Human Traffickin: The Solution to Iraq?

Just when you think that things could not POSSIBLY get better in Iraq, something else jumps out of the bush (or explodes from the roadside, it’s all the same really) and says: SURPRISE SURPRISE!

Take a look at this House Oversight Committee hearing yesterday.

So apparently we paid $600 million dollars to a Kuwaiti company to build our new Iraqi embassy, and the Kuwaiti contractor used abducted foreign labor and mistreated them. Just read this on-the-ground, eye-witness testimony (pdf) of human trafficking in this construction project, which, by the way, is only the largest State Department construction project in the world.

What a great way to spread Democracy in the Middle-East: using American people’s tax money to fund a construction projected built by slave labor.

God Bless America!

Harry Potter and The Sopranos

There is almost a striking similarity between the endings of Harry Potter and The Sopranos, although such a claim may look strange on its surface. After all, the Sopranos ended on a note of dread and uncertainty, pulled a stunt on its audiences, and played them for fools. On the other hand, HP7 ends with a sunny disposition and showed that all is right in the world.

Well, the similarity between that both endings told their audiences absolutely nothing about the protagonists. No one knows if Tony is dead and what he does, and no one knows anything about Harry, Hermione, Ron, and their respective families and adult careers.

Except whereas The Sopranos made a conscious decision to make its uncertainly in extremely explicit terms, J.K. Rowlings did the same thing but without the explicitness. In the end, both of their audiences know nothing about the fate of the main characters. They are equally mysterious, but in different ways.

Therefore, it is not surprising that both end with a gathering of their respective families. And in some sense this is fitting, since both celebrate the family, but does so in vastly different ways.

The Return of Politics, At Last

Finally, someone says what I’ve been thinking for some time now: Liberal democracies are not the end of history.

It’s time we stopped this liberal-democratic wet dream and confront the reality of international relations: namely, liberal-democratic values and the strategic maneuvers that they demand are not universal.

The Robert Kagan article that I’ve just linked is a well-written, nuanced analysis of America’s position in the international order today. You don’t have to agree with all of its conclusions to see that it’s a well-written, well-argued piece of thinking.

Although the article is couched mainly in a neo-realist IR framework, I agree with its central contention: that America must act strategically if it is serious about preserving the liberal-democratic ideas that it so values–in essence, a neo-realist prescription on how to go about achieving a normative goal, i.e., preservation of liberalism in the international order.

This requires America to finally give up the dream that the world will be shaped in its image, that any deviance from liberalism is not likely to be temporary but long-lasting due to cultural and historical differences. America must realize that no country will automatically open its borders and markets and suddenly turn liberal and embrace America with welcome arms. Rather, it must recognize and acknowledge the fact that illiberalism has a long tradition and cultural rootedness, that there are nations and cultures that will never deem liberalism legitimate.

In other words, America must recognize that liberalism and its values are not universal, transcendent values, but rather values that must be protected and fought for if one truly believes in them. This requires giving up the liberal-democratic Utopian dream brought about by the end of the Cold War, and it requires thinking in very strategic terms about what to do with nations and cultures that resist liberalism (China, Russia) and who might even seek to destroy it (fundamental Islam).

I wholeheartedly agree with this thesis, because I have never thought that the defense of normative values, by necessity, require those values to be fundamental and transcendent. All that matters is that the political community decides that they must be protected. This requires giving up any and all claims to privileged epistemological and ethical justifications of those values, which is something that America will have extreme difficult to do, since we are a country founded on the belief that God gave us the imperative to create the world in our image.

It means, at last, politics has returned, because politics operates based on the assumption that there is no consensus on what fundamental truths are. Politics is the struggle to realize certain visions, themselves derived from normative values held by the political community, by different political communities and actors. It has just been that historically speaking, such normative values are almost always couched in terms of fundamental truth and universalism, whether it’s God, Reason, and most recently, Capitalism.

I welcome this fragmentation of values, and the consequent fragmentation of the international order, for such a fragmentation can finally shake America out of its sense of moral superiority and thus shock it out of complacency and smugness. The fact that values cherished by Americans are now under attack requires America to finally engage in vigorous, active international politics: that is, engaging in struggles of power in which the stakes are nothing less than American identity as a whole.

