The world according to the blue collar migrant

The words "migrant" and "workers" evoke in our minds, berry pickers and meat packers who cross America's south western borders by legal or illegal means, to make seasonal living in minimum wage conditions.

However, when we use "blue collar" and "migrant worker" together, we come up with a near-empty canvas, because in the history of American labor, blue collar workers have typically been members of a settled community of residents, a local, stable pool of high-school graduates, from whom a Ford, GM or 3M type corporations draw to employ in their factories.

But in a economy that has been affected by globalization, many blue collar workers find themselves migrating from their home states to find jobs elsewhere, to another state, where they live like migrants, i.e. as overnighters with no stable housing or communities available to provide a supportive structure.

Blue collar migrant workers are the subject matter of a new riveting film called The Overnighters. It's a Fast Food Nation gone native.

The overnighters in this case are workers who flock to North Dakota which has been experiencing an oil boom for the last few years, if only because oil is fossil fuel and is not a fungible goods. But as news report after news report has documented, the oil-boon is proving to be a short and long term curse for North Dakota. 

Workers have migrated from all over the country to earn a livelihood and they have been single males with broken families, very little education and some, appallingly, have criminal backgrounds. Furthermore, cities in North Dakota have not planned ahead of time to provide secure housing for the migrant workers, and as the film tells us, many of them end up experiencing homelessness.

The central character of The Overnighters is a local padre who provides shelter to the migrants and earn the locals' displeasure in the process.

Prophets of peace

On the heels of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded respectively to Pakistan's Malala Yousufzahi and India's Kailash Satyarthi, both of whom work for the liberation of children from various kinds of exploitation (labor and sexual): Three excellent films by documentarian Errol Morris on Liberian Leymah Gbowee, winner (jointly) of the 2013 Peace Prize, Bob Geldof, the musician who preceded Bono in raising billions for food security in Africa, and Lech Walesa, Polish electrician, labor organizer and leader of Poland's famous union, Solidarity, and winner of the 1983 Peace Prize. 

Three cheers to the principles of peace and non-violence.

Technology novels

The ten top technology novels as listed by PC Magazine.

And this is my shortest blog on record.

Global literature

It used to be that the provenance of literature, especially that of the novel, was the nation.

I may sound a tad anachronistic, but I'd definitely buy into Ian Watt's (in his 1957 book, The Rise of the Novel) thesis that the novel "rose" along with the political strengthening of the nation and in some ways contributed to the myth of the nation.

But today the word transnational is sprouting like weed in our discourses of literary genre, as much as it is pervasive in the corporate parlance. We have the massive transnational corporations whose markets brook no national boundaries.

Novels too, or their provenance rather, are transcending nations in a global age. If the nation was the locus of power in the traditional novel, then what is the corresponding loci of power in global fiction? The world?

Perhaps. In a majority of 21st novels whose provenance spans the globe, one sees another major locus of power--technology. Global novels are typically starting to be concerned about the rise of technological power, a power that has no specific geographical habitus but has a borderless network.

Take for instance Dave Eggers' The Circle; the protagonist pits herself against the might of the global giant Google.

In Spark, John Twelve Hawks' hero is a global assassin and is cast in the mold of an artificial intelligence though he has a body and the form of a fully functional human being. He resembles AI in the sense that he is amoral. As the novel unfolds, the assassin begins to lose his amorality, which signals his return to humanity.

Increasingly, the provenance of the global novel then is technology and the hegemonic rule of the same.

Is the business of the 21st century novel primarily to challenge this hegemonic assertion?

Capital in the 19th century

I had a hunch that slavery was central to the United States' economic development in the early days of capitalism, and that the U.S. became a powerful economic force in the world because so much was produced--cotton and tobacco--on the back of free labor.

We can't imagine the idea of free labor anymore, neither can we imagine the conception of a fellow human as property owned by another as just another institutionalized way of being.

Edward Baptist's new book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, reminds American readers of the unpleasant truth of the history of the rise of American capitalism.

"The idea", writes Baptist, a native of North Carolina, a state whose past is rife with the brutality of the plantation economy, "that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the U.S. powerful and rich is not an idea that people are necessarily happy to hear. Yet it is the truth."

Regarding the general perception that African Americans passively accepted their status as slaves and didn't actively resist the condition of enslavement, Baptist says:

Historians have spent a lot of time talking about whether African Americans resisted. Resistance acquires a different look in forced migrations, where survival is a kind of resistance in finding ways to stand in solidarity with each other and to write stories about themselves to say: This is crime.

Can scholars be stylish?

They are stylish in their choice of cars (Prius) and coffee, and more often than not, in their sartorial selections, but can they write with the grace, verve, and style of a Joan Didion (not a Marilyn Robinson, a self-confessed disdainer of the cult of articulacy)? 

Harvard cognitive scientist and popular science writer, Steven Pinker asks this question in a recent criticism of obtuse writing in academia.

The big steal I got out of Pinker's essay is a reference to a book:

Sword invented the term "zombie nouns" in her funny critique of excessive nominalizations in academic prose.

I intend to use Sword's book on stylish academic prose as a companion piece of the other book on style I adore:

I'd need to stick this one into my harem of books on style and academic prose too!

The vanishing of the "soul" under neuroscience

I had known the name "Crick" to be associated with "Watson" because when we studied biology in high school, we got acquainted with the structure of the human DNA as discovered by "Watson and Crick."

I had the image of a Siamese twin attached at the waist.

That "Crick" had a separate identity of his own and composed an astounding, book called The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search For the Soul was unknown to be, till it was referenced in the illuminating NYT Opinion piece by Erik Parens, an expert in bioethics. 

Parens is appreciative of Cricks scientific approach to an understanding of what it means to be human, but is critical of the one-sidedness of the approach as well.

Published in 1994, Crick's book is evidently on the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy (if "soul" is believed to be the province of philosophy).

Raised in Christianity and the philosophy that we call Platonic, Crick was taught about the impermanence of the body and the permanence and ergo superiority of the soul. The soul, preaches the Platonic Christian admixture, is "real", i.e. more "real" than the body, which is but an illusory placeholder for the soul. Moreover, the soul is capable of reason and freewill on its own.

