She’s apparently “cut off from social life” and “deprived of identity,” he said. With all due respect, Monsieur President, there’s a better way to critique a cultural practice than totally discounting the agency of its practitioners. At the very least, please don’t talk shit about people you don’t know.
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.
“What a man!” That was the concluding remark of a blonde German reporter named Judith Bonesky in her enthusiastic account of an encounter with Obama at the Berlin Ritz Carlton, where she went to stalk him in the hotel gym. Yeah, no kidding. Apparently, “he didn’t even sweat!”
Everyone has been writing about Obama’s trip to Germany, where over 200,000 people showed up to hail the prophet. Some crush, they have. In the words of a young man interviewed by NYT’s Berlin correspondent: “He’s more like a rockstar, I think.”
“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]
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.
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.
The senior project of an art major at Yale has waged a storm of controversy across the nation. Chances are, you too (will) find it pretty shocking and/or disgusting. Surprisingly, I didn’t–but we can discuss that later.
For now, I thought I’d offer my take on the Shvarts affair. Firstly, if you aren’t yet aware of the “facts” or details, here’s the YDN article that made the story public three days ago: “For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse.” A follow-up article reports the University’s official statement on the matter, claiming that Aliza Shvarts did not actually do all that stuff. The next day, Shvarts responded with an explanation, reasserting that she did do it. The YDN reported further that the University claims that Shvarts told them she would deny it if the University made her “confession” public. But Shvarts claims that the University is lying to save its reputation.
There’s a reason why I’m making this a he-said she-said story, rather than going into the graphic details (which you can learn anyway from the internet: including any of 400+ news items or 1,900+ blog posts!). I think the key issue here is epistemological: how/do we know whether she did or did not do the inseminations/abortions she claims she did. More importantly, does that even matter? I don’t think so. (more…)
That, is the title of a recent article on Wilders’s overly hyped film by Bengali-American lawyer Moushumi Khan, who draws attention to the dialectics of Islamist extremism and Islamophobia:
Watching the entire 15 minutes exposes an uncanny similarity between Wilders’ inflammatory rhetoric and that of fiery preachers caught on tape. Each mirrors the other’s intolerance and blanket censure. Neither leaves room for dialogue or debate. Each assumes the sanctity of their message and shares tactics of incitement with the other. Wilders is as reactionary as those he condemns. (“Geert Gone Wild,” Common Ground News Service)
Khan argues that if the real issue is Muslim immigrants in Europe, as Wilders himself insists, then the problem is not their religion per se. “The more Muslims assert their rights of citizenship, the more the boundaries of European liberalism are tested.” (more…)
Another terrorist attack, when the painful memory of the Blackwater murders of September 16 has not even faded.
