Anthology

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Dinesh D'Suck on Michelle Obama

Of course, we were only waiting for the attacks on Michelle to begin. Dinesh D'Souza has taken his turn. In a typically horrible piece of writing, Mr. D'Souza--the Indian immigrant turned crazy right-wing American, and a homophobe who also blames the cultural left for causing 9/11 (!)--vilifies Michelle Obama and identifies her as the "real problem" of Senator Obama. But we all know that for sexist misogynists, the real problems somehow always have something to do with women!

D'Souza, characterizes Michelle as an "above-average but far-from-stellar performer" who never deserved to have gone to Princeton. And then, you knew it, he quotes from her already much-quoted college senior thesis! For a man who doesn't have a real job other than getting paid for spewing forth bullshit like this, D'Souza comes across as exactly the kind of person who would bother spending hours going through a 21 year old's paper until he finds a "typical" sentence with a couple of grammar mistakes. And voila! Mr. D'Souza declares his triumphalism as he proves once and for all the lack of intelligence of an inherently inferior being. Of course, what were we thinking? Did we forget, black people are not supposed to know good English! And we have Mr. BA-in-English to remind us of that.

But D'Souza's main contention is that Obama should be married to a strong woman like her, "a woman who clearly influences him and who stands to have public influence in her own right." The assertion, it seems, is that Obama can't control his wife. And a man who can't control his wife is the real horror in the eyes of misogynists.

Friday, June 27, 2008

CEO of Abble, Inc.

Am I the only only one who did not know that Steve Jobs is half Arab? His biological father was a Syrian immigrant dude. A cousin just happened to mention it as a random fun fact (adding that "no wonder he looks so Middle Eastern"). Here's a bit about his mythic background I found in a profile from The Observer:

The first unlikely player in the story is Abdulfattah John Jandali, from Syria, a political science professor who went to San Francisco. In 1955, his relationship with student Joanne Carole Schieble produced a son, whom she put up for adoption on condition that he be adopted by college graduates. A lawyer and his wife were selected, but decided at the last minute they actually wanted a girl. So, in the middle of the night, a call was made to would-be adopters Paul and Clara Jobs: 'We have an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?' Yes, they did. Only later did it emerge that Clara never graduated from college and Paul never graduated from high school. Schieble refused to sign the adoption papers but gave in a few months later when the working-class couple promised that the boy would one day go to college.

They kept their promise, at the cost of their life savings, only for 17-year-old Jobs to drop out after six months. He slept on friends' floors, returned Coke bottles to earn five cents so he could buy food and walked seven miles to town every Sunday to get one decent meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. 'However,' Jobs says, 'I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life.' ["The non-stop revolutionary," The Observer. Jan 29, 2006]

Thursday, June 26, 2008

It's Opposition to America they Oppose

"Putin is an oppressor--except when he oppresses something that the American mainstream media doesn't approve of either. Americans have proven that it's not oppression or censorship they oppose--it's opposition to America that they oppose."

Chief Editor of The eXile, on the American media's relative silence about the official crackdown on his newspaper. Quoted in "The End of the eXile?" (The Nation, July 7, 2008)

Friday, June 20, 2008

A Portrait of the Blogger as a Poor Man

During the course of a conversation after dinner somewhere in midtown Manhattan last weekend, a friend casually admitted that he has disposable income, and that he wouldn't mind paying more in taxes for the benefit of someone without health insurance. This was in response to a question posed by another friend, who is generally against paying higher taxes. While I remained quiet during much of this Saturday night banter, I thought to myself that I am in a fairly similar situation as the former friend, and although I'm usually eager to save as much as possible, I believe in higher taxes for the benefit of the community and country as a whole and of the poor in particular. I then wondered, however, why it was the case that my friend, the school teacher and I, the non-profit employee are the ones who worry about others and are willing to share our meager income with those caught in the structural violence of poverty. All this while some of our friends in finance and other profitable industries make many multiples of what we do, but seem less willing to part with a portion of their earnings.

