You Can't Make Mistakes

I recently wrote this piece for Erudition regarding the American mid-term elections. It looks like it was a pretty good prediction/assessment after all.

http://www.eruditiononline.co.uk/article.php?id=816

“Let us call ourselves radicals, let us pick up the mantle of the great Progressives, let us be petit-bourgeois anarchists, but please let us not be “liberals” any longer, who have confirmed themselves as callow wankers who cringe and waffle if only the bullies will leave them alone.”

- Michael Fountain, science-fiction author and teacher

My dear friend Mike Fountain wrote the above this morning. I found it quite moving. You can read the rest of the post here: http://michaelfountain.blogspot.com/2010/09/democrats-deserve-to-lose.html.

I have two new articles in the April edition of Intuition:

Census Cookies – A breakthrough new method of data-gathering is being pioneered in the United States

Cosmic Rays – They’re coming from outer space to break your electrical goods

Enjoy.

Here’s to your inevitable political downfall!

I read this article about the respective public spectacles over Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin and it got me thinking about the spectacle that became Sarah Palin last autumn during the American presidential elections and her present attention-grabbing efforts. Her untimely resignation from the Alaska gubernatorial seat should be another nail in her political coffin, but apparently she is up in the polls with republicans. This does nothing to inspire confidence in her ability to lead—particularly considering that she has just stepped out of such a position in a fit of overly-self-confident irresponsibility. The GOP has backed some horrifying failures of late and continues in its ability to conflate “conservatism” with bigotry and fiscal liberality.

Perhaps this is the strangled choking death rattle of the GOP at last.

Somehow I doubt it, but it would be nice to think so.

This maneuver on Palin’s part is little more than her present attempt to get herself back in the spotlight of national political fame—and scrutiny. It turns out that the old marketing folk-wisdom approach—that both praise and criticism have equal value, as long as they turn heads—works as a strategy for political advancement in the United States now. Last autumn, Palin was roasted over and over again by critics, political rivals and comedians. Rather than taking any criticism seriously—and, though dismissive, it was serious—she soldiered on bravely, in the eyes of her supporters. The rest of thought that she did so foolishly. I often felt pity for her. She was placed in the public eye by the GOP essentially unprepared and then made a spectacle of. At the time, it seemed as though this was something that was being inflicted upon her. Now, however, her spectacular displays of incompetence and lack of judgment have proven to be self-motivated.

It is unfortunate for conservatives, particularly for women, to have to even give any thought to this rambling, silly woman as a viable candidate for anything, let alone the Presidency. It is also remarkable that the conservatives who support her, just as they supported President Bush, seem to do so uncritically, praising when she says something they agree with, ignoring the malapropisms and blaming her critics for their “meanness.” I say that it is remarkable because it demonstrates precisely the way that the American political machine has come to operate. Substance and form no longer matter, having been replaced by sentimentality and dogged devotion—probably driven by a desire not to be seen as backing a failure, fool, or asshole.

Perhaps this does represent the death rattle of the GOP after all. The Republicans would do well to leave some of their failures and garbage along the side of the road. If they don’t, they are likely looking at a series of very disappointing years before they figure out a way to turn the apathy and indecision of the Democrats against them again. So, here is to you Sarah, may you be taken out with the rest of the political celebrity trash. God help you until then. You’re going to need it.

Update:
10. July 2009 14:48

In case you needed another argument why we should let her go quietly into the night: here it is.

Nothing gets in or out.

I had to go to the American Embassy in Cairo this morning. My passport still has five years left before it expires, but all of my visa pages have been used up. This is not necessarily from traveling a lot—traveling between EU countries now requires no passport control—but from living long-term in a country that has very arbitrary and haphazard immigration and border control. My passport is chock full of Egyptian visas.

Here is how it works: you can get a temporary—tourist—visa to enter the country from your local Egyptian consulate or embassy. Or, you pay the visa fee and get the stamp when you enter the country at the airport. Either way, this takes one page of your passport. Upon landing, you get an arrival stamp (one-quarter of a page). If you leave and come back you get an exit stamp and another incoming stamp (half page). If you apply for a resident visa through a sponsor, such as the university, you will use up another page.

