We Can Dance If We Want To

Hiatus

2009-03-09T18:44:00.001-04:00

This blog is on pause. All the action is over there.

Newspeak Watch

2009-01-09T23:10:00.002-05:00

And now, a public service announcement

2009-01-03T14:09:00.002-05:00

RAWI Condemns Israel's Aggression in Gaza

RAWI, the Radius of Arab American Writers, condemns in the strongest possible terms the ongoing Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip. Various news agencies around the world have reported the terrible impact of Israel's military aggression in Gaza, which has resulted in nearly 400 Palestinian deaths, the majority of them children and civilians.

A particularly gruesome illustration of Israel's brutality can be found in its effect on specific households, such as the Hamdan family, who lost two daughters, the Balusha family, who lost five daughters, the Absi family, who lost three daughters, and the Kishku family, who lost two daughters. In all, Israel has killed over fifty Palestinian children.

Commentators on the political right have applauded Israel's destruction of Gaza and the massacre of civilians, in the same way that they applauded the deadly economic strangulation preceding the current military violence. Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum went so far as to accuse the Palestinians of photographing children pretending to be injured.

It is the response of traditional liberal media that has been most disturbing, however. Nearly all corporate media in the United States and a majority of its progressive forums have conceptualized Israel's attack as retaliatory, a position that has no basis in fact and that would be unjustifiable even if it were true. In fact, the majority of American media appear to believe that the death of Palestinian civilians is an unfortunate byproduct of their own innate barbarity. Famed Israeli writers and noted doves David Grossman, writing in the New York Times, and Amos Oz, quoted in Ha'aretz, appear to be much more preoccupied with the purity of the Israeli soul and with finding a quieter way to suppress Palestinian resistance than they are with the belligerence of their government.

We deplore that media continually emphasize Israel's retaliation as if to simultaneously justify and absolve its cruelty. We would point out that most of the Gazans are refugees who are indigenous to the villages and cities Israel claims to now be protecting. Gaza's population does not consist of irrational Muslim extremists who inexplicably dislike Jews and take a perverse joy in undermining Israel's timeless and innocent democracy, as American news outlets relentlessly suggest; it consists of people who have been systematically dispossessed, starved, tortured, and economically exploited. Nor does this population exist outside of history; it is engaged in a colonial war against a powerful state that has long undertaken a program of ethnic cleansing.

RAWI calls on artists and writers of all cultural backgrounds, nationalities, faiths, and political affiliations to vocally condemn Israel's extensive human rights violations, along with the odious discourses of justification that allow those violations to continue.

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No comment really necessary. Given that Israeli ground troops have just entered the Strip, condemnation is the minimum necessary response.

Resistance is Fertile?

2008-12-17T10:57:00.004-05:00

They're rioting in Athens. Still.

The protestors are calling for Europe-wide protests, and 'resistance' (in four languages - although from the picture at right it appears they misspelled the German). Cool. But protests against what? Resistance to what? Prime Minister Karamanlis conceded in parliament that "long-unresolved problems, such as the lack of meritocracy, corruption in everyday life and a sense of social injustice disappoint young people." Well of course. Twas ever thus. And if they keep it up, the demonstrators might just get Karamanlis out of office, without otherwise making much difference on those issues.

But the call for a broader European resistance shows that they realize that the forces that are 'disappointing' them are much wider, much more diffuse. Transnational. Abstract concepts that nevertheless have real, local, socially difficult consequences, like globalization. Well - how do you 'resist' the times we live in? What happens as a result of protesting against them? Time to get real, people. Time to start planning for, and building, the different society you want. Protests won't build it. Resistance won't build it.

On the other hand, protests and resistance can build community, and communities can build it. So, protest away. But after the protests, take that momentum and the new connections you have forged and build something new.

Essential Reading

2008-12-15T20:42:00.004-05:00

Senate Armed Forces Committee report on torture. Blame for this hideous violation of decency and, not coincidentally, massive blow to US national interests, goes all the way to the top. Yes, I'm looking at you, W and Rummy. Oh, and the usual suspects in the neocon cabal - Feith, Wolfowitz et al. It's not a long read, and is an important one.

In other news, capitalism is eating itself, in the form of rapacious financial operators running around looking for people to blame for their own collective and individual failings. Farce.

Rebel yell?