Later that night, I returned downtown to an apartment around the corner from Wall Street where I was crashing in with a couple of other friends. One of them I had not seen yet, because he was at work all day (yes, even on a Saturday). I had already been asleep when he came back home, apparently at around 2:30am! The next morning, on Sunday, I finally got to say hi to him before he had to hurry back to work, and that was just past 10:30am. Such is the life of a recent college graduate at a major investment-banking firm. Worth noting, of course, that he probably earns more than what I might even after I acquire a PhD in about a decade, and possibly even after I achieve the coveted rank of full professor after another decade on tenure track. Even so, the woes of a starving scholar aside, I wondered if my friend is really being paid as much as he probably deserves. In all honesty, I don't think overworked analysts at investment banks receive a fair share of the profits raked in by partners and executives. The annual compensation for the CEO of my friend's firm ranks among the highest in the nation, and I'm talking about $50m+ per year.

It so happens that this same firm's much revered charitable division is a major donor to the organization that I work for. Despite the grandeur of the corporation's claims to philanthropic commitment, the truth is that the big fat checks they write to non-profits are still nothing compared to the stock options they issue to their big shot employees. And not to even bring up the question of tax breaks! By the time the money trickles down to the bottom of society, there's barely any left to be meaningful. Charity is not justice; unless the process of charity can negate itself, its being is dependent on the very inequalities it supposedly aims to resolve.

Sometimes during lunch breaks, I walk by Harvard Square and come across the poor homeless people begging from passers by outside the bank lobbies. I rarely have change to spare, but even if I do, I don't always give it away. I feel guilty, but also confused. I begin to wonder why I am the one who should feel so guilty.

And then I feel guilty for even thinking this way, for I really have so much to be grateful for.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Obama vs. Muslims: the Politics of Images

I received a forward this morning with an unfortunate news that won't bear too well with Muslims:

Two Muslim women at Barack Obama’s rally in Detroit on Monday were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women’s headscarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate.

The campaign has apologized to the women, both Obama supporters who said they felt betrayed by their treatment at the rally. ["Muslims barred from picture at Obama event," Politico, 6/18/08]

In the last few hours, the major news media have also begun to pick up the story. While I wasn't too surprised to read about this (it's politics, after all), I was nevertheless quite disturbed. I have spent a lot of time defending Obama's necessary pragmatism in debates with Muslim friends and family members who felt that the Senator wasn't taking the right stance against the "secret Muslim" smear (which would be to both clarify that he is not Muslim and to assert that there's nothing wrong with being one). But now it seems that the Obama campaign's obviously uneasy relationship with Islam has gone a bit haywire. While most Muslims do support Obama (heck, even my mom has been cheering for him from the other side of the world!), his campaign clearly doesn't want to be associated with us. It's understandable, but that doesn't make it right.

That brings us to the question of images. Ben Smith, who broke the news at Politico, states that "for Obama, the old-fashioned image-making contrasts with his promise to transcend identity politics and to embrace all elements of America." I actually don't think that this concern for appearance reveals anything hypocritical about Obama's campaign. If anything, Obama is all about images. Non-identity is still an identity: even if Obama transcends the politics of images, he is still playing with an image of non-images. I have believed in Obama the Prophet, but I'm careful not to be so delusional about Hope and Change.

Gary Younge, one of my favorite columnists, wrote this week about some of this tension:

There are symbols, and there is substance--the way things look, and the way things are. But in between there is the way things might be: a sense of possibility that image might precede content or even provide space for it to emerge. A leap of faith. Some wishful thinking. Such is the tension in the American left's response to Obama's candidacy. There are some--let's call them dreamers--who believe his nomination marks a paradigm shift in progressive politics in this country. And there are others--let's call them materialists--who dismiss the excitement surrounding his nomination as little more than an emotional distraction from what really matters: war, foreclosures, civil liberties, the Middle East, global warming. ["Obama and the Power of Symbols," The Nation, 6/12/08]

The question is: where do Muslims stand? Perhaps somewhere in between, I suggest.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Insiders Pretending to be Outsiders

