Filed under: Política
Sometimes I think Tom Friedman is so ridiculous that I can’t even believe they pay him to write crap for the NYT. Take, for instance, this line from his latest op-ed: “Is Facebook to Iran’s Moderate Revolution what the mosque was to Iran’s Islamic Revolution?” Like, seriously: WTF? Firstly, 1979 was not an “Islamic” revolution: it was an Iranian revolution that got co-opted by the Islamists. Secondly, it was organized on the streets, not in the mosques. I hate when journalists can’t write without resorting to such pigeonholing platitudes.
Today at the bookstore, I came across a copy of André Aciman’s memoir, Out of Egypt, which reminded me that I should write up my critique of Aciman’s much-circulated recent op-ed in the New York Times: “The Exodus Obama Forgot to Mention.” When I first read the piece, I was quite surprised that a scholar of his standing would write something so unhistorical. But before I go on to explain my reaction, let me note that I do agree with his main message. It is indeed a shame that few of us know this history, that most young Egyptians today have no idea about the vibrant Jewish community that lived among them less than a century ago.
What Aciman forgot to mention is why or how, and under what historical circumstances most of the Middle East’s Jews fled their homelands or were (unjustly) expelled from there by the governments. Aciman writes: “Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.” This is a downright dishonest and inaccurate picture, if only because of the glaring absence of the one big word you would expect to see here: “Israel.” (more…)
Dan Mathewson, a scholar of religion, has published an incisive analysis on disparities between the media coverage of Dr. George Tiller’s murderer and that of the man who killed an army recuiter in Arkansas. Whereas in the case of the latter, the media has paid a lot of attention to his religious background as a convert to Islam, in the case of the former, the fact of the man’s zealous attachment to Christianity has been basically set aside as unimportant. Junaid Afeef makes the same point in his piece at altmuslim, and further asks: why has Dr. Tiller’s murderer not been charged with terrorism, even though his act seems to meet the legal definition. (more…)
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
“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]
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. (more…)
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.