The scientist in Francis Crick revolted against this notion of the body as illusory and unreal container of the soul, the real seat of our humanity. 

In The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick looked at the body/soul dichotomy through the lens of neuroscience and wrote of the human subject:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Paren interprets Crick's reduction of the human subject into a well nigh object of atomic and subatomic parts:

“You” think that you are something special, a subject who experiences joys and sorrows, memories, ambitions, a sense of identity and a free will. But that, Crick wants to inform you, is an illusion. “You” are an object. “You” are your body, a collection of nerve cells, albeit enmeshed amidst many other kinds of cells.

Is book banning a covert form of book burning?

In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, books are burned with impunity by the unnamed government of an unnamed nation of the year 2053. 

Discerning readers were quick to see the ghost of totalitarianism in the novel; the Nazis were adept at burning books because books, the repository of ideas and dissidence, were the single biggest threat to Nazi authority.

What ghost of which past are revived in the eyes of our collective historical consciousness (if 21st century Americans have any), when books are banned? Banning, as I see it, is a covert form of burning, just as minimum wage labor in a society with hard core capitalistic principles, is a covert form of slavery.

Books, especially novels, are banished with regularity from k-12 curricula in the United States with mind-numbing regularity. Often times school libraries are asked to "remove" certain books from their shelves. 

A brilliant librarian once made a counter library, hidden from the view of the public, of banned books.

Last week of September this year is the banned books week when we remember this most ignominious of all anti-social and anti-intellectual activities undertaken by school boards across the nation. However, the recent case of book banning was not undertaken by school authorities but by some of the parents and grandparents of kids attending Highland Park schools in the affluent suburb of Dallas, Texas.

Seeds of Nazism/totalitarianism may be embedded not only in governments but also in the general public. 

From my metaphorical observation deck, upon which I perch myself and try to observe society through the mist of half-knowledge and half-truths that filter down to me through the media, I see the emergence of a very tyrannical American public who impose their narrow world views on everything, ranging from foreign policy to family and education, down to how to best care for the self.

Parents and grandparents of children who attend institutions of education for the relatively well-off, whether they be P.S.'s or private schools, are a particularly egregious group in this regard. They have a conviction of what's "good" and what's "bad" for the intellectual nurturing of their wards. 

Grandparents are worse off than the parents, as they are retirees, taking care of their grandkids because the grandkids' parents have divorced, leaving their children behind to be raised by their parents who have the house and the money. As retirees, they have too much time on their hands to meddle into the curriculum choices of the schools their grandkids attend.

The seven books that the consortium of parents and grandparents want the Highland Park school district to erase from their curriculum are as follows:

I know why some of the books may stir controversy in the placid moral and intellectual universes of the so-called children, whom the parents and grandparents are trying to raise in a sanitized world, free of the germs of inconvenient truths of society.

Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is bound to get the boot with its commingling of purity and prostitution (two sides of the same coin, the second P being more intellectually honest than the first). Which Dallas mind will see the fun in that?

As for Toni Morrison, almost everything she writes is banned from the intellectual diet of American children. Why? Oh, because she has painted a cosmos of slavery where there are no chirpy birds or bespectacled cutsie Harry Potters to come to the rescue of folks who are mindlessly brutalized and rendered unto property. 

No searing portrayal of American poverty will sell in the heartland of unfettered capitalism--Texas. No critique of capitalism will be brooked. So a book on the invisibility of the American poor (too redolent of the invisibility of the blacks before civil rights) will be unpleasant to say the least.

If words like "absolute truth" and "half-Indian" show up in the title itself, even if the title is of a book by Sherman Alexie (a "half-Indian" himself), it's bound to appeal to the imagination of Texan grandparents.

The dog book by Gareth Stein is a mystifying selection in the ban bucket: Apparently, the canine perspective is celebrated when it shows up through the scrim of Disney. Otherwise, it's bad.

Jeannette Walls is brutally honest about the perils of growing up a girl in working class America, so off goes her memoir into the burning pyre.

John Greene? How can this fella who writes young adult romance and who has worked hard over the years through social media and what not, to build a huge fan base of swooning young adults, offend? The plot of some of his novels can be morbid, but offensive?

But overall, the books were banned for having too much sex and such other social taboos in them. Sounds believable? 

I have a sneaky feeling that the books were banned/burnt because they have the capacity to stir a moral fibre of the sleepwalking American youth. Thus they are dangerous.   

Of quantum physics and the heart of darkness

Sir Francis Bacon, the Renaissance Englishman who is credited with the art of a post-Aristotelian classification of knowledge into fields and disciplines, once said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province".

He had meant that to improve the human condition (an endeavor described by Bacon as his "moderate civil ends") one had to subject everything to intellectual scrutiny.

On the one hand, by declaring "all knowledge" to be one's "province", Francis Bacon had opened up to the lay person, the "generalist", as it were, such hermetic bodies of knowledge as the sciences (back then metaphysics and alchemy with a sprinkling of nascent physics); on the other, he had exposed specialized knowledge to the hazard of being dragged out of context and circulated in a half-baked way in general human discourse.

For instance, as Professors of Philosophy and Physics respectively, at Stony brook University, Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber, say, the use of scientific terminologies, like "quantum", pervades general cultural discourses in today's day and age. Non-scientists appropriate scientific words and adapt them to their local cultural chit chat.

The writers, especially, the physics half of the writing duo, I believe, may harbor an ambivalent attitude to such free uprooting of words from their scientific terrains and re implanting them in non-scientific one's. They may interpret the appropriation as a misappropriation.

Thus when Lady Gaga contrasts her notion of the fragility of memory in one of her music videos with the uniqueness of the "atoms and particles in quantum physics," the physicist may be peeved to counter that Lady Gaga's referencing is "inapt" because, "in quantum physics, atoms and particles, unlike memories, can lose their individuality, for any two of the same kind cannot be distinguished from each other." 