2008-11-23T23:17:00.005-05:00

The scene: Friendly's in Gettysburg, PA
The perp: dude in a baseball cap decorated with a Confederate flag and the word 'Rebel' across the front
The crime: he probably gets to vote, despite his manifest disdain for the national flag, and for the republic and constitution for which it stands

In Gettysburg, of all places. The re-enactors and fans in Confederate grey (or their Union blue) don't bother me at all. Perhaps they should, but it seems, well, historical. Ugly dude in the diner, though, not so much. I don't get to vote, since I'm a non-citizen. Fair enough. But I probably have more respect for the United States as a polity and an idea than he does. So if he wants to be a rebel, strip him of his rights as a citizen, and let him be a noisy bystander like me.

By the way, the chocolate mudslide ice cream is back, and it's tasty - particularly with hot fudge sauce.

Farewell, Mama Afrika

2008-11-10T11:06:00.002-05:00

Miriam Makeba has left us, after an extraordinary life in music and politics. A rare soul.

At last

2008-11-05T08:10:00.000-05:00

A president we can respect, and whom the world will respect. It's a new era.

Let's just hope the outgoing administration manages to keep its fly zipped until January - no war with Iran or Pakistan, no environmental rape, no extra corporate welfare.

Hope is now back in fashion.

Road Rage

2008-10-16T10:00:00.007-04:00

A few days a week, I drive three children (two of them mine) to school in Harrisburg. Of course, I drive carefully, refrain from swearing at idiot drivers, and generally attempt to model calm and responsible driver conduct. Some days it is particularly hard, today was among the hardest. Not because of some bizarre and life-threatening action by a truck driver or because (as is all too common) someone is following me too closely at high speed. This was something in front of me, that forced me to draw back even further than usual in the hope that the kids would not see such obscenity.

An SUV in front of me had a sticker on the back saying:

No Husseins in the White House.

Barely-disguised code in the current climate for "No Ni&&@#$ in the White House." So thank you, McCain-Palin campaign, for empowering racist hicks everywhere to be out and proud about their feebleminded, fearful hate. John Murtha acknowledged today that endemic racism in western PA will reduce the size of Obama's victory here. Sadly, it is not restricted to the west - we have our very own bigots here in the Capital Area.

How can we bring up decent, open-minded children with that kind of example around them? Hope and work for an Obama victory, of course. Model civility. And, like Wendy in South Park, confront and fight cancers wherever we encounter them.

Blog Action Day 08 - Poverty

2008-10-15T19:19:00.007-04:00

It's Blog Action Day - and the theme is poverty. It is such a huge theme - where does one even begin? Too big. So I will tell a small story of the kindness of strangers.

As an undergrad, I spent a few weeks one April traveling around Turkey with Francesca. We were on a budget of around £5 a day, if I remember correctly, not least because my parents had cut off financial support for a while for reasons I don't need to get into here. I had six months' worth of Turkish at that point, and I taught Francesca the essentials - greetings, please and thank you, and "I am a student, I have no money." Towards the end of our time there we were in Cappadocia, and it was Ramadan. Ramadan is particularly hard on the Turks, many of whom are very dedicated smokers, but we did not encounter any irritability, or anything other than the customary hospitality. On our way out of town to catch the bus to Ankara, a woman saw us passing and invited us into her house - which looked something like the one pictured here, but without the snow at that time. Although she was fasting, and clearly not at all wealthy, she pressed on us food for the journey - including delicious fresh tomatoes and spicy peppers. Insisted that we take it and asked for nothing. And of course, the memory of this - and other acts of simple kindness - remain fresh for me today.

It has been my experience traveling, particularly but not only in the Middle East, that those with little to share are often the most willing to do so. There is nothing romantic about this, and certainly nothing to celebrate about poverty in general. It is the practical solidarity and kindness of the poor. And it is a rebuke to the rampant materialism celebrated by so much of Western culture, and a necessary corrective to the acquisitiveness and consumerism that do so much to threaten not only our beleaguered planet, but also (as even the doctrinaire free-market fundamentalists are now forced to recognize) the sound functioning of economic life in general. We need a simpler life for all, a more even distribution of wealth, and a re-evaluation of consumer capitalism as the tasteless and dangerous system it is. We must connect in kindness and solidarity, value our fellow human beings over the acquisition of mere things, lift the whole planet out of poverty in a sustainable way. Every action towards that end, however small, is useful and hopeful.

