Quickly noted

Been real busy ignoring my work these last few weeks, so I haven't been able to pay enough attention to the Isreali Lobby piece (short version: yes most of the claims are a little exaggerated, but probably not enough to deserve such vitriol) or to whatever's going on in Paris.

But those schoolchildren learned a valuable lesson...

Reality TV has a body count.

Horn-rimmed, rose colored glasses

The blogosphere has been stepping to the wayback machine this week to play gotcha with quotes from the original Iraqi invasion, three years ago. (Hmm... guess which side turned out to be right?) My favorite is from David Brooks, 4 April 2003:

An Iraqi civilian in Najaf exulted, "Democracy! Whiskey! And Sexy!" giving the war its first great slogan.

Also the first time I've agreed with David Brooks: that really is a great slogan.

via Radosh

Human Rights Crisis?

Milosevic's death (or rather, his death prior to conviction) and the UN HRC problems (this article is vague, hopefully more will be out soon) are an interesting news pairing. Is there a crisis in human rights? I know very little about human rights theory, besides the fact that some in France (Benny-Levy? Furet? See, I know nothing) have criticized it as an inadequate basis for freedom and equality. The US also seems to be totally uninterested in supporting its enforcement, to the point where it doesn't really disturb a lot of Americans that we're breaking those rules. (To be fair, the BBC story doesn't say what the US objections are--maybe they want more sweeping reforms than others do?) This seems a fairly popular way to think about foreign policy from a non-realist perspective. Do we need another way? What are the alternatives?

One idea I'm toying with, and considering sharing with my students: Europe bases much of its postwar (or maybe post-cold war) self-image on being anti-genocide. Which is a fine thing to be, except that it has the annoying side effect of pissing off lots of Muslims, many of whom see their situation as comparable to what happened to Jewish Europe in 1940-45. I don't happen to agree with them, but to privilege genocidal oppression over versions of colonial and post-colonial oppression seems, shall we say, a little path dependent. Or to be less charitable: suspiciously convenient, from a European perspective.

The usual way this question gets raised is this: why does no-one rally to support Holocaust deniers like David Irving, but when it's a matter of anti-Muslim cartoons everyone jumps on board the free speech bandwagon? Andre Glucksmann says it's a matter of truth (the Holocaust was a fact) versus belief (Islam is merely a religion.) I think this is wrong: the idea of "the Holocaust" as a historical object is a construction that (if I'm right about Europe using it to ground its identity) is just as motivated by political and social reality as is the Muslim religion. I realize I need to be careful here: I don't doubt for a second that 6,000,000+ people died, nor that their deaths were willed by Nazi leaders, nor even that this was unprecedented and a crucial event in human history. I just question whether we can neatly separate that event as a genocide from the thousand other atrocities of the period or even now. Especially considering the Eastern European context, it's fair to say that there were other factors in play. It was genocide, but it wasn't JUST a genocide, and to pretend that's all it was is to let ourselves off to easily. "Never again" has become a sick joke at this point--let's be honest with ourselves.

I would prefer a lower bar for going after human rights abuses--Milosevic's trial would have been faster had people been less concerned with convincing everyone he was the reincarnation of Hitler and more concerned with pinning him with every one of his individual crimes. That would make the reconciliation process easier, probably. Tough in the case of Milosevic, who was less directly involved than Karadic and Mladic. I'll hold off dancing on Milosevic's grave and pray instead that they get those two.

Dammit!

Zizek has this theory (or buy it here) that the West wanted 9/11, that it was the fulfilment of an unconscious desire for the destruction of "the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe." We all wanted to wake up from the Matrix, basically. I had one of those "where were you" conversations about 9/11 a couple days ago--those few days right after there were awful, obviously, but I think they gave everyone the feeling that they were living in the real world for at least a little bit, and five years on that can make us a little nostalgic.

I say this because I'm trying to figure out what makes 24 a good show. One reason is that it brings up cultural issues in such a subtle way that you're not quite sure which side the show is on. For every bitchy mannish female boss, there's a douchebag President resorting to prayer as the last option in a hopeless situation. It should be shocking that a show about terrorism has not generated a single major protest in five years. I don't think this has anything to do with the quality of the show. It's just that no one can pin it down.

But what's the attraction of the show? It moves too fast to achieve anything more than superficial character development. And it sure as hell isn't a thoughtful examination of how one goes about stopping a terrorist plot. So it's basically counter-terrorism porn. But as with all porn, the viewer is not really sure which side they're on. Case in point: the most recent episode, in which (spoiler, but it was days ago, so get over it) CTU is the victim of a nerve gas attack. As with 9/11, the viewer is secretly rooting for the terrorists to succeed, as long as we (meaning the main characters) survive. How many faceless drones died without us giving a shit, before Edgar waddles in and supposedly makes us feel sympathy? The important part is not that we care that he's dead, but that Chloe now has an excuse to pull out her m-16. So the show is wish fulfilment in a different way: we WANT terrorist attacks mostly because it gives us justification for the fucked up things our government is doing.