If you apply for a long-term tourist visa—which is what most people do whether they are working/attending university here or not—this takes yet another page. From the last calendar year, I have four tourist visas (4 pages), one multi-entry endorsement (1/2 page), two full-time student/resident visas (2 pages), and about six exit/entry stamps (1 1/2 pages). That is a total of nine out of the sixteen-odd visa pages in my passport gone. My most recent resident visa has expired and I have two weeks to get a tourist visa for the summer in order to fill the gap before the University will sponsor me for another visa. The Mogamma will not place another visa in my passport becasue I am out of pages.

It was time to have pages added to the ol’ passport. So, I checked the embassy hours online: 8am until 11am, every Sunday through Thursday except for holidays and the last Tuesday of every month.

Confused yet? Just hang on.

So, this morning, I dragged myself out of bed and staggered downstairs to catch a cab downtown. I arrived near the embassy and walked, looking for the entrance. The American Embassy in Cairo appears to be a tribute to the concrete fortress-style architecture of the American 1970s. Here is a picture, which I do not own the rights to, but gets the point across. I would have taken my own picture but likely this would have ended in my being arrested and beaten. What you will not see in that picture is the 5 meter high wall that surrounds the triangular tower in the middle of an triangular city block. I didn’t know which of the three streets the main entrance was on, so I just picked a side and started walking.

It was the wrong side.

There are three or four doors in the two-kilometer long embassy wall, labeled cryptically. I just kept walking and walking and finally asked one of the many Egyptian National Security guys standing outside the walls where the entrance was. He gave me directions. By this point I am already worried that I will not have enough time to get inside, wait in line and submit my paperwork. I am also a little put off by how—not—inviting the embassy building itself is.

A few weeks prior to this, I was invited by one of the committee members at the BCA to the Queen’s Birthday Party at the British Embassy. It was a giant cocktail party for the Queen. Bagpipes, drinks, food, ice-cream, hundreds and hundreds of diplomats. It was pretty cool. The party was held in the garden at the embassy residence: a very lovely, very comfortable setting. Grand British architectural style, but quite modern. Apparently, before the construction of the Nile Corniche road, the garden had extended all the way to the river. Lovely. The American Embassy is the opposite of this. While the British seemed to say, “Come in. Have a drink,” the Americans seemed to be saying, “Please leave now, or we might beat you.”

I finally found the entrance and a man pointed me to the left door as he was pointing couples of people to the door on the right. I noticed an AUC professor who I often see in the library in the line ahead of me. Once inside the security chamber—for lack of a better term—I was relieved of my mobile phone and my identification. I had been warned about this by a friend who had told me to take a book, but nothing electronic. After reassembling my person, I was told that to get to the American Citizen Services section I would need to go right then right again, left, up the stairs outside, through the doors, right, then down the stairs inside and then left. There were no signs. I noticed the visa section for Egyptians trying to get entry visas on my left before the stairs and the doors and things. It was outside. At 10am the temperature was already 30C (86F). No better way to say “please come to our country” than “please sit in this horrifyingly hot place and wait forever for the privilege.”

Even once inside, the place screamed “Go away! You do not belong here!” The ceiling was 50 meters above and there were rows of identical windows. The room was triangular. I was standing below ground in the center of the triangular tower. I took a number from a machine, which was tiny, unlabeled and on a shelf practically at eye-level so that you would have to search the entire high-ceilinged chamber before finding it. Then I waited. There were 30 people ahead of me. This took the better part of the hour.

Once my number was called, the rest was relatively painless. I submitted my passport and application and was then instructed to take a blue form to the cashier, even though there is no charge for additional pages being added to a passport. I was told that I needed to get a “no-charge” receipt from the cashier. I rolled my eyes. The woman on the other side of the bullet-proof glass did not blink and pointed in the direction of the cashier.

And that was it. I was told to come back the next morning and my passport would be ready. Relatively painless. I just wonder what goes on inside the embassy that requires that level of fortress-like security and obfuscation. We—Americans—really are crazed when it comes to security theater. We just can’t get enough. So, tomorrow morning I will get up and repeat the process before work, or just wait until Wednesday when I can go to the Mogamma as well—an experience which I will also write about, I’m sure.