The philosopher, however, would rationalize the "inapt" use of scientific terms by the non-scientific community as inevitable:

Every major scientific development has served this function, delivering a stock of new tools for describing aspects of human life. Newtonian mechanics offered novel images of causality and attraction; evolutionary theory gave us ways of discussing survival and fitness.

Besides, as the philosopher would add,

Nothing is intrinsically wrong with applying scientific language metaphorically to human experience. Metaphors are valuable when our experiences are enigmatic or difficult to capture, when existing words don’t fit the situation at hand. Even the incorrect use of technical terms can meaningfully express what we intuit but cannot otherwise say.

The philosopher would point to the perfect marriage of imperfect use of science in the service of the perfect expression of human experience that like physical phenomena, is always innately complex.

But what if the "knowledge" thus appropriated in the Baconian spirit of free-spiritedness, is not from the discipline of science, but from the discipline of the humanities?

I would think that there would be no one to defend or attack the usages, and a deafening neutrality or indifference would ensue.

For, unlike the sciences, the humanities, particularly literature and art, have somehow been perceived in cultures worldwide as everybody's province, including those of scientists and economists (consider the use of literary texts as springboard to launch a treatise on the 21st century global economy in Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century).

It's as though nobody could be bothered to fact check the use and/or abuse of literary references in the non-literary discourses of our cultures, because the humanities is seen since the time of Plato as a flaccid placeholder for everything and anybody can put anything they want in it or take out anything they want out of it, without fear of being rapped on the knuckles for decontextualizing.

While the Stony brook professors pointed out the plusses and minuses of living in a culture "awash in references to quantum leaps, parallel worlds and the uncertainty principle" (including, President Obama's use of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle"), there has been no such discussion of the plusses and minuses of President Barack Obama's reference to the contraption of Islamic fundamentalism called ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), as the "heart of darkness."

While a loose use of the word "quantum" can do some damage to our understanding of it by being propagated as an imprecise concept, a loose use of the core of one of the Western world's most paradigm-shifting of novels, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, won't raise an eyebrow because we assume the descriptor to have no precise historical or geographical province.

Literature is imprecise and cloudy, a cipher, as Plato would have put it--a world of representations not facts, that contribute to the battening of our false consciousnesses anyway.

Yet, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness published in 1899, at the height of European material and territorial exploitation of Africa, is a potent historical document, with a precise geographical referent, despite the metaphorical resonance of the title.

The referent, if one reads the novel closely enough, is so not Africa; it's Europe, or the heart of Europe as signified in the novel itself by the river Thames, and more specifically, Belgium, which is not named but on whose brutal history of colonial rule in the Congo, the novel's idea is based.

Paradigm-shifting literature is a literature of dissent; it opens people's eyes to that which remains hidden by the manipulation of mainstream politics. Today we associate the heart of darkness with anything that is obviously barbaric, but back then Conrad would have liked the reader to see the heart of barbarism in what conventional wisdom took to be the heart of civilization--Europe.

Mahatma Gandhi understood this ironic transposition (I'm not saying that he read Conrad's Heart of Darkness) when he remarked that the "idea" of the "West" is "great". 

In the Heart of Darkness Mr. Kurtz is the European "white" man who turns dark in his soul; it may be simplistic to think that Africa corrupts Kurtz; Conrad says pretty clearly, that all of Europe went into the making of Kurtz.

No one expects the President of the United States, even someone as erudite and intellectually discerning as Barack Obama, to particularize the reference to reflect what Joseph Conrad originally meant (all of Western bungling has gone into the making of the ISIS), but someone ought to say something about the usage of a literary term that's gone so far from its roots as not to be recognized as originating from the Conradian province.

Literary terms, I'm sad to say, has become a spin-off of spin-offs with no record-keeping of when the spin-off began. Today, art terms suffer the same fate as literary one's; the pilfering of the term "surreal" to mean anything that's is beyond rational explanation or merely strange, is too disturbing to contemplate.

The humanities in this sense has dwindled to the status of a temple prostitute, the (in(famous) and sexually exploited temple-women of ancient India whom the whole village had sexual access to, and on whom any male could lay claim during the sexual act.

I mean to say that like the temple prostitute, literature has become communal property with no distinct identity of its own like the sciences have.

Jane Eyre: Know thy context or be conned by the text

I noticed that the newest film adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has been rated PG-13 for its “chaste passion” and “discreet violence”.

Additionally, Jane is marketed as a "mousy governess" on the poster.

I understand the commingling of passion with chastity—for the heroine, Jane, is an embodiment of chastity (i.e. she will be kissed by nor open her legs to anybody) which tempers the passion she develops over time for her beau, the Earl of Rochester. 

What I don’t quite get is the reference to the “discreet violence”. Does this refer to the burning alive of Bertha Mason, Rochester’s West Indian wife, who is neglected by her husband once he brings her over to England? He enjoys her estate, gets rich off her, and then conveniently decides that she is mad and confines her to the attic of her house.

If the quarantining and subsequent death of Bertha Mason is emblematic of violence that's "discreet", then the whole history of colonial violence, the substructure, upon which the superstructure of 19th century British prosperity lay, is discreet. 

But was this violence inflicted discreetly? Hell no; it was as overtly inflicted as is the modern day violence of a Ray Rice on his fiancee. The choice of the adjective "discreet" could be attributed to the race of the colonial master vis-a-vis the race of the servant subjugated by the former with impunity, back in those days. 

Bertha Mason’s treatment, we know today, is a direct consequence of her race—she was black. 

In the novel, Bertha hardly speaks; she is never seen. Only when the Rochester abode (which is refurbished with wealth from Mason's ancestral sugarcane plantation in Antigua) is up in flames, do we know that the madwoman in the attic is responsible for the arson.

Once the context is read into the novel, the violence done to Bertha hardly remains “discreet”.

Oh, and Jane can by no means be described as "mousy" (the film's poster sums up Jane's journey as a journey of increasing self-confidence). Her reticence is not a sign of her feminine diffidence; it's a pre-Victorian virtue, a virtue that would have been commendable in a young woman back then.