Sing out

2008-10-02T10:42:00.008-04:00

So, Clay Aiken has come out of the closet. Clay is gay. In other news, the Pope is reported to be Catholic, and bears are alleged to be... Well, you get the picture. I'm happy for him that he feels able to do this. It's a shame it took so long, but then again, would he really have done so well in Idol if he had been out and proud? How would my friend Dan Fishback fare? He would be fabulous, and he would not be allowed to succeed (not that he would go for it, I'm sure, except as some new twist on performance art). Ironically, over in the 'conservative' and 'intolerant' Middle East, we have transsexual superstars such as Bülent Ersoy (see below) and Aderet. Let's hope for Clay and others in the US that audiences follow the Lebanese example, and concentrate on the music, rather than worrying about who is producing it.

Vote Third Party?

2008-09-25T11:52:00.002-04:00

Ostrich Syndrome

2008-09-24T23:13:00.005-04:00

Transsexual diva Bülent Ersoy joins a long line of prominent public figures, including Orhan Pamuk, in undergoing prosecution for thoughtcrime. Criticizing the military is, as the BBC's Sarah Rainsford points out, a gamble. But what the military and its allies in the judiciary have to realize is that they have lost this one. It is no longer feasible, let alone desirable, to suppress all criticism of how the Turkish state has managed its Kurdish problem. If uncritical admiration of the military was ever established hegemonically, it has broken down by now. This is not in itself a problem. There is plenty to admire about the Turkish military. It should realize that criticism is not the enemy - that there are worse enemies, including complacency and paranoia. Let the Diva voice her concerns, let the writers examine the problem and propose solutions. The debate will be healthy. More to the point, it is already going on and is unlikely to be stopped now. So the best move is to get heads out of the sand and into the discussion.

Terror attack in Yemen

2008-09-17T08:22:00.003-04:00

It's a small, sad world. Reports just coming in of an attack on the US Embassy in Sana'a feature Ryan Gliha, Embassy spokesperson. A decade ago, I was doing that job for the Brits in Egypt, answering questions from the media and the public about the attack on tourists at the temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor. In those first few hours after the attack, we couldn't know when picking up the phone in the Embassy's impromptu incident room whether the person on the other end would be a tabloid journalist or a parent worried about her or his backpacking child who might or might not have been in Luxor at the time. A few days later I represented the Ambassador at a memorial ceremony held by the Governor of Luxor. It all remains very vivid for me.

I know Ryan a little from when we graduate students together with a common interest in Islam and Central Asia. I can only wish him well now as he does what I know to be an exhausting job, emotionally and otherwise.

Saved for the assassin's bullet

2008-09-05T13:51:00.002-04:00

So the AKP government avoided being deposed by the 'secularist' (actually Kemalist sectarian) judiciary, getting away with a wrist-slapping (see last post.) And now President Gül is off to Armenia. Now, on the one hand, it's football, the nearest thing we have to a universal human religion, so maybe he'll be fine. On the other hand, rabid nationalists on both sides - Turkish and Armenian - will be lining up to take a shot at him. I only hope the Turkish and Armenian security people decide to do their job well this weekend. The AKP has a strong enough popular mandate to actually do something about their country's poor relationship with Armenia. And Armenia should take note of what a dodgy ally they have in Russia, given what they just got up to next door, and perhaps take this opportunity to thaw relations with Turkey (and, even, Azerbaijan by proxy.) There's change I can believe in.

Judicial Coup avoided in Turkey

2008-07-30T13:35:00.002-04:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7533414.stm

Very important news. Commentary to follow.

These times...

2008-07-09T15:07:00.004-04:00

The Rabbit Ripper - a hare-raising tale of the everyday gothic

Read it and weep/laugh.

A Time Traveler In The Court Of King George

2008-07-07T12:06:00.001-04:00

What struck me most was his impressive facial hair. Were these long mustaches the fashion, perhaps, in 20__?
No, he explained. He had sworn at 21 not to shave his upper lip so long as the President was in the White House.
Thinking to glean some valuable intelligence of the country's future course, I inquired casually as to which President was the object of his ire.
"How should I know, or care? Some damn fool is still there, still meddling. The UN went condo years ago, but the White House is still in business. And the rest of those blowhards inside the Beltway..."
Indeed, this was to be, he said mournfully, his last spin before the Time Travel and Allied Activities Regulation Act [20__] kicked in and further visits to our time would become impossible.
Thereupon he brightened, recalling that, a well-regulated militia being necessary &c &c, he had about his person a HomeDefender(TM) pocket fusion cannon that, properly aimed and primed, could reduce the relevant quadrant of the District of Columbia to glass. He might yet be shaving upon the morrow.
At news of his plan I owned to a degree of ambivalence. I had, I explained, in our short acquaintance, become inordinately fond of his mustaches.

