May 2008
The Politicization of Disaster
In regards to the nearly 10,000 children who’ve died in China’s most recent earthquake, the New York Times has a fascinating article on the way the disaster has become politicized at local levels, leading to demonstrations against the government for having failed to address the unsafe building conditions prior to the earthquake, as well as exaggerating the role they played in disaster recovery. Concerning the issue, the Times has this to say:
Indiana Jones and the Family Myth
I recently saw the new Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and was pleased to find a film that so easily accommodated itself to a psychoanalytic interpretation. I suppose, as a general principle, however, that the majority of mainstream Hollywood films are perfect terrain for examining the contours of today’s ideological constellation from a variety of angles: in this respect, Indiana Jones did not surprise in the least.
Home Economics
An und für sich:
The flurry of activity dedicated to satisfying the demands of the supposed meritocracy has the beneficial side-effect of blinding the participants to the amount of start-up capital required to participate in the meritocracy at all — a function also served by the reification of “the family,” which shows that the alliance between the capitalists and the “family values” crowd is perhaps more natural than one might first suppose.
Is Barack Obama Muslim?
A handy PSA. (Via Matthew Yglesias.)
Lynch and Herzog Working Together
[Werner] Herzog and David Lynch have teamed up on a film called My Son; a murder drama to be tentatively shot next March. Based on a true story, My Son will tell of a “San Diego man who acts out a Sophocles play in his mind and kills his mother with a sword.” HR says the film will jump between the murder scene and this disturbed man’s story. Nice family film from two completely sane directors.
Yes, it sounds amazing.
Zizek: Theory, Politics, Culture
I recently read Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique, which, for those that don’t know, is an analysis of Marxian political economy from the transcendental perspective of Kantian ethics, and Adrian Johnston’s Zizek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, which I thought was tremendously well written considering the breadth of abstruse theory dealt with. Not to say that Karatani’s wasn’t, in fact Karatani’s was probably just as equally well written, although it was translated, so maybe I should just thank the translator.
Ting Tings
I saw this band on Jonathan Ross and thought I might put them up here, but now they’re in an iPod commercial so I’m sure you’ve already heard of them from that friend of yours with the black plastic glasses and earlobe piercings.
Anyway, they’re called the Ting Tings, there are two of them and they have a nice simple sound, one drums the other fronts.
As for the song itself… not the best lyrics, but the band sounds great and they seem to have a lot of potential and talent. We’ll see once the album comes out. Worth paying attention to.
Usually I don’t like brit bands that use a heavy accents, especially regional ones, it seems pretty camp. In this case, I’ll make an exception as it’s not too over the top.
Acting with James Franco
He was great in Freaks and Geeks, great! I still can’t decide, is his role in the Spiderman movies an intentional comedic triumph or an unintentional comedic triumph? Both?
Will Arnett in Radar
Here’s a great interview with Will Arnett from the end of last month’s Radar Online. One of the wittiest interviews I’ve read. The photographs are also great.
Beck’s New Album
This looks pretty exciting, Dangermouse production and apparently a lot of studio effort. The last two albums have been great, I’m hoping this one takes it to the next level.
Each song started with Beck playing acoustic guitar over a drumbeat: If it made the cut, they’d flesh out the music, usually with Burton playing keyboard bass and Beck playing most of the other instruments.
That seems like a good way to make a record. Well, as long as you spend “at least 10 weeks with no days off, until four or five in the morning every night.” Then you’ll have something.
Zizek on Democracy Now! (Part II)
I’ve included the transcript for the link, but I recommend watching the streamed video. Here’s a link to Part I if you missed it. (Via I cite.)
On Speculation
V. I. Lenin:
We can’t expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot.
(Via Lenin’s Tomb.)
TIME Asks: Is It Time to Invade Burma?
The resounding answer: no. It might be worth looking back at this Carl Schmitt quote. I also like the rhetorical inversion of “is” and “it” in order to obscure their demand for humanitarian intervention (a.k.a. the expansion of economic imperialism). For more on the political usage of the question mark, check out this great Daily Show clip.
Worldview From The Cloud?
A Reddit conversation on the growing information gap between those, to paraphrase Mike Soron, who are “connected” and those who are not.
How Much Did Rumsfeld Know?
TIME:
To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I had never seen any approved CENTCOM campaign plan, either conceptual or detailed, for the post-major combat operations phase. When I was on the ground in Iraq and saw what was going on, I assumed they had done zero Phase IV planning. Now, three years later, I was learning for the first time that my assumption was not completely accurate. In fact, CENTCOM had originally called for twelve to eighteen months of Phase IV activity with active troop deployments. But then CENTCOM had completely walked away by simply stating that the war was over and Phase IV was not their job.
