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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Guardianreports, 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?
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.
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.