Context matters, else Jane Eyre would belong to the same category of fiction as The Nanny Diaries.

Attaining political nirvana through Moditva

I'd like to grab a copy of this book, called Moditva. The book, conceptualized and executed by the ruling party of India, the BJP, has all the clever slogans used by Narendra Modi since his election campaign.

Just as Russian President Vladimir Putin has successfully manipulated words and messages to make his territorial designs on neighboring sovereign nations look normal, justified, even, Narendra Modi, the Indian Premier, has been able to build a fabulous fan base with his wily aphorisms and alliterative mantras.

The Nazis had historically perfected the art of the effective political speech so as to hold almost an entire nation of exemplary Germans in its thrall. However, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, one hears of the virtue of the alliteratively-delivered mantras that moves into the human brain by dulling it down into an ideal, non-critical receiver of messages. Caesar's nemesis Anthony was smart but he desisted from giving smart speeches to the public, as smart speeches might just trigger off the discerning nerves in the human neurocircuitry.

I am hoping there is progress from Moditva to Modisatva before Modi leaves office.

Some of the best alliterative slogans from Narendra Modi are, "Toilets befor temples" and "Development over deity." He has gone a long way to bolster his secular credentials to erase the taint of the Gujarat riots of 2002 under his stewardship.

Migration

Somebody, I believe it's Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul, who had described the history of the world to be the history of migration.

Some facts of migration published by the Guardian validates the above viewpoint:

Migrants would constitute the world's fifth most populous country.

■ Number of international migrants has increased from around 150 million people in 2002 to 214 milllion.

■ One out of every 33 persons in the world is a migrant.

■ Countries with a high percentage of migrants include Qatar (87%), United Arab Emirates (70%), Singapore (41%), and Saudi Arabia (28%).

■ Countries with a small percentage of migrants include Turkey (1.9%), Japan (1.7%), India (0.4%), Nigeria (0.22%) and Indonesia (0.1%).

■ In 2012, according to the European commission's Eurostat, there were an estimated 1.7 million immigrants to the EU 27 from outside countries.

Parsing the facts of migration and combining them with the turgid history of immigration in nations like Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia, I figure that what's migration to us, in the liberal hemisphere, is slavery in these nations with a "high percentage" of migrants. For all three nations have a sorry track record of luring outsiders just to exploit their labor, free and/or cheap. Already there is hell raised by the U.N.'s Human Rights Watch Commission about the plight of Nepali workers in Qatar, who've helped built the mammoth soccer stadium without getting a penny.

Again, India, with a small percentage of migrants loses out on the opportunity to become a viscerally diverse nation. India's much touted "diversity" is pretty fake, and is largely mediated through consumption. Instead of savoring Mexican food from the restaurants of real Mexican migrants, Indians are limited to eating exotic Mexican fare cooked by Punjabi chefs in fancy Gurgaon restaurants with silly names like "Salsa Salsaa". 

As for Japan, lack of migrants are causing serious labor shortages.

Turkey is only lately playing host to thousands of Syrian refugees; but how are they treating their unfortunate neighbors, displaced by a hideous civil war? Older Turkish males are marrying young Syrian girls of ages ranging from 13 to 20 as their third and fourth wives, literally abducting them into their insidious harems.

Indonesia could do with some infusion of non-Indonesian blood; they missed out on raising a generation of little Obamas because Balinese boys and girls taunted boy Obama as a "blackie" when he went to school in Bali.

Nobody would think twice of migrating to Nigeria barring the Chinese, who are said to be engaged in the nefarious business of land grabbing in the continent of Africa.

I am all for migration; I cannot imagine the dynamism of human history without it. Homogeneity is anti-evolutionary.

Global time of modernity triumphs over "Hindustan" time

HMT watches, marketed throughout my childhood with the jingle, "If you have the inclination, we have the time," will no longer adorn the wrists of Indians.

Hindustan Machine Tools, one of India's largest public sector undertakings (PSU's, an acronym, which the public sector bashers of India had nicknamed "poshu", meaning "beast" in Bengali, were anathema to many in Socialist India because of their under-productivity and inefficiency) has closed shop, finally.

Indian Premier Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurated HMT in collaboration with the Japanese multinational, Citizen, in 1964. Nehru's objective was to supply every Indian worker with a wrist watch, so she/he (mostly he) would value time, understand the importance of being on time and speedy accomplishment of tasks. A favorite quip of Nehru's was "Talk less, work more". HMT, along with other massive PSU's embodied the Nehruvian vision of a modernizing and industrializing India.

Since the opening up of the Indian economy to foreign brands, the sales of HMT watches had plummeted, but one of HMT's domestic competitors, Titan, a creation of the Tata corporation, had tolled a death knell for HMT watches long before foreign brands had.

I wore my first wristwatch in middle school; it was an HMT slim band watch with a tiny round, dial, the smallness and the lunar-shape being indicative of the wearer's gender, of course. It had belonged to my mom. 

My very first wristwatch, which my dad presented to me during my last-year in high school was a Titan. It looked much more snazzier than an HMT, and had Roman numerals, something I totally loved. My father, who was a champion of the private sector, gleamed with delight as he announced the watch to have been made by a private corporation.

Looking back, the Titan had more attention to detail, as I remember the design was slick, and the color scheme reflected harmony. It was a better watch in the department of aesthetics, though I am certain it kept time the same way as its HMT counterpart did. 

Bye, bye HMT.

The biggest loser

The queue to the first Mcdonalds that opened in 1990 in Moscow was phenomenal. However, such a queue was only expected right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a dissolution of Soviet-style Communism.

After all, a bright emblem of Capitalist consumerist modernity had just set up shop in the tattered halls of Communist economy.

Zoom forward to today: President Vladimir Putin is cracking down on Mcdonalds in Russia (there are 208 outlets in Moscow itself), to retaliate against U.S. sanctions over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Yet, McDonalds is no longer a shiny badge of American capitalism; if anything, it's an emblem of Capitalism with a capital C claiming no Cold War-era allegiance with a particular nation. In today's global economy, Capital reigns supreme and Capital will do just about anything to adjust to the conditions of the market in which it operates. It's sole interest is to thrive.

