passes, at least amongst a significant proportion of the people who - unlike Calder’s detractors - chose to take it seriously, precisely for a critique of imperialism. Regardless of the merits of that argument, which is not my intention to discuss here, did James Cameron just a few hours ago, in accepting his Golden Globe for best director, really speak Na’vi? What kind of gesture was that? What does it mean to pay homage to the struggles of a people that does not exist, and to do so right now, at this moment in history, when it is bound to be preceded in the news bulletins by footage from Port au Prince?
Now this obviously is a coincidence, and the release of Avatar was never meant to overlap with the Haitian earthquake. But what if it dulls its reality? What if that appeal to fictional indigenous rights criminally distract us, by creating a warped space of reflection on plights that aren’t real?

It is sad to assert but in our times, disasters and everything else need to be able to produce nice pictures, infomercials to catch and to keep the attention of America first of all and of Hollywoodized world. What has bothered about the continuing Haiti saga is precisely the lack of analysis and of thoughts because we are too busy feeling, being overwhelmed by the pictures of Anderson Cooper looking tanned in the middle of glamorous misery. 

Churchill and the British Empire

Piers Brendon reviews Richard Toye's upcoming book, Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made in the Literary Review:

The Empire, indeed, was the main bone of contention between Churchill and Roosevelt during the war. The President found it hard to believe that they were fighting Axis tyranny but not working to free people all over the world from colonial oppression. He openly disagreed with Churchill's assertion that the promises of self-government in the Atlantic Charter did not apply to the British Empire. The Prime Minister thought it was 'pretty good cheek' for the Americans, who had blood on their hands in the Philippines, to try 'to school-marm us into proper behaviour' in the Empire. And with the Empire behind him, he felt able to stand up to the Great Republic. According to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's plea that India should be allowed to rule itself wrung from Churchill a 'string of cuss words [that] lasted for two hours in the middle of the night'.
Young Winston had vowed to devote his life to the maintenance of the British Empire. As warlord during the struggle against Hitler he fought to preserve it even though that meant testing the Anglo-American alliance, which he also championed. As an old man he lamented that his life had been for nothing: 'The Empire I believed in has gone.' In view of all that it is remarkable that no substantial scholarly work on this subject has hitherto appeared. There have been essays and a couple of partial studies, and the topic has been aired in some of the many volumes about Churchill published since the opening and electronic cataloguing of his papers. But Churchill's Empire is the first book to cover all the ground. It does so in a masterly fashion, drawing on much fresh evidence, teasing out the nuances of Churchill's attitudes and providing a marvellously illuminating appraisal.

Well, at least and at last, Churchill has something in common with Charles de Gaulle, but should we expected that men who grew in times when empire is synonymous not to say equaled to their nation's grandeur are reluctant to give it up and to see decolonization as a plus?

Loss and blandness

The Times Literary Supplement has a review of Martin Amis's latest The Pregnant Widow, which left me wondering why Amis writes about love when he seems to feel the same about it than Christopher Hitchens feels about religion. In any case, here is a sugary excerpt of the review:

However, if the friction between the novel’s layers doesn’t always generate excitement, the conceit of layers does contribute to its greatest strengths. At the very beginning of the story, Keith in 2006 is described as entering “the great dig of London”, and The Pregnant Widow works best as an archaeology of the ageing body, an analysis of what Helen Small has pointedly described as “the failure of a preferential version of the future in which one’s own freedom was the overriding object”. In this regard, the novel’s multiple time frames give Amis the chance to measure Keith’s increasing physical frailty and stretchedness unsparingly against his younger self (“As you pass the half-century, the flesh, the coating on the person, begin to attenuate. And the world is full of blades and spikes”), raising the uncomfortable possibility that it may be worse for a man’s ageing body to be parodically recognizable than changed utterly.
Nor is this the only kind of wasting that sets Amis’s imagination going: The Pregnant Widow stands alongside novels such as Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Philip Roth’s Indignation as part of a contemporary subgenre, the elegy to wasted opportunity. As in McEwan’s novella, the last section of the story fast-forwards through the future lives and losses of some of the characters, a trajectory of unfulfilment and mis-fulfilment that is deliberately braced against the unsuspecting world of 1970, as if the sheer weight of narrative itself could somehow preserve the ghostly energy of what didn’t go on to happen.

I'm going to wait (well after after May 2010 when it gets published in the States) to read The Pregnant Widow. It needs to age because it is ready for me. I will eventually get to it as I know that I'll get around to eating more tofu just to have the illusion and the self-satisfaction that I'm a healthier and better person.

Haiti and the lazy culture

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

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

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

America, Canada and melting pots

Sugary excerpt of the day from Nav Purewal's fascinating article in the Walrus:

Canada’s kaleidoscopic shards form a culture more overtly variegated than America’s comparatively homogeneous stew, but they also elide both nations’ colonial pasts, a history that has particularly important implications for Canada’s complicated approaches to assimilation. The truism that everyone here came from somewhere else obliquely acknowledges that English and French imperialism supplanted existing cultures.
Modern Canada is as much a palimpsest as a mosaic, a truth perhaps engrained somewhere in our national consciousness — and one that manifests itself in two divergent traditions of immigrant assimilation. In English Canada, the fraught legacy of cultural imperialism — whether the slaughter of native tribes or the injustice of residential schools — results in a reluctance to impose a uniform Canadian culture on newcomers; whereas Quebec, ever afraid of diluting its francophone heritage, demands that immigrants conform to an atavistic conception of French-Canadian culture.