Liberation Theology for the 21st Century

I caught this article from the Christian Science monitor this morning on the trepidation of Arab states over reacting to the current situation in Iran. They cited the “voice of a disenfranchised [Iranian] people” as the mechanism for the current political and social unrest and that this is the biggest political crisis facing Iran since the 1979 revolution.*

I have been reading a great deal of late about the 1979 Iranian revolution and have begun to understand that the socially and economically disenfranchised in 1970s Iran were not actually active participants in the revolution, nor did they derive any particular benefit from it. Neither the poor nor the merchant class were particularly involved in the rise of the Khomeini movement. It was a revolution apparently driven by an increasingly religiously motivated middle-class and the urban intellectual class which drove the development of an opposition to the Shah. That there was little involvement on the part of the rural poor is quite surprising considering that the themes employed in the revolutionary rhetoric on the part of Khomeini and his supporters was seemingly socialism wrapped up in Islamic topoi or terminology.

In other words, the revolutionaries of 1970s Iran employed a specifically crafted rhetorical framework based on sort of liberation theology in order to galvanize certain parts of the population and pulled support from the most unlikely sectors of Iranian society, all the while setting the stage for continuing the disenfranchisement of the already disenfranchised. Many of the secular intellectual socialists and Marxists went up against the wall when Khomeini’s revolutionaries seized control, many succumbed to the pressure being exerted around them and conformed to the newly political and religiously-mapped social environment around them.

It would seem that all of the seeds of disenfranchisement sewn by the 1979 revolution are now coming to fruition. The intellectual class is no longer happy to be subjugated, the poor are fighting back, not in line with the religious elite who are waiving the liberation-theology around—still, and again—but against them. In 1979 it was that same—then very young—urban middle class who were becoming more religious who built the revolutionary movement. They made Kohmeini into a a figurehead, and he tacitly accepted the role allowing them to drive the revolution forward.

The funny—or maybe “horrifying” is a better word—thing about revolutions, and revolutionaries, is that they cease to function as a revolution the moment they are no longer the opposition. That is unless there is a political mechanism established at the same time for limiting the authority of the revolutionary leaders. This was never the case in Iran. Indeed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had to die before his position as the leader of the revolution—and therefore the Iranian government after the revolution—would be questioned. After his death he was replaced by another revolutionary leader who had become entrenched in the “new” political system in Iran in the 1980s.

Now that “revolution” is being called into question, mostly because it is no longer a revolution. Just as Castro’s revolution lost its meaning the moment that he took power in Cuba and Che Guevarra—the real revolutionary—went on his way, as is the preferred role of the true revolutionary. How to ensure then that the revolutionaries live up to the ideals of the revolution and not their own desires for power? How to keep the bitterness of their previous disenfranchisement from their policy and administration and marginalizing those that they once sought to free from disenfranchisement?

I am loathe to cite the American political system as a standard for post-revolutionary political development—and indeed it has its problems, not least of which is the unabashed power-squabbles of our present party-system—but it worked. When the first Americans called for the revolutionary leaders to retain their power, they stepped aside and had an election. The established a set of rules, the interpretation of which has changed over time, but which are still the rules, nonetheless. Those rules, for better or for worse, continue to keep the political system as fair as we can make it. There is still power-grabbing.

There is still lying, cheating, and stealing. Indeed, more than a few of us have been concerned that the administrative regime of President Bush and his cronies would have a deep effect on the way business was done after they left office. It seems, though, that this is not the case. We shall see, but it seems that we are moving back to normal after years of opacity and circumvention of the Constitution to protect the interests of the few at all possible costs.

Perhaps another revolution in Iran is what is called for. Perhaps not. Perhaps the present regime is learning something from the political strife that is now boiling throughout Iran. Likely not. If there is another revolution, it cannot continue as normal. It has to live up to the ideals which galvanize and excite it in the first place rather than simply serving the interests of those who do the exciting.

Khomeini’s liberation theology still applies in Iran, possibly now more than it did before. The present regime had better hope that the people never get their hands on copies of his book, Islamic Government as they would find themselves out the door in very short order. The principles which are outlined therein are a far sight more fair and reasonable than those under which the present regime operates.