McDonalds, like other mega corporate entities, is highly transnational. The golden arch seeks not to impose anymore, but to blend in with the local.

So, the joke is on Putin, who being a sad relic of the Cold War, uses outmoded Cold War tactics to fight a battle which has no name except, perhaps, "a poor facsimile of the Cold War". Putin also resorts to Cold War propaganda, or a war of words conducted via Twitter, to distract and deceive global attention from his misdoings in Ukraine. the other day somebody wrote of how Putin has revived the culture of Orwellian newspeak/doublespeak, something that the other Vladimir, Vladimir Nabokov, made mincemeat of in his novels.

The Russian Mcdonalds is for all practical purposes very Russian, in that it caters to Russian taste and Russian appetite and most significantly, sources its meat and veggies from Russian farmers. As reported by Quartz, two Russian companies, Wimm-Bill-Dann and Barybino State Farm, have got so successful supplying lettuce and milk to McDonalds, that they registered in the New York Stock Exchange.

By cracking down on the Russian McDonalds, Putin has cracked down on his own. What might he be fighting against? Capital itself? Then there is no winning. In his insistence on wielding the Cold War lance Putin is getting to be the biggest loser.

Dear planet, we're feasting off you as you spiral deathward

Station Eleven is the author's 4th novel. Emily St. John Mandel the writer based in you-know-where, had despaired of finding a publisher for this most dystopian of all American novels because she had surmised the wave for the genre to have peaked and subsided. 

The fiction market is saturated with dystopian novels. Like the literature of the Cold War that expressed a collective anxiety of a nuclear destruction of the world, today's dystopian fiction is dominated by contemporary fears of climate catastrophes, pandemics, and epidemics, among others. However, there have been one too many dystopian novels of late, making, Ms. St. John Mandel, a relative newbie to the genre, anxious about the economic prospects of her book.  

To her surprise, however, no sooner than Station Eleven was completed, it found itself at the center of a minor (three-day long) bidding war, with Knopf snagging the deal with a six-figure advance, an amount that's three times that generated by her three previous novels taken together.

The money is good news because (good) writers deserve to make a living off their products just as app developers. But does the appetite for dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction tell us something about ourselves and our real-world attitude toward apocalypses? 

Take the recent epidemic of ebola in countries in West Africa. In terms of real action all that Americans could muster were something akin to fear-triggered hysteria of contamination. "Keep the African savages from the borders of our country" was the general collective scream that emerged from the millions of tweets generated by the news of the outbreak. Not much else in the way of empathic action was committed. I can imagine an entire posse of fantasy/post-apocalyptic/dystopian fiction mongerers based in you-know-where, frenetically cranking out plots of a post-ebola world order ruled by an African warlord who is the sole survivor of the viral attack. 

That we are "entertained" by the world-is-coming-to-an-end spectre, is not unprecedented. During major global Wars and conflicts of the past, ranging from World War 2, the rise of fascism, through the Cold War and the ambiguously worded War on Terror, the book and movie market have been traditionally been glutted by visions of the ending of a familiar world order. This is what a market-based economy does: ossifies, and some would say, deflects, real fears of real impending doom, into dollars and emblems of entertainment, thus deferring perpetually the action that's badly needed to stem the tide of the doom.

The planet slowly spins netherwards but the maximum we can do is to convert the descent into subject matter for fiction to be bought, read and "engaged" with at a very nominal level of entertainment.

The one thing that differentiates the 21st century apocalyptic fiction from the Cold War one is the envisioning of a post-.Today's young, educated, readers, the future-conscious, career-conscious and cautious folks that they are, want to plan ahead of time. Thus the dystopian fiction of today, as epitomized by the likes of Ms. St. John Mandel's, tells us repeatedly that the "end" is just a new beginning.

The world of Station Eleven is an emergent, post-present world, one that has been wiped off by the flu virus. It's like a startup cosmos all over again.

Did not know

That Bertolt Brecht found time from his activism and theatre to write poetry.

Here is one called "Send Me a Leaf":

Send me a leaf, but from a little tree
That grows no nearer your house
Than half an hour away. for then
You will have to walk, you will get strong and I
Shall thank you for the pretty leaf.

The voting women

On this day, August 19, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state in America to ratify, 50 to 46, the amendment extending equal suffrage to women in America. 

While there is no cut off date for historical events like these, it could be said that the first agitation for women's suffrage was launched in 1839, when Lucretia Mott, a Pennsylvania Quakeress, was upset because she was denied a seat along with her husband to a world slavery congress held in London.

In 1920, there were around 26,000,000 women eligible to vote in the United States.

The historical trajectory of the women's suffrage movement can be found here.

Gandhi of the grain

Hailed as the "Gandhi of the grain" social activist, Vandana Shiva has been hailed as the Gandhi of the grain, for her tireless and valiant crusade against the monoculture of genetically modified seeds.

For me, the idea of owning intellectual-property rights for seeds is a bad, pathetic attempt at seed dictatorship,” Shiva says. “Our commitment is to make sure that dictatorship never flourishes.”

An excellent profile of Shiva is here.

Any frenemy cities?

I have some observations on Conde Nast Traveler's list of 2014's "friendliest" and "unfriendliest" cities in America.

On a personal note, I have been to one on each list, Telluride, Colorado and Detroit, Michigan. Drawing from my humble, first-hand experience of both cities (I lived very close to Detroit) I'd have to say this: Telluride, Colorado is bound to be "friendly" because it's not a typical city with a standard urban density of population. Telluride is a ski resort with astounding natural beauty; where nature is the dominant resident, friendliness is bound to emanate.

Detroit: How on earth can a city that has suffered multiple economic and other damages in the last decade or so be "friendly"? Consider somebody you know; a person that has been victimized by financial losses, betrayals of various kinds and harsh race politics. Would you expect that person to be a Ms. congeniality contestant? As it is that Detroit has negative media image; by labeling it as America's 5th most unfriendliest city is exacerbating the wound.