I am wondering whether both America and Canada integration's models are adaptable and suitable for any other country. I have the suspicion that that the answer is no and these variation of the melting pot model, which in fact lead to fractured societies made of communities (which can cohabit without "mixing" given the size of those countries),but which are in fact legitimated and thus, reinforced by the State (s). The most interesting question has to be whether those  models are sustainable. At the time, when analysts such as Bruce Bawer, Christophe Caldwell and Mark Steyn are making loud (and disturbing) noises about the end of Europe as we know to put things more tastefully, I wonder if they should look at America and Canada and wonder what might happen if the communities that form their societies stop having common interest and a share of the apple pie. In other words, what happens when American and Canada become even more unequal, and more "varied societies." Implicitly, I'm suggesting here that identity matters less in wealthy and prospering countries where the poor, and minorities feel that they have a shoot to reach the mountain top. This might suggest that Canada because it is a "fairer" society (one where welfare  and universal healthcare are not fighting words) might face great of an identity crisis than America. Unfortunately, literature doesn't have the answer to that question. 

Hell is reading others's people sleaze

After reading Jessica Dweck's article in Slate, I know that I'm going to hell:

In his new tell-all book, The Politician, Andrew Young claims to have discovered a sex tape recorded by John Edwards and his mistress, Rielle Hunter, in a box of trash. Although Hunter apparently tried to dismantle the video by pulling the tape out of the cassette, Young was able to restore it and view the footage with his wife. How do you destroy a sex tape so that it actually stays destroyed?

Are American political journalists still serious people? Or is that an unbelievably naïve question? What is the point of the sex tape "information" except to appeal to our basest instincts?

Virtual political will

Ah ! No ah Ha...that just means that I agree with this:

(...)the idea of Obama's election campaign was that the new political will was virtual—that it arouse out of new modes of Internet participation in political life. The failure of this model does not necessarily depend on the will's "non-concrete," virtual existence, but on the fact that its power never lay in its own being but was artificially conjured up for the elections. An existentially present political will does not wake up every four years only to be safely put to sleep as soon as the ballots are counted!

Fundamental questions

Jytte Klausen, the author whose book, The Cartoons that Shook the World, was censured by Yale University Press by removing the Muhammad cartoons gave a great interview available on Eurozine in which she explains the motives behind her book and why she thought the cartoons were a necessary addition:

My idea was not to engage the provocation of: "Do I now dare to print these bad pictures or not?" That would never be my purpose. My purpose was to get the whole page from the newspaper as it was reprinted that day. There have been many misunderstandings and often the online versions of the cartoons have incorrect translations of the captions. In the book, and it was written with this purpose, I ask the reader to put on different glasses and look at the images and analyse them from the vantage point of the different arguments that were made against and for the cartoons at the time. What would a Danish reader see? What did the cartoonist intend to show? Why would a secular Muslim say they were Islamaphobic? Why would a religious Muslim say they were blasphemous? These are all different readings of the meaning of the cartoons and I wanted my readers to look at how no illustrations, and no caricature, is read in the absence of context. And I do describe some of them actually as anti-Semitic in a classical European style.

The Crazies are in Haiti

'We" know from experience and from reading Camus's La Peste that Religious fundamentalists love nothing more than catastrophic disasters to take advantage of the others while feeding on their need to understand what happened to them and why "God," "fate," or whatever else abandoned them. Reading this sugary excerpt from John Snow (h/t: Daniel Finkelstein) just shows that Haiti is ground zero for all kind of despicable behaviors and that this reality will continue for Haiti is now more than ever a country without a state:

My own inquiries in Port-au-Prince revealed very few absolute orphans. The extended family is very much still a part of Haitian life. I found a ten month old baby girl, whose mother had been killed and whose father was missing. But the child’s aunt, who was cradling the child as I spoke to her, told me she would bring her up as her own. According to NGOs I spoke to, there are very, very few children who have been completely dispossessed of all family and community. Yet even in these circumstances, I have heard evangelicals stating as a fact that a loving, childless, Christian family in America will give the child a better life.
Christian and Islamic fundamentalists both play on immigrant and ethnic minority groupings in western countries. They play too on communities in the developing world – from Africa to Europe, from the Caribbean and Latin America to South East Asia.
Christian fundamentalists have yet to carry out bomb attacks against the state. But among many other practices, they kill doctors who carry out abortions, they abduct children, and they threaten the social cohesion of emerging societies by advocating the outlawing of homosexuals.
Do we ignore the dangers inherent in hysterical fundamentalism in all faiths at our peril? Perhaps the time has come to ask why, in the age of technological breakthrough, religious fundamentalism is developing such a stranglehold on societies across the world.