This to me is the beauty of politics, and also that which makes politics the highest calling: because to engage in politics is to engage in a serious, passionate defense of one’s values and their authenticity by using one’s personal vigor and strength. Beyond simply a struggle for power, politics is the struggle for power that is anchored by a core set of beliefs for which one should be willing to pay the highest price for if one is truly sincere in his belief.

This necessarily means an increase in risk and instability in both an individual, national, and international context, because the stakes are nothing less than the integrity of identity of an individual or a state. This means that there will be intense struggles as beliefs clash, and it means that one must be prepared for such struggles, and if necessary, die for them.

So America must realize that its cherished liberal values won’t defend themselves, that the world is not going to roll-over and embrace the kind of Thomas Friedman politico-economic Utopia of open markets and rule-of-law. Most of all, America must realize that it must assume the burdens of defending its core beliefs and all the danger, risk, and instability that comes with such a defense.

Review of HP7: Deathly Hallows

This review contains spoilers.

This book is a mixed bag to me, because there are some really good parts, and then there are parts which seem under-developed or otherwise rushed.

First, onto the good parts. The narrative is much better this time because taking the narrative action out of Hogwarts really frees Rowling from the structured imposed on her by the schedule of the school. It’s true that you miss out on Quidditch, but I’ve always felt that it was superfluous anyways. Setting the plot in a new, more adult, more realistic (to the extent that realism is possible in a fantasy setting) context makes the action much more exciting and free.

Second, there is much more moral nuances and complexities in this book than ever before, especially Rowling’s decision to challenge the ethical nature of Dumbledore’s past actions. But given the good-vs-evil theme of the book, moral complexities are not as rich as they could be, but that sort of complaint is to miss the point of the series in general. Given that the audiences are mostly children and teenagers, more ethical complexity and shades-of-gray would be inappropriate. After all, this is not a series about challenging traditional moral conventions.

Third, the plot picks up in intensity as it should, since it is the last book after all. A sense of urgency is established right from the beginning, and it rarely lets off save some slower stretches during the middle of the book. A lot gets packed into the pages, and it makes for a much more exciting and tense read. But this accelerated pace does not come at the expense of intricacy, since long-time readers are rewarded with a number of conclusions to various sub-plots running throughout the series.

Finally, the book achieves moments of poignancy that goes beyond what the series has produced in the past, such as Harry’s burial of Dobby, the ghosts of his loved ones accompanying him on his journey to self-sacrifice, the death of Fred, etc. And the poignancy is not of the mawkish, overly-sentimental variety but of the genuinely cathartic sort.

And here comes the not-so-good parts.

First, because the book is so plot-driven this time, I felt that it short-changed some really interesting characters. Given that the narrative takes place predominantly outside of Hogwarts, it’s inevitable that the students (other than the three main protagonists) are given much less face-time so to speak. Even admitting this, I felt that characters like Neville Longbottom, Luna Lovegood, and even Draco Malfoy should have received more development, since each of them have back-stories that could yield huge dividends dramatically: Neville’s vengeance for his parents, Lovegood for her father, and Draco’s vacilitating between good and evil, etc.

But the character that really got the shaft, in my opinion, is Snape. Rowling (in)famously posed the question of Snape’s loyalities, and given his back-story, a confrontation between Harry and Snape would have been extremely dramatic on so many levels. Yet their one encounter yields a scene in which Snape says virtually nothing, and the big revelation that Snape has been loyal to Dumbledore after all is revealed passively in the form of a Pensieve memory. As the character with the most complex morality, Snape gets an extremely short-shrift from Rowling. I was extremely disappointed in this particular encounter, which to me had the most dramatic potential.

The ending is also anti-climatic because what precedes immediately–Harry’s voluntary resignation and self-sacrifice–is so much more poignant than his final confrontation with Voldermort. The entire “dream” or “ghostly” encounter with Dumbledore after Harry dies seems like a deus-ex-machina device to me. All that part does is to come up with a lengthy exposition of why Harry can still live with no real continuity with the rest of the book. Sure, it ties up a lot of loose ends with Dumbledore and the Deathly Hallows, but its only real purpose is to make sure that Harry survives.

The confrontation between Harry and Voldermort itself is underwhelming, becoming little more than cliched Hollywood-style exchanges between Hero and Villain. Would the ending be better had Harry died? My immediate answer would be yes, but I think that even if one wanted Harry to survive, there are better ways to do so than this anti-climatic confrontation.