I was surprised with the omission from the list of the megapolises like NYC, San Francisco and Chicago. Perhaps they are frenemy cities?

Interestingly, Connecticut has 2 ill-tempered cities--Hartford and New Haven; some say the whole of Connecticut is cold to all those who don't belong to the 1% league.

An yellow revolution

India's recently elected Prime Minister, Narendra Singh Modi, deviated from the usual silly speech patterns into which a majority of Indian Premiers fall. During his maiden Independence Day address to the Nation, Modi focussed on local problems.

India is plagued by a toilet problem; there are very few clean, usable, public toilets available for ordinary people in this nation. Many houses in villages and urban areas don't have proper toilet facilities either. The scarcity of toilets forces people to defecate and piss here, there, everywhere, thus creating monuments of health hazard. 

The lack of toilets poses special problems for girls and women in India. Often times women are forced to seek out dark, empty, corners, away from populated areas, to relieve themselves without sacrificing on shame. In the process, they endanger themselves gravely, as is evidenced by the recent gang rape and murder of two little girls in Uttar Pradesh. They had gone out into a field to pee and never came back.

So, when Modi pledged to fill every public school in India with a separate toilet for girls by August 2015, he displayed a commodious intent, a big-heartedness by caring for the little people (figuratively speaking, India is a nation where the majority are "little" with resources and power of Lilliputian proportions, but women are littler by virtue of their gender).

Heeding his call for toilet-investment, corporations like Tata Consultancy, donated money. 

May the chrome-yellow revolution for the girls of India begin.

The bleeding white heart

Every time there is an event like that of the shooting to death of the 18-year old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the white liberal heart starts to bleed, the mea culpas, some blunt and others heavily nuanced, start to seep into the media.

Here is writer Tobias Wolff's in the New Yorker, cleverly titled, Heart of Whiteness (to evoke the most trenchant of all critiques of colonialism and Europe's racism, The Heart of Darkness).

Remembering Michael Chabon's mea culpa piece in the NYTimes magazine not too long ago. All of the testimonials of racist complicity in the world can't get the "damned spot" (reverberation of Lady Macbeth shriek of her own guilt) of real, brutal racism and classism out from the fabric of contemporary America.

Death of an Actor

Interesting thoughts on actor Robin Williams' suicide; he was smart, he was witty, he was mega-successful, much more of a force to reckon with in the world of art than actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was merely a thinking man's actor and od'd himself to death some months ago. Williams was also a comedian; so why did this epitome of joy, success and influence commit suicide?

Andrew Solomon dissects Williams' suicide well:

A part that stands out:

When the mass media report suicide stories, they almost always provide a “reason,” which seems to bring logic to the illogic of self-termination. Such rationalization is particularly common when it comes to the suicides of celebrities, because the idea that someone could be miserable despite great worldly success seems so unreasonable. Why would a person with so much of what the rest of us want choose to end his life? Since there are always things going awry in every life at every moment, the explanation industry usually tells us that the person had a disastrous marriage, or was a hopeless addict, or had just experienced a major career disaster, or was under the influence of a cult. But Robin Williams does not seem to have had any of these problems. Yes, he fought addiction, but he had been largely sober for quite a while. He was on his third marriage, but it appeared to be a happy one, and he seems to have been close to his children. His newest TV series was cancelled a few months ago, but his reputation as one of the great performers of our time remained untarnished. So he would have had little “reason” to commit suicide—as, indeed, most people who kill themselves have little “reason” other than depression (unipolar or bipolar), which is at the base of most suicide.

The story ends on a poignant note:

A great hope gets crushed every time someone reminds us that happiness can be neither assumed nor earned; that we are all prisoners of our own flawed brains; that the ultimate aloneness in each of us is, finally, inviolable.

A diet of rich cartoons

From the New Yorker.

Robert Mankoff's humor has been unique, and here he is with his series of cartoons on America's preoccupation with food, eating more or less:

I like the one where he gives life to the weight that we have cast away:

Poison Ivy league

The title of William Deresiewicz's new book on the state of Ivy League education in America invokes the observation made by poet and public intellectual Ezra Pound about 80 years ago. 

In The ABC of Reading, Pound had argued that higher education needn't be mandatory, foisted on everybody, but should be reserved for those who have a genuine desire to know. The rest, he said is "merely sheepherding."

Deresiewicz, a Yale English Professor who was denied tenure at this hallowed Institution of higher learning, damns the current generation of HYPSters, an acronym for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford graduates, for being mere sheep, but of excellent pedigree, not because they have good genes or do any larger good to society, but because they obediently follow the tried and tested path of a meaningless life of "blinkered overachievers."

A majority of HYPSters go into bland careers in finance and/or consulting; according to Deresiewicz they tend to lack curiosity, moral courage, passionate weirdness.

The legion of "excellent sheep" is one of a generation of polite, striving, praise-addicted, grade-grubbing nonentities.

What caught my attention (via this most excellent review of the book) was Deresiewicz's critique of the institutions that have sprung up to be the grazing pastures, as it were, of the "excellent sheep." 

One such institution is an Yale-brainchild, Teach For America. Deresiewicz is suspicious of the motives of those among the sheep who sign up for two years with Teach to do the recommended stint of teaching the "socioeconomically underserved" kids of America:

[They] swoop down and rescue [the unfortunate] with [their] awesome wisdom and virtue [...] [They] do acknowledge their existence, but in a fashion that maintains [their] sense of superiority — indeed, that reinforces it.

Bloody servants

Works of art, be it paintings, fiction, play, poems, films, that are based on servants and explore the master-servant relationship of power in any society, interest me.

Murderous servants fascinate me because my study of servitude tells me that its a condition that at one point or the other (even when servitude is socially sanctioned) is bound to beget violence. I'm eager to read Jean Genet's The Maids, a play about two murderous maids who kill their mistress primarily because the play looks at the imbalance of power between master and servant and decides that its unsustainable.