For more information about the Iranian political system and the 1979 revolution, I suggest the following:

• Islam and Revolution: Writing and Declarations of Imam Khomeini by Hamid Algar.
• Khomenism: Essays on the Islamic Republic by Evrand Abrahamian.
• The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran by Said Amir Ajromand.
• Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi. Or for the more visually inclined, the film version.

———

* In solidarity with that voice, the background of this blog is now a picture of Naqsh-e Jahan Square in breathtaking Isfahan.

And so it begins.

In case anyone missed this yesterday (it was evening for me), you can download the audio here.

President Obama’s Inaugural Address

It was a good speech. I, for one, am glad to have a President again who can string words together in a meaningful way. Enjoy.

It always comes in the most unlikely packages.

WARNING:This blog post acknowledges the existence of pornography, free-speech and, well, sex between people older than 25.

This morning, I read this article about Larry Flynt’s appeal to the U.S. Congress for a bailout of the porn industry. At first, I laughed. Then, on further consideration, I decided that this was more than a prank.

Larry Flint—while maybe not the most savory of characters in the minds of most—is always ready to bring us down a peg in our conceit as a nation. Some would call him a smut-peddling, degenerate lowlife. I would refer to him as the 20th century’s champion of free-speech. Some might say that he corrupts the minds of American children. I would say that anyone who thinks that American kids aren’t going to find their way to porn one way or another is an idiot.

Besides, Americans are prudes, right? Puritannical on the outside, and all sublimated rage, lust and envy on the inside. We must keep up appearances, just don’t look between the mattresses, on the top shelf of the closet, or in the nightstand.

Honestly, if Americans were a bit more open about sex, people would probably have lower blood pressure, or at least be a little less cranky.

I was in Germany for Christmas—more to come on that topic as well—and stayed with a friend’s family. We were in a guest room which apparently was also used as a laundry sorting/ironing facility because it contained an ironing-board adorned by a rather large picture of a nude male model. The matron of the family just laughed and said that her daughter had gotten it for her years ago. Apparently, he used to have underwear on that disappeared as you ironed.

There was no embarrassed silence, no blushing, and the ironing board did not suddenly disappear. It was just not a big deal, because sex is just a thing, and nudity is nudity. Shrug.

In a typical American household, this scene would have ended in blushing embarrassment and the swift removal of such an object. Not to mention that if child services ever got hold of this information…

Why are we such prudes in the States?

Well, for one, we are unrealistic. Ask any of your American friends if they think that their parents have a healthy sex life. Do it, right now. Whoever is around. They don’t even have to be a friend.

If you can even bring yourself to ask that, it probably means that you weren’t just crippled by mental cinema of our parents having sex, and that makes you different. If you got an answer other than groans of disgust, nausea, or a slap in the face, then you were probably not talking to an American born between 1975 and the present. In my anecdotal experience, the Americans of my generation typically never conceive of their parents as sexual beings. Never. To do so brings on the aforementioned nausea, mental images, and so forth.

But you know what? Your parents did have sex. Probably lots of it. That’s why you are here. That’s how it works. Grow up.

If we were a little more realistic about sex, we might tend to be more realistic about other things as well. Sex is one of those things that we can’t talk about, right? What does this silence breed? Well, ignorance, for one. Then there is repression, and its inevitable partner in crime, neurosis. None of those are very good things. That is how it is in the States though: if everyone is not talking about something, then everyone had better not talk about it.

Unfortunately, no one has been talking about this last act of our president to bail various industries out with nonexistent government funds either. Perhaps if we had been, the Senate wouldn’t have been so zealous in their padding of the original bill to bail out the bank giants. Perhaps the auto industry would be forced to make changes in the structure of their enterprise which would save the industry rather than just placing a bandage on a severed arm. Maybe.

The point is, we don’t know. We don’t know because no one talks. This is not unlike: “We had no idea that Jimmy was a rapist. We didn’t know.” Granted, we also didn’t talk to little Jimmy about sex, and we told him that it was dirty, but you never get to hear that in the tearful interviews of parents after the FBI excavates their basement to find the bodies of all of little Jimmy’s girlfriends.

So I say “Bravo!” to Larry Flynt. Larry is the one guy who is not going to lie about what he and others in the industry are going to use their bailout money for. You can’t say that for the automakers, because they are going to use their bailout money for the same thing that Larry would, they would just have you think otherwise.