That decision set up the United States for a failed first year in Iraq. There is no question about it. And I was supposed to believe that neither the Secretary of Defense nor anybody above him knew anything about it? Impossible! Rumsfeld knew about it. Everybody on the NSC knew about it, including Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, and Colin Powell. Vice President Cheney knew about it. And President Bush knew about it.
Hillary Clinton, Populist Extraordinaire
Matthew Yglesias:
Economists, environmentalists, everyone who’s thought about the issue for ten minutes, etc. I’m not going to say that our public policy should blindly conform to the consensus among the economics profession, but the gas tax holiday is an illiteracy on a much deeper level — there’s simply no support for this idea among people who’ve looked at it in a serious way. That’s not elitism, that’s reality, and what Clinton’s selling is Bush-style misgovernment.
Selling the War with Iran
Nir Rosen:
Moreover the dominant parties in the government and in those units of the security forces that battled their political rivals in Basra and elsewhere are the ones closest to Iran. The leadership of the Iraqi government regularly consults Iranian officials and is closer to Iran than any other element in Iraq today. Moreover, the Americans have always blamed their failures in Iraq on outsiders, Baathists, al Qaeda, Iranians, because they refuse to admit that the Iraqi people don’t want them. So Iran is a convenient scapegoat to explain the strength of the Sadrists, a strength actually resulting from the fact that they are a genuinely popular mass movement. Blaming Iran also lets the Americans maintain the illusion that the Mahdi Army’s ceasefire is still in effect.
… To the Post as to most establishment officials in the media and government, all social and political movements in the Middle East are either al Qaeda or Iranian plots, or for Senator McCain, a bit of both. These people are unable to see social and political movements in the Middle East as the collective action of poor and oppressed people. People in the region were anti-American before Islamism became the dominant trend, and they were battling American imperialism as secularists and nationalists. During the cold war every popular movement was blamed on a Soviet conspiracy. Now people in the region battle American imperialism as Islamists, but it is the fight that created the movements, not the other way around. And the fight continues.
… Most of those who fight the Americans in Iraq do so not at the bidding of a foreign power but out of genuine and sincere opposition to the American occupation. The Americans never grasped this and always assumed it was about the money, or al Qaeda, and now part of a silly Iranian conspiracy. After at first siding with Iraq’s Shiites much to the consternation of America’s so called “moderate” Sunni allies, the Americans are now targeting Shiites and perhaps even Shiite Iran as Bush prepares for once last war on his path to the “New Middle East.” But without the help of an acquiescent media supplicating to Bush administration and US military officials they might not be able to go to war once again.
(Via A Tiny Revolution.)
Obama No
A provocative article in the Progressive from outspoken professor of political science Adolph Reed, Jr. on Obama:
I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.
… Because he’s tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he’s been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record represents precisely the “character” weakness the Republicans have exploited in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put things over on the American people.
Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction—built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November—that will fall apart under Republican pressure.
And then where will we be?
(Via I cite.)
Why Žižek Matters
Naught Thought:
What makes Žižek important is the simple fact that he approaches the topic of subjectivity and freedom (among other issues) by using psychoanalysis as a lense to examine German Idealism, and that this analysis allows for, and even encourages, a theory of the subject that takes into account but manages to narrowly escape, the scientifically fueled determinism of our age.
Happy May Day
To celebrate, here’s a copy of the Internationale in German:
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Check out some of these great posts:
- Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, and make merry while ye May (Historiann)
- May Day Greetings (Lenin’s Tomb)
- Still Nothing to Lose But Our Chains, After All These Years (The Weblog)
- Dockworkers Protest Iraq War (NY Times)
- International Workers’ Day Iconography (Greenpagan)
- International Workers’ Day (Wikipedia)
- All Out For May Day! (Crooked Timber)
- Immigrant Rights Day of Action (AFL-CIO, DC Metro Council)
- Workers of the World Unite (Bitch Ph.D.)
Inside Dylan’s Brain
Take a look at this fantastic Vanity Fair “portrait” of Bob Dylan vis-a-vis his themes, favorite artists and strange remarks from his radio show Theme Time Radio Hour. It’s pretty great:
Re: Jimmy Lewis – “He sounds as bad off as a rubber-nosed woodpecker in a petrified forest.”
Re: Tex William’s Brother Drop Dead – “Some people die too soon. Others, you’re kind of hoping. Tex Williams has a song for such a situation.”
They say the earth’s warmin’ up. Be careful of that global warming, and wear your sunscreen.
Sometimes when you look at a menu, it’s hard to decide what to get. Life is like that, full of difficult choices.
I want everybody to go out and paint their cars red and white tonight. We want a PINK CAR NATION.
In the comments section, Roryks points out a connection between David Lynch and Dylan:
Your near-exhaustive list - brilliant, by the way - missed out the Wild At Heart movie reference in the recent “Heat” episode: Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern)to Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage)”Uh oh. Baby, you’d better get me back to that hotel. You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt.”
Amazing.
(Thanks to Jenny.)