The play is based on a real-life murder (famously known in the media as the Papin case) of an affluent mistress and her adult daughter by two domestic helps in Depression-era France. 

There are, I hear, scenes in the play, where the two maids, both sisters, role play their mistress when she is away. The mistress is very rich and very callous and can't tell one maid from the other. The maids fiercely hate her. When the mistress goes out (which she does frequently), the maids go to play a sinister game where one sister dresses up as the mistress and the other gruesomely murders her or tortures her. They act out their fantasies this way.

One needs to understand this lurid desire on the part of the maids not as psychopathy, but as the innate condition, I believe of subjugation.

When subjugated and shorn of freedom, the human instinct is to lash out in very many ways.

In the Caribbean the slaves had institutionalized this practice of staging strange plays at night, after a days back-breaking labor on the sugarcane plantations. In these plays some would dress up as the masters and others would be themselves--the servants, that is, with the difference that they would be empowered enough to kill the masters. The ritual castration of masters was essential for the indentured servants; it kept their rage in check. So the masters connived.

Connivance is absent in Genet's play as connivance comes from understanding. The mistress is a rich, flaky girl, who hasn't a fibre of nuance or political suaveness in her being. The end result is consequently bloody.

Just world? Nope

There is now competing evidence showing that two Ukrainian government fighter jets, not a surface to air BUK missile, shot down Malaysian passenger jet MH17 over Ukraine on July 17, 2014.

But whoever the perpetrator behind the heinous shooting is or was, at one point in time, the Western media was abuzz with fervent calls for justice. Those who had shot the innocent plane down were war criminals, it was said, and sooner or later would have to be tried in an International court of justice.

The fervency of trials, justice and war crimes has since died down, putting a dampener on all of the aggressive expostulations on virtue. Recently, however, a pint of justice is scheduled to be served as the world waits for verdicts against two leaders of the Pol Pot regime. 

An U.N. backed war crimes tribunal has taken over three and a half decade and over $200 million (pocketed mostly by the judges and their cohorts) to arrive at this juncture.

[Does the world even remember the Khmer Rouge?] 

A young Cambodian said he is interested in justice being served, but believes that the money could have been better spent in improving the nation’s infrastructure. He isn't interested in investing in the historical past.

But victims of the genocide think otherwise.

A woman, whose children died of starvation during the Khmer Rouge brutality, said she still remembers walking down the jungled paths without food or water, numbed by the grief of her dead children. She said she is willing to wait eternally for justice.

The two Pol Pot cronies are geriatric men; while one, like Hanna Schmidt in Bernard Schlink’s The Reader, claims to have been a pawn in the Pol Pot drama, doing nothing knowingly, another argued that the Khmer Rouge was not a genocidal or criminal contraption, just an ideological apparatus of its time.

The crux is time: If a crime as vast and irrefutably evidential as the Khmer Rouge genocide takes 40 years and resource that could restructure the Brooklyn Bridge in a year, then wouldn't the shooting down of MH17 would be a blip in the radar of war crime? It would take roughly fifty years or more for such a crime to be tried in the Hague.

The world is not a just place across the board, never has been.

Chomskian self

Michael Ghondy's Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? is a must see for all Noam Chomsky fans.

I saw it and loved it.

What happens in the bush does not stay in the bush: notes on globalization

In London, Paris and New York City, among other global cities, what people eat in the remote villages of Guinea matters today.

The ebola virus, which so far has ravaged 700 lives in West Africa, is said to have originated in Guinea, the epicenter being the southern town of Gueckedou primarily because folks were eating bush meat contaminated with the virus. 

As The Guardian reports, bush meat or meat from wild animals have been banned in Guinean towns, the practice of eating said meat continues in the far flung villages, where residents refuse to give up on their traditional diet.

A favorite bush meat for the villagers of Nongoha, for instance, is fruit bat; unfortunately the ebola virus has chosen the fruit bat as one of its temporary habitats. The urgings of medical workers in these villages notwithstanding, Nongohans insist on eating fruit bat meat and see those who bring in modern scientific warnings against their traditional diet as evil witches wanting to upend a way of life.

A village spokesperson observed that inexplicable diseases and deaths are common in this part of the world, and the virus isn't perceived as a threat because it can't be seen. Had it been an airplane or a drone, the villagers would have shot it down as an enemy.

But should the rest of the world be imperiled on account of a way of life in a small village in Guinea? After all, we are not all living inside the head of Margaret Mead.

In a pre-globalized or less interconnected world, what the Nongohans ate wouldn't have mattered at all; the Western world could care less if they ate their way into death or disease. Now the (ill) effect of a Nongohan diet isn't confined to the Nongohans but can spread globally, especially to those Western enclaves where there is a significant African diaspora. Despite the efforts of authorities, ebola has been transmitted from bush meat to Guineans to Liberians to citizens of Sierra Leone. A few human bodies stand in the way of its transmission to London, New York or Paris. 

Either the Nongohans should stop eating bush meat or travelers from the continent of Africa ought to be carefully screened before they hop on a Westbound plane. 

The Western public discourse on ebola is, as expected, tainted with colonial-era xenophobia and racism, but how much rationalism and objectivity can be permitted when a deadly virus can go global at the drop of a hat?

While it's okay to chide the Western hysteria about the virus, it's also important to educate villagers of West Africa that it's no longer okay to risk death over "tradition", because the cost of eating a fruit bat salad ( a salad comprised of rodent and wild antelope meat) would be borne by many more than just those who chomp on these bush delicacies in the bushes. 

In globalization what happens in the bush does not stay in the bush anymore. Should the Nongohan's not become a little less local and a bit more global in the realm of responsibility?

This just might get under your skin

I'm not sure I have the words in which to describe the art house science fiction/horror film Under the Skin, but try I must for the film was a substantial experience for me.

Directed by the British Jonathan Glazer (of Sexy Beast fame), Under tracks the activities of an alien named Laura, played superbly by Scarlett Johansson, as she drives through the streets of a very working class Glasgow, picking up men in her van, taking them home and then consuming them, or devouring them sexually. The men are shown to sink into a dark pool on which Laura walks.