Me, I'm still waiting for Jack to torture somebody who turns out to legitimately not know anything. Funny how he always turns out to be right, huh?

Vive la bourgeoisie!

Vive la bourgeoisie! Défense d'uriner
Originally uploaded by cicilief.

Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience.

T.W. Adorno

Spring break, and I'm disappearing

So far

create your own visited countries map

Civl war?

Very recent developments in Iraq are very bad, but there is probably a glimmer of hope in what news I've seen: the fact that Iraqis are stunned at the violence of the last few days probably means we won't see this continuously. There may be further outbreaks of this sort or worse, but hopefully they'll be infrequent.

I think now is the time to ask a tough question: at what point should we say Iraq has crossed the line from "sectarian violence" into "civil war"? What are the criteria that separate the two? On first reflection, a civil war seems to require (at least) two sides with competing claims to legitimate rule over a certain territory, but this seems unlikely in a time and place where the nation state looks very different than it did in (for example) 19th C America. Neither terrorist organizations nor fundamentalist Islamists--and I'm told there's an overlap there--seem to be interested in collecting taxes or providing police service. So let's come up with a broader definition of civil war, in order to fully reflect the violence of the situation if and when the time comes.

I propose this: we can call it a civil war when bombings and disruptions such as this are not resolved in any way before the next one occurs, so that the events run together enough to be considered one large event. To be more precise, this will occur when the period between major violent events is shorter than the news cycle. There will be at least two objections to this definition. First, that the length of a news cycle is undefined. I agree, but I don't mind leaving this as a subjective definition, open to reasonable interpretations. As a rule of thumb, let's remember that the Cheney shotgun story, which was drawn out longer than necessary because of a sloppy media strategy, lasted a little under a week. The second objection will be that this defines the term on the basis of our Western perception of events rather than that of the Iraqis, who would obviously be most affected by this hypothetical war. I don't really have a problem with this. The closer you get to the ground, the less it matters what you call it. If you die as a result of sectarian violence, you're just as dead as if you die in a civil war, and your family is just as devestated. It's only as you move away from the events that names become important. If we have a good idea what Civil War is, we'll have a better idea when to admit failure and change strategies.

That is, if anyone can think up something good.

Enough of that

One of my biggest disappointments was being to big to fit into Japanese clothing. My mother used to have a sweatshirt featuring the great Larry Biod, and I got nothing. Well, now my prayers are answered.

Le Canard Enchainé shows 'em how it's done

Anti-clericalism can be funny and non-racist.

What do you expect from a Yankees fan?

Muslim-baiting vs. violent fundamentalism? A pox on both your houses. Free speech is an important value, but sometimes silence is more honest. It's very hard to say anything in this matter without taking sides, and I don't want to do that.

But I'll say one thing: U.S. newspapers should run the cartoons now. They're legitimate news items. Not running them shows a lack of respect for the people of the Islamic world, since it assumes they can't tell news from racist provocation.

Click on the picture for smart commentary from Der Spiegel.

New Acquisitions

I was just going to pay rent and deposit my stipend check, but the used book stores sucked me in. It's an addiction, I swear.

Richard Farina, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me. So far I haven't gotten past Pynchon's intro; their Cornell seems to be a very different place than mine was.

Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity.

Janet Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944-1965. I love Paris Was Yesterday. This one's out of my period, but I'm sure it will be just as much fun.

Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes. I'm told it's weirder than Murakami. I'm not a huge fan of Murakami, but weird is good.

Montaigne, Essays. It wasn't until I left the shop that I remembered I was planning on buying these in French.

Where can I find one of those?

From the Times:

Mr. Meloy, 30, has the look of a confident, unhurried graduate student.

2006 in Bowl Games

The year of the failed lateral and the missed field goal. Just goes to show that failure is more interesting than success. The winners: all the losers.

New Pornographers

Music sounds different on the radio. Use It is way too complex rhythmically to work with anything less than complete attention and passable sound quality. Which makes me wonder why that's the one that's getting airplay. Sing me Spanish Techno!

Not a top ten

Totally predictable list of music I didn't hate this year:

Architecture in Helsinki, In Case We Die. Along with Deerhoof, I think AiH is a great example of the resurgence of pop music. Challenging but catchy as all hell, both of them. Just goes to show that 69 Love Songs is the most important record of the decade, the way Nevermind and Loveless were for the 90's.