To the losers.

Hot on the heels of my last post, Tim Krieder, cartoonist and the brains behind “The Pain” comic series, posted this piece, which reflected my very strange dream quite a bit. The comic itself is not the important part of that link, however. Please make sure that you continue on a read the article below it.

This guy, Krieder, is an obvious cynic, and with any likelihood a total asshole—I don’t mean that as an insult, some of my best friends are assholes—but sometimes he writes things that touch me in a way that I am not expecting. I got a little choked up and teary reading this article, for instance. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a total sap. I cry while reading sci-fi, I give money to street kids and widows, I talk about love and friendship in a non-ironic way. Usually though, I am typically a realist—read: pessimist—with regard to government/political/social stuff. It seems now with all that has happened, I have fallen into the camp of sad, sappy, suckers—as I might have previously viewed them—who believe that everything is going to get better.

On this point particularly, I think that Krieder is spot-on when he says:

“that the last eight wretched years had occupied so large a chunk of our adulthoods that we’d forgotten that nothing lasts forever, we’d thought that this was just how the world was: mean-spirited shitheads would always win and we would always lose. It was hard to believe it was really over.” [Krieder, link]

It is hard to believe that it is over. It is hard to shift gears into thinking that things might work out. I’m not so naïve as to believe that everything will change overnight, or that President Obama will change the world single-handedly, but I do feel like I am rubbing the sleep out of my eyes after a really terrible dream. Not a nightmare, per se, but just a really bad dream where nothing works and nothing makes any sense.

Maybe that is what is happening. It does feel like everyone woke up all at once, not a little pissed-off, and took action. If that is so, then I raise a glass and a still-angry fist in toast and say again, “Here’s to you, and here’s to me, best of friends we’ll ever be. But, should we ever disagree…”

Well, you know the rest.

And now the real work begins.

Well America, as a collective, we chose well. We were faced with the most important set of decisions that we have made in a long time and we made the right ones. I, for one, am thrilled. I actually cried out of relief this morning.

While President Elect Obama is positioned to be able to effect change in a significant way, what with being backed by a Congress which will support the directives of the new administration, there are a few things which didn’t go so well.

Michigan passed the stem cell research and medical marijuana ballot initiatives, both of which are positive things for people who suffer debilitating and painful diseases, and their respective ratifications are a step away from maligned points of view that these things stand in moral opposition to goodness and rightness. They will hopefully help many people.

I said above that we chose well and we did, for the most part. However, in this time of celebrating immanent changes for the better and positive steps forward, it is important to point out our failings, lest we forget ourselves. I would like to point out, for instance, that—at the time of writing—in Florida and Arizona have decisively banned gay marriage, and Arkansas has decisively banned adoption for gay people. California is still uncertain at this time—with only 20% of the polls reporting results from their ballot initiative—though it doesn’t look good there either, which saddens me.

Update 21:51 EET: With 95% of the precincts reporting, California has passed the gay marriage amendment ban. 52% Yes, 48% No.

Why are these things important? First, they indicate that even in seemingly liberal or progressive places, conservative/bigoted rhetoric is still very powerful in convincing people to make decisions about social issues. Second, at a time when things are looking up and we have a new golden-boy—who actually speaks in a positive way about gay people in his rhetoric—we obviously still have some work to do.

What do I mean by this? I mean that we have reached a new echelon of civil rights issues. We now will have a President who is part of a formerly legally disenfranchised—currently practically disenfranchised, in many ways—section of the American populace. This being the case, we now have an even greater chance to chip away at the bigotry which still lives in our law code. This was less possible over the past 8 years during a time when the dominant political thread was busy pandering to the very people who support that bigotry in their daily lives.

We have a chance now to rectify the mistakes that were made in the past 8 years, and in some cases 16 years—let us not forget that it was President Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage act into law. The current President Elect is quite a bit more progressive than President Clinton was, but it won’t mean a hill of beans if we don’t actually progress. We can only hope that in the coming years, we will be able to overturn these bigoted state constitutional amendments and have a new kind of civil rights revolution in which people are treated equally again under the eyes of the law.