That's it, it's when we see Laura walk on water, we know she isn't human, i.e. not human in the sense we know humans to be.

Laura goes about the business of seduction in a disinterested way; she isn't titillated, or aroused; she is simply curious. While Laura prattles away a series of questions to her male victims, what's their name? Where are they headed? Where are they from? Are they single? the males, mostly un-literate, poor, into drugs and slightly thuggish, are mesmerised by her attention to them. These aren't men that attractive, London-accented young women would spare a first look at. The film seeks to jolt the sexual vanities of men out of their complacencies.

The prospect of having sex with Laura overrides the instinct for self-preservation, or benumbs the man to the fact that they are drowning in a nefarious cesspool while Laura, stripping herself off clothing, walks away from them. The men who drown are the proverbial donkeys who, lured by the shiny carrot of promise, would walk into their very deaths.

But one has to keep in mind that Laura isn't preying on the genteel; she's careful in her choice of slum dwellers. They won't be missed; their disappearance won't be an anomaly.

The film is also about Laura herself; Unlike other movie extraterrestrials, Laura looks remarkably like a human female and we are not given any distinct signs of her alienness. We, however, get ample evidence of her alienation from the sliver of earth in which she roams. The streets and the occasional club, the inside of a home, appear as they would to her eyes. They zip past us and remain mostly in a blur, the color of a day-old bruise on human skin. Means that nothing holds Laura's attention.

She picks up a disfigured man who is on his way to the grocery store at night; he interests her. The encounter proves to be transformative, for in the remaining part of the film Laura seems less alienated and more in a catatonic state of existence. She quits eating men; she tries to have real sexual intercourse with a kind male but runs away upon discovering that a crucial part of the female human anatomy, the genitalia, is missing from her nether regions.

The film ends on a most poignantly tragic of notes: a peeling off of Laura's skin reveals the dark slithery entity that she is under the human skin. She is set on fire and the last interlude is a depressingly violent one for Laura, yet it's the one time when Laura is seen to be riveted to something--the face of her temporary human body. As Laura holds up the face for viewing, she twitches with emotions that tell us that she has got attached to her skin.

I felt deeply sorry at the disintegration of Laura, into a pile of ashy substance.

The strangely unloveable Nazi virus

Stanley Kubrick's classic Dr. Strangelove (1964) is undoubtedly about the cold war with America and the "commie" Russians as mutual antagonists. But the film--and I saw it for the first time recently--has, I think, a curious subtext: The Nazi virus is indomitable. 

The virus manifests itself in the plan that Dr. Strangelove has at the movie's end. After an American bomber drops the dreaded H bomb on a Russian ICBM base, Dr. Strangelove tells his spellbound audience, comprised of both Americans and the Soviets, that the radiation from the explosion will invade the earth's atmosphere for a hundred years making the planet uninhabitable. During these hundred years, says Dr. Strangelove, it's advisable to build a subterranean hideout, a society if you will, where the most virile of men will cohabit with the most seductive and fertile of women in the ratio of 1:10. 

What he doesn't spell out, but what strikes us like a bolt of lightning, is the fact that these would be males and females of a particular race, the chosen race. The truth of Dr. Strangelove springs out like a Jack-in-the-box when in a moment of exhilaration, the "doctor"--a German scientist who had emigrated to the U.S. after world war II and changed his name--gets out of his wheelchair and exclaims, "Mein fuhrer I can walk!!!"

The subtext then is that Dr. Strangelove had borne inside of himself the unfulfilled Nazi dream of racial domination--the emergence of a society of the racially superior types. After the fall of Hitler, who would revive that dream but the stupid Americans and Russians, punch drunk in love with arms racing? 

In this magnificent satire on the Cold War and the hollow ideologies the war was supposed to have been fought in the service of (there are many hints that the war was really a way for Coca Cola and mega corporations of the ilk to thrive), Kubrick shows us how extirpation isn't just something we expect from fascists; the Americans and the Russians were equally extirpative in their outlook during the Cold War, except that the "death to all but the best among us" was hidden behind a veil of a just war.

N.B. There was also a rumor floating the time of the film's release, that Dr. Strangelove is a satirical portrait of Dr. Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, a Jewish-German emigre to the United States spoke with a distinct German accent; there were talks back then, in light of the Vietnam war, of trying him in the International Court of Justice at the Hague.

An unusually composed Medea

Just finished watching Lars Von Trier's Medea.

From trash poem to welcome sign

Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here, until you came.

A sign bearing these lines stand in Upper Manhattan's Fort Tyrone Park. They are beautiful, aren't they? asks a visitor as she finds the words to be poetic: they make her feel wanted.

She is then on a mission to track down the source of these lines. Upon Googling nothing shows up. The lines are then discovered to be fragments, carefully chiseled out of a longer early 20th-century poem:

Friend,
When you stray or sit and take your ease
On heath or hill, or under spreading trees,
Pray leave no traces of your wayside meal,
No paper bag, no scattered orange peel,
Nor daily journal littered on the grass;
Others may view these with distaste, and pass;
Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here until you came.

This isn't a poem of sweet cajoling, but one with a scolding attitude, "grumpy lines" as the visitor calls them. The history of the poem is part of the burgeoning history of trash and trash talk in post-World War I Britain, a time when, liberated by rising economic fortunes and goaded by a desire to cultivate leisure, members of the British working and middle classes took to traveling from the cities to the countryside either in motor cars or on bicycles. The countryside, for so long a pristine habitat reserved for the ruminating walks of the upper class, was seen to be everybody's public space then.

Forced to contend with the despoiling of the countryside, the elite began to express deep chagrin about the litter that the lumpen visitors tended to leave behind.

In his book Landscape and Englishness, David Matless records the backlash against the new tourism which really was a backlash against the violation or a "flagrant breach of the national good form."

So, in short, the two lines that comfort the modern visitor to the Manhattan Park is in essence clipped from a longer trash poem that in class-conscious Britain had issued moral caveats.