Turkey Decides

2007-05-22T11:03:00.000-04:00

One of the best-selling books in Turkey in the past few years was one in which Washington DC is destroyed in a nuclear explosion caused not by an Islamist radical, but by a Turkish military intelligence officer desperate to save his country from US occupation. Metal Fırtına (Metal Storm) by science fiction writer Orkun Ucar and journalist Burak Turna, is a near-future political thriller in which the United States, fresh from its occupation of Iraq, invades its NATO ally Turkey. The heroes of the book include the country’s present Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the armed forces General Staff, who work together to pull political and diplomatic victory out of military defeat. Yet the real-world political crisis gripping Turkey today sets Mr. Erdogan and the military on a dangerous collision course. Americans need to pay attention.

On my last visit to Turkey in 2005 Metal Fırtına seemed to be everywhere—in the headlines as much as the bookstores—as the country’s intellectual elite agonized over the chauvinist mood that seemed to have swept the country. There were many flag-waving demonstrations in response to perceived insults to ‘Turkishness,’ be they from Kurdish youths demonstrating in the streets, or writers addressing the massacre of Armenians in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. Fast forward to 2007, the year in which the events of Metal Fırtına are set. Turkey’s streets are full of demonstrators once more. In January, thousands marched in Istanbul in solidarity with the murdered Armenian journalist (and patriotic Turkish citizen) Hrant Dink. In late April, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in Istanbul ‘to defend secularism.’ And on May 1^st almost 600 supporters of Turkey’s labor movement were arrested as thousands tried to rally in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. The present crisis goes beyond party politics. What is at stake is the nature of the Republic. The ruling Justice and Development Party’s candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, secured 357 out of 361 votes cast by members of the People’s Assembly in the first round of the presidential election. Mr. Gul’s center-right party (known by its Turkish initials AKP) has been in government since 2002. In government, but not fully in power. For while sovereignty rests with the National Assembly, any government serves only at the pleasure of the military, the self-appointed guardians of the principles of the Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1924, who have intervened in politics with coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980, and by pressuring an Islamist cabinet to resign in 1997. The military warned that it had concerns about the election. The Constitutional Court, at the request of the main secularist opposition party, then annulled the vote.

The AKP represents Islamist politics of a peculiarly Turkish kind, a fusion labelled by some ‘Muslim Democracy.’ The party is socially conservative, but has not pushed an overtly Islamist agenda. It has frequently stated its commitment to the principles of the Constitution, including Ataturk’s version of secularism. It has presided over a period of successful economic reform, the revitalization of Turkey’s commercial and cultural capital, Istanbul, and some tough but broadly positive negotiations with the European Union about Turkey’s eventual membership. Mr. Gul has led those negotiations, and was put forward for the presidency as being less controversial than Mr. Erdogan, less likely to provoke the military to intervene. And yet here we are again.

Mr. Erdogan responded to the setback in combative form, calling on the Assembly to approve early elections and setting out a package of constitutional reforms including making the Presidency directly elected by popular vote. The Assembly elections may show that Mr Erdogan represents the majority of his country rather better than do the opposition and the senior ranks of the military. They may not: uncertainty is the essence of democracy. The AKP is not the enemy of democracy, nor of the West, nor of Ataturk’s Republic. We must hope that if Mr Erdogan wins a new mandate, Turkey will show itself to be a mature democratic republic rather than lapsing back into the pattern of periodic crises and military interventions that has marred past decades.

Before we begin

2007-05-01T20:16:00.000-04:00

Something I wrote in 2004 as a friendly critique of the American Political Science Association, since published in slightly amended form in the political science journal PS as "Funkify and Diversify or The Politics of Dancing—Reflections on APSA in Chicago" – PS XXXVIII, 1 (January 2005), 1-2. What? So it's a couple of years old. I just thought you might have missed it, and I intend that it should set the tone for this blog. After all, as Emma Goldman so sensibly said, "If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution."