Bloc Party, Silent Alarm. Backlash-proof. Yeah it's another Gang of Four ripoff, but it sounds good, y'know?

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Yeah.

Edan, Beauty and the Beat. Yes I'm white. Why do you ask?

Feist "Mushaboom," Coralie Clement "Bye Bye Beauté," Keren Ann "Chelsea Burns." I'm not sure it's fair to lump these three together. I like them in very small doses, but these are all great songs convincingly performed. Fragile and soft is the new riot grrl.

Four Tet "Joy." Less beautiful than "My Angel Rocks Me Back and Forth. "

The Kills, No Wow. I didn't listen to this enough, but I have no doubt that it'll hold up, so I can still listen to it next year. Shows the Yeah Yeah Yeahs how it's done.

Metric, "Monster Hospital" and Ladytron, "Destroy Everything You Touch." The best political songs are the ones that don't get noticed as political songs. "When the President Talks to God" sucks. M.I.A. is still awesome, though. "Rich Man's War," by Steve Earle too.

Of Montreal, "The Party's Crashing Us Now." I have more songs and fewer albums on this list than I would have had last year, because have an iPod now. Put them in with AiH and Deerhoof as quirky pop.

New Pornographers "Bleeding Heart Show." I don't think the album's great, but this song is. Less pop than the first two albums. It seems like they're starting to take themselves seriously, which normally I'd say that's a bad thing, but here it works.

Nouvelle Vague, s/t. This is how songs get canonized. Right on the border between a novelty record and a standards album.

Stars, Set Yourself On Fire. "I am trying to say what I wanted to say without having to say I love you." What kind of self-respecing neurotic can't identify with that?

Sleater-Kinney, The Woods. Are they turning into hippies? I still like Call the Doctor and Dig Me Out more, but this is good. I'm imagining stoned teenagers in the seventies listening to Zeppelin and Deep Purple and saying "man, this just ROCKS," and now I know exactly what they meant. In those "music genome" projects that people are working on right now, do you suppose there's a category for how much something "rocks"? This one would be at 11, obviously.

Oh, we know you're listening

Authors reading what bloggers have to say about them. "Seems narcissistic" indeed.

The mistake Ms. Paul (it's the Times, after all) makes is that we really care about people who write books. Lots of us are people who write books, or will one day write books. And still we don't care. We're just writing stuff to see ourselves in print.

I'm cool, I swear!

Because I bought Europe Central before it won. I didn't read it before it won, but that's because it's like a thousand pages long.

That counts, right?

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

I had Thanksgiving dinner with a former president of Providence College, who now teaches one course, on contemporary ethical issues. We didn't have much of a conversation about any of those issues, partly because I don't know much about ethics and partly because he quickly derails any conversational give-and-take into a story. He's one of those older men who have an endless supply of stories to tell, and tell them fairly well, and jump at any slight excuse to tell them. The problem is the stories themselves aren't that great, and have to do mostly with law suits the college won, and students who come to class in baseball caps. John Heineman was like that too.

My point? None really, except that after reading Never Let Me Golast week, I've been thinking about contemporary ethical issues.

I'm not sure how much Ishiguro intended this novel to be part of the debate over cloning issues, and how much he simply wanted to write one of those poignant, frustrated love stories that he seems so fond of, which just happens to take place in a slightly alternate reality. The title is taken from a touching, intimate scene in the novel that has nothing to do with cloning at all, so it suggests that the balance is meant to be towards the latter. But remember that Remains of the Day used a seemingly apolitical love story to comment on democracy and fascism, themes which very rarely popped up explicitly, and bore very little of the plot's weight. Same here.

I don't mean to say that this is an anti-cloning novel, because despite the obvious inhumanity of the society depicted, it isn't. But it's not really a love story either. It's a story about how acceptable certain horrific injustices can feel. Ishiguro reveals the details of the cloning scheme slowly, which emphasizes the fact that none of this seems particularly shocking to the characters. It does to us, of course, but there is no preaching about the evils of cloning--to us, as they are to themselves, the characters are fully human and individual. The effect could just as well be to remind that there are real-world injustices which are nearly as horrifying, and which we block out the best we can.

The controlled, slow reveal has fooled some people into thinking of it as a mystery story, but there's really not much suspense. Unfortunately there is one of those climactic scenes in which all is revealed, a la Miss Marple, and in my opinion this is the least successful passage. But it's ambiguous and unsatisfying enough to not cheapen the experience of the book up to that point.

It's a bit to easy to find a "live life to the fullest" message for my taste. I know, it's probably good advice. But if I were living life to the fullest, I probably wouldn't have had time to read the novel, now would I?