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Corey Robin's lengthy article in last week's Nation, where he reviews three books on conservatism, including the one by famous "Mr. Conservative," Barry Goldwater. The main thrust of Robin's piece is to articulate the essential double bind of conservatism: a sense of entitlement as well as exclusion. This characterization is apt. I'm sure I'm not the only one to be so confounded by the remarkable comfort with which some conservatives claim victimhood, even as they fully enjoy the comforts of privilege. Here's some characteristic eloquence from Robin that made me giddy with recognition:

Reformers and radicals must convince the subordinated and disenfranchised that they have rights and power. Conservatives are different. They are aggrieved and entitled--aggrieved because entitled--and already convinced of the righteousness of their cause and the inevitability of its triumph. They can play victim and victor with a conviction and dexterity the subaltern can only imagine, making them formidable claimants on our allegiance and affection. Whether we are rich or poor or somewhere in between, the conservative is, as Hugo Young said of Maggie Thatcher, one of us.

But how do they convince us that we are one of them? By making privilege democratic and democracy aristocratic.

I guess victimhood is sexy. Robin also writes about the "puzzle" that is the neocons ("How did a group of bookish, mostly Jewish, ex-leftists from New York City come to help govern a nation that is Christian, anti-intellectual and hates New York City?"). But here's some more insightful verbiage from the conclusion to Robin's essay:

Ever since it emerged from the shadows of the French Revolution, conservatism has been a movement of insiders pretending to be outsiders. Who better to make the case that the insider is really an outsider than the outsider who has become an insider? Staffing the offices of reaction, parvenus and upstarts can argue, like no one else, for a modernized mass feudalism. Their very presence at the centers of power signals that privilege has indeed become democratic.

The full article is available online.

Monday, June 09, 2008

Miss Headscarf 2008

A friend shared this BBC news clip reporting on a hijab fashion contest being sponsored by Danmarks Radio, the Danish national broadcaster. The purpose, they state, is to show "cool Muslim women who often make up a very fashion-conscious and style-confident part of the Danish street scene." Browsing through the pictures on the official website, one cannot help but note the remarkable diversity of the headscarf donning contestants, which in itself shatters the monolithic image of the Muslim woman. The usually unseen but imagined object of the political discourse on hijab has been rendered visible. Interestingly, whereas beauty contests are generally regarded by many feminists as unhealthy practices that objectify women, it almost becomes in this case the very means of affirming these women's individuality. Which reminds us, therefore, that meaning is always relative.

But of course, the business is more complicated than that. This is still a process of "representation"--which is always a problématique, as the French would say. Perhaps the real question is: who has the power to represent? It isn't surprising then that the religious establishment doesn't appear too happy. The BBC report interviews a Danish Muslim scholar who asks, "would you ever see nuns in a beauty or fashon contest?" Local community leaders have asked Muslim women to preserve their modesty and not to participate in the contest. But Khadijah, a young woman also interviewed by the BBC report, wants to reclaim her agency and asserts: "it's about time that people and the media talk to us and not just about us all the time."

One thing is clear: Danmarks Radio has gotten exactly what it wanted, which was to garner attention as well as to spur debate on an issue; or, to put it another way, to use an already contentious issue to draw website traffic. They deserve props, however, for depicting the hijab as a reality on the streets of Denmark, thereby highlighting its acceptability (or so I think). The significance of this should be evident, at a time when groups are calling for a ban on the hijab altogether. This is in the wake of a recent government decision to ban judges from wearing headscarves or similar religious/political symbols. The pointlessness of the ban isn't lost on some, who've noted that there is currently no one in the Danish courts who would be affected by the ban. Then why all the fuss? Court President Torben Goldin is reported as saying that "the ban merely had good 'entertainment value'." One wonders if the Danish government has nothing better to work on. Meanwhile, the DPP (Danish People's Party) continues it's anti-Muslim campaign, which earlier included mass-producing a poster with this ridiculous image of a judge in a burka (and, err, with what looks like a man's hands!).

Perhaps the much-hyped decadence of the West is not in sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. It is in the fact that boredom has driven some of them to a politics of absurdity.