We can dance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind
'Cause your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance
Well they’re no friends of mine

"The Safety Dance" - Men Without Hats

In her plenary address at this year’s annual meeting, Mary Robinson cited Jonathan Steele's report for The Guardian on this year’s ASA meeting, in which sociologists dismissed the US political science profession as being ‘in a conservative phase.’ President Robinson, fair-minded observer that she is, had the courtesy to remark that the annual meeting of this supposedly conservative profession was replete with innovative discussion and debate around the issues of global inequalities that were our theme, offering some evidence at least of non-conservative tendencies. Yet there is no doubt that there are some important features of our professional and associational life that merit the conservative label, that work to impede change, to preserve hierarchy and status, to constrain the creation of productive social capital. (Examples of some of these features are readily apparent from the agenda that those in the Perestroika movement and the Caucus for a New Political Science have felt it necessary to pursue, and continue to pursue — the mostly symbolic democracy within much of APSA; insufficient diversity in the profession in all senses; too little commitment to social justice and a political science that is relevant to actually-existing politics; the continuing dominance in APSA Council of the high-prestige research institutions who do not represent the majority of the membership; the failure of much of the profession to stand up for the rights of academic workers to organize, etc.) One event at Chicago signaled this associational conservatism quite vividly: at the gala reception after Susanne Rudolph’s presidential address, many came, most ate and drank, everybody talked… but few danced. Political Science was not having a funky good time.

At the annual meeting we perform scholarship, no doubt, as well as a certain amount of the administrative business essential to the running of the organization and its associated groups, and of course for some there are job interviews or discussions with publishers. We also engage in the more amorphous activity of social capital building in the particular sense captured by the slogan ‘networking a world of scholars’ — however, this is a sense that is often almost brutally instrumental. There are instances of course of intellectual debate for the sheer pleasure of it, and the catching up with old friends and the making of new. But these instances do not seem to me to be the dominant experience. Rather, we go to APSA to interact with those who can advance our careers directly: we hunt them down, and those of us near the bottom of the career ladder hope that we will not encounter that crushing moment when the target of our suit peers at our name badge, decides we are not important, and directs her or his attention elsewhere.

For what we spend a lot of time and energy doing, I would like to suggest, is performing status. In our interactions in the formal space of the panel discussion, but even more so in the informal space of discussions in the corridors or receptions, those who have status display it; those who do not, seek to establish some small amount of it and at the same time provide the occasion for the other’s performance of higher status. This is inevitable, of course — relations of power and domination are inscribed on every human interaction, and political scientists remain human beings (for the most part). At the annual meeting we spend most of our time performing the ‘professional’ part of our identity repertoire and so it is that set of relations of domination that is most visible, intertwined of course with those of race, gender, class etc.

But wouldn’t it be healthier, and more fun, if we delved more deeply into our identity repertoire to engage each other more wholly as human beings? We really need to dance more. On the dance floor the dynamic is different, the playing field more level, domination harder to assert — and whatever fluid hierarchies may temporarily emerge, you can bet that straight white men are unlikely to be on top of them. Even if people kept their nametags on, it would be pretty hard to read them while doing the Twist. On the dance floor we’re all just human beings getting a bit of a non-competitive work-out, loosening up a bit. Not everyone loves to dance, of course, and no doubt some people had other things to do that evening in Chicago. But it strikes me that part of what keeps some of us off the dance floor at the annual meeting is fear. I don’t mean the fear of looking a fool because we don’t know the moves to the ‘Electric Slide’ — I was there, I didn’t know the moves, I probably looked a fool, it didn’t matter. But would I have been up there if I was, in that awful phrase exemplifying the instrumental rationality of the annual meeting rituals, ‘on the market’ this year? I like to think I would — but we’ve already established that I’m a fool. The rational chooser, if she existed, might be less willing to drop the performance of professionalism out of fear that the person dancing opposite would be their interviewer the next day. But so what? In those interviews, after all, two or more people should be sizing each other up as potential colleagues, rather than as boss and employee. Don’t you want to have colleagues who are prepared to loosen up a bit? Isn’t that interview relationship marked by a power dynamic that could usefully be undermined, to everyone’s benefit? And so on through the other types of annual meeting interactions: would more junior members of the profession not feel more empowered to speak up in the organized sections’ business meetings if they had seen that severe-looking chairperson doing the Bus Stop the night before?

The proposal at the Perestroika reception to hold a dance party next year was most welcome, and I hope we can follow through. And there was a spontaneous, albeit brief outbreak of dancing at the New Political Science reception — but we already know that that’s a groovy crowd. Dancing with ourselves at these events is not the issue. It can be read as critique of the prevailing unfunkiness of the annual meeting: but we surely don’t need reminding that the point is not merely to comment on conditions, but rather to change them. We need to get everyone dancing. I urge those of us who have an interest in subverting or at least loosening the prevailing hierarchy within APSA, whether we are working as individuals, or collectively through groups such as NPS or Perestroika, to commit ourselves in future meetings to showing up and getting on down.