Filed under: Trivialities
Have I ever mentioned that the folks at KabobFest totally rock? And they’re hilarious. Especially when they illustrate and advise you on the thirteen kinds of Arab men you should never date. Check it out! Since this was on guys who live in the States, my long-time blog-friend Roba offers a follow-up guide to Arab men in the Arab world that you shouldn’t date.
Since everyone has been talking about the AIG bonuses, this post at a Nation blog draws on the legendary excesses of the Philippino First Lady Imelda Marcos to think about and question the culture of executive pay on Wall Street. When the revolutionary public had stormed the Marcos palace in ‘86, they found–among many, many other things–1,060 pairs of shoes.
What was so potent about those shoes? What did they symbolize? Gross inequality, corruption, the staggeringly brazen looting of public resources–for sure (all qualities also evident in the AIG bailout). But something else too was represented by that collection of ruby slippers, a kind of insane magic by which Imelda transformed herself into something more than human. She could never wear all those shoes. They were beyond utility or even fashion. They existed only to represent the idea of excess itself [my emphasis]
Ah, the sublime idea of excess itself! But instead of the becoming-more-than-human, I am actually more curious about what this may say about human nature itself. In any case, Kim would like us to think about what numbers can mean when it comes to the ridiculous millions that corporate executives receive in pay: “what kind of work could merit a $6.4 million bonus (what one AIG manager received)? What could a CEO do to deserve $25.4 million (the severance package that Liddy’s predecessor Martin Sullivan got when he left AIG, having lost 99 percent of the company’s market value during his tenure)?” No matter our understanding of the notorious complexity of today’s financial system, at some point these numbers cease to make much sense. Kim continues:
These are preposterous, abstract figures that have long since lost any relation to what even the most gluttonous among us might call “quality of life.” What the corporate elite seeks to preserve is not any explicable measure of work and worth, but rather the right to transcend with impunity any measure of value itself, for the right of kings to pin multi-million bonuses on princes as badges of relative privilege, for the right to hoard 1,060 pairs of shoes. (Richard Kim, “AIG and Imelda Marcos’ Shoes“)
The biggest lie that society tells us, especially societies appealing to the metaphor that has come to be called “the American Dream,” is that hard works pays: strive, and you will be rewarded accordingly. But like the old adage, that some men are more equal than others, the truth is: some hard work pays more than others.
Like, seriously: I hate Dershowitz so much, that I may not be able to help myself from cussing at him or something if I ever run into him in the neighborhood. We’ve all read or heard about his learned legal justifications of torture. Perhaps not surprisingly, he’s apparently spoken in defense of John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who’s in a bit of trouble for advising the Bush government on torture policy. Dershowitz thinks the school should only be concerned with Yoo’s academics. Wait, what? Yup, that’s right! Mr. Alan Dershowitz insisting on academic freedom: the same Dershowitz who instigated a political campaign to get another fellow academic denied tenure.
Here’s more on this, including a glimpse at Dershowitz’s views on torture. In one word, despicable.
This is a very short film on Gaza made by the animator of Waltz with Bashir (which I briefly mentioned before, but hope to talk about a bit more sometime, especially in light of a critical review that has been circulating recently).
The war on Gaza that marked the beginning of this year was a deeply traumatic moment in the lives of many of us, and affected me in ways that I may not have yet fully recovered from. If I have been relatively silent on the matter, that may have more to do with psychic repression, than with mere neglect. Of course, each of us experience the world in our own ways, even as we converge, and there’s no denial that a particular set of circumstances defined my particular experience of the war–of which I am still trying to make sense. But as I had confessed to a friend one night back in the middle of January, when the smokes were still suspended in the Gaza sky, I was feeling guilty for even being alive. How does one make sense of life, when life has torn to shreds any sense of justice that one may have grown up with? Which made me realize, that this maybe as much about coming-of-age as, say, empathy. It is as if we are still growing up, still coming to terms with a world we thought we knew, but apparently do not. Perhaps the utopia of peace that so many of us dream about and obsess over is no more than a nostalgia for a lost childhood innocence, to which we will obviously never return.
Yet we stil refuse to give up, on meaning. And are still trying to make sense of insensible wars. This, in fact, may be the very problem: that we are plagued by existential crises when the very existence of some people are denied, without negotiation–the very real people who die very real deaths, thanks to war in the age of mechanical destruction. Why them; why not us? I feel guilty to even be alive.
While I’m reading a bunch of dead white men debate on the nature of the historical event, thought I’d take a minute off to blog on the following interesting insight:
Television, by abolishing delay and placing the action before our eyes while its outcome is still uncertain, has at last robbed events of their historical character and projected them into the everyday life of large numbers of people. (Pierre Nora, “Le retour de l’Événement,” 1974)
The author cites the landing on the moon as the archetypal modern event. For us, of course, a more recent and striking example would be 9/11. Pierre Nora continues: “Now, moreover, events are transformed into spectacles. Is theatricality an inherent quality of so many of the conemporary events that become objects of pubic consumption, or is it live broadcasting that bestows an element of theatricality upon them?” The question is more than pertinent to the event of 9/11.