Sunday, June 08, 2008

Bengalisches Hölzchen

While looking up the word Streichhölzer on an online German-English dictionary, I came across the phrase bengalisches Hölzchen that was listed there as well. It apparently means a "Bengal match," which I've never heard of before. On further investigation, I came across this webpage where various people offered translations for bengalische Fackeln, meaning Bengal torches/flares. According to wiki, a Bengal match is apparently a "a firework producing a relatively long-burning, coloured flame." I wonder how these got to be named after Bengal.

Thursday, June 05, 2008

Rowling on Failure and Imagination

I have just returned from a commencement gathering at Harvard, where J.K. Rowling delivered a pretty remarkable address. As someone who has traversed the path from being a fan to critic of her Harry Potter works (and remains ambivalent), I really enjoyed listening to such an eloquent, inspiring and deeply moving speech--not least because of the gay wizard joke, her discussion of Amnesty International, her call for siding with the powerless in the world, and for her references to the responsibility of Americans in holding their government accountable. By talking not only about the importance of imagination but also about poverty and justice, she probably said the right things you could say to a group of people that includes some of the most privileged in society. The full text of the speech is available here.

Sunday, June 01, 2008

Sex and the Movie

The release this weekend of Sex and the City, the movie, has been the buzz across country, and anyone who has recently opened the news (on-line or off-) could not have avoided hearing about it. And so partly out of curiosity, when a couple of friends asked about going to the theater last night, I agreed to accompany without reservations.

Now, I'm not inherently averse to that less-than-serious genre of romantic comedy, not to say anything of the stuff known as "chick flix." But Sex and the City was an awful film. If it weren't based on a wildly popular TV show that ran for six seasons (I've only seen a few episodes occasionally), the movie would've certainly been a poor-quality no-name romantic comedy and not the box office hit that it has become--grossing over $55m this opening weekend. As you may have heard, for the premiere in NYC last week, there were last-minute posts on craigslist seeking tickets and willing to pay as much as $6,000. And of course there's the woman who spent $19,000 on eBay for what turned out to be a fraud. That kind of spending is perhaps condoned by the culture that produced, and is depicted in, Sex and the City--even as many women claim that SATC is merely fantasy, and not a reflection of their real desires to spend all the money they could on designer items. But more on that later.

The movie itself was less than mediocre: the plot was remarkably flimsy, the drama was sloppy, the acting lacked the power to convince, and there was barely any character development. Throughout much of it, I had to struggle to ignore the feeling that I was watching TV, and in this I couldn't agree more with New Yorker's Anthony Lane, who says that the film "was more like a TV show on steroids." Indeed, the movie felt like another episode of the show, except this time it was stretched to the big screen and to a painful length of 2 hours and 20 minutes (that's nearly 5 times the 30-minute TV allotment!).

I also particularly relate to a concluding remark in Lane's good and funny review: "I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist." Which brings us back to the question of money and cuture, or the money-culture, in Sex and the City. Regarding Carrie's $525 Manolo Blahnik shoe, I can only say that even my suits don't cost half as much! A fashion critic on the NYT addresses precisely the questions I have asked myself and others:

It’s easy to bash the show’s over-the-top materialism, but “Sex and the City” has never bothered to rationalize it, no matter how absurd or overpriced an item may be. (Nor has the show explained how a freelance writer could afford all those clothes.) It simply accepts that fashion is good and assumes the audience, just like Carrie, so badly wants to be a part of Vogue.

Not sure if that counts as artistic self-confidence or consumerist ideology masquerading as entertainment. The show has often struck me as ostensibly the business of three W's: wealthy white women. You don't have to go to the Third World to find women who barely relate to those in SATC, there are countless thousands in The City itself. In capitalist societies coded by hierarchies of class and culture, ridiculous questions like "who are you wearing" merely deconstruct. And then Carrie hires an assistant who happens to be African American (who shares a living-situation with 3 roommates but rents designer handbags!). Sometimes white normativity is so pervasive, that any effort to multiculturalise something makes it look rather silly. Incidentally, I was reminded of my critique of one of the Harry Potter films from several years ago.

As for the (undoubtedly complex) feminist interpretation of Sex and the City, I leave that to my feminist colleagues.