But even with these flaws, I still found the book to be the best in the series, because it achieves a level of intensity that is not found in all previous books. It brings a satisfying conclusion, albeit not a completely satisfying one, to the series. Like the series as a whole, the book is not terribly original, with influences of Arthurian legends and Tolkien easily perceivable, but that in itself is not detrimental because in some ways the line between homage and direct-quotation is a blurry one. The thematic qualities of the book do not reach the level of richness that is characteristic of first-rate literature, but there is an appropriate amount given the audience.

So as far as literature aimed at children and teenagers go, this is not a bad series at all, with terrific entertainment value. But no one should pretend that this stuff compares to Doestoyvesky or Proust. Will it become a classic of the genre? On commercial popularity alone, it is all but done. But only time can tell whether its artistic influences are long-lasting or not.

Breast Milk

It looks like TSA finally did something right when it announced that mothers can now carry more than three ounces of breast milk.

I’m glad our airports are now safe from the terror threat that is breast milk

Academic Erotica

One common crack people in the non-academic world–which is to say, 99 percent of the public–levels at academia is that grad schools are little more than institutions in which people engage in intellectual masturbation.

And to that I say: what is the problem?

For in that joke is the assumption that the erotic is somehow misguided. And a further assumption is that the erotic can only manifest itself physically.

The first assumption is a reflection of the puritanical character of this country, the same puritanical character that produces an ironic dichotomy: the public condemns sexual scandals of public figures but yet demands every sordid detail.

The second assumption reflects a lack of understanding of the nature of Eros. I am going to make a claim which should surprise no one: not a lot of people in this country have read Plato’s Symposium.

I only bring up the Symposium because in it Socrates articulates the nature of Eros as the pursuit or desire of immortality, which is manifested in its highest form through the production or exchange of ideas between the teacher and the student.

What most of America has never thought about is the possibility that ideas can become objects of desire in that they arouse a kind of “high” or feeling of transcendence. Anyone who has ever produced an intellectual product, whether it’s a book, painting, or music, can attest to the feeling of euphoria. Why do you think musicians often say that performing on stage, and performing well on stage, is better than sex?

And that is the problem with the public: it cannot conceive of a higher manifestation of Erotic Love than the sexual. Therefore, the metaphor of “intellectual masturbation” is a contradiction: its usage suggests that the public does recognize intellectual pursuit as a form of Eros, but it is used in an ironic and derogatory way by those who use it, thereby exposing the inability of the user to conceive of Eros as anything but physical intercourse.

The Shitter as the Source of All Ideas

So I was sitting on the shitter, reading Thomas Friedman’s Lexus and the Olive Tree. Yes, indeed I do read books on globalization as bathroom reading. And one line particularly struck me, only in a way Thomas Friedman can, about the naivety and smugness of neo-liberalism: with the democratization of information, no political leader today can pretend that nothing evil is happening in the world. Or something to that effect.

And I almost burst out laughing, because my God, to think of it: the Internet as teleology! I mean, what a fucking concept! Friedman sounds exactly like Al Gore in his latest book: they both praise the Internet as a great democratic tool that will loosen the stranglehold of information held by MNCs and let the people speak truth to power.

Well here’s a good counter-example: Darfur. Oh yes, we have known about Darfur for a while now, but aside from a bunch of college students wearing green wrist-bands, our political leaders have done what…Nothing?

Oh no, what Friedman seems to forget is that people are not all good, in any sense, at all. Just because we know something to be wrong doesn’t mean we will actually do anything about it.

The wisdom of the crowd is a joke if the crowd makes it decision based on information presented to it by media conglomerates. What is the Internet? The Internet is a place for partisan hacks, opportunistic manipulators, advertisers looking for the quick buck.

All praise the profit motive, who only acts morally as an after-thought.

American Complicity in the Tiananmen Square Massacre

It’s been 18 years and a month since students took to Tiananmen Square to demonstrate and demand government reform. Why am I writing about this? After all, I was only 4 years old when it happened. It has some meaning for me because my mother participated in the demonstrations, and she has since then told me all about her own experiences.

Yet no major mainstream media outlet has covered the story on June 4th, the 18th anniversary of the event. The only thing I’ve seen so far is this retrospective and reflection in LRB. And of all places, it’s based in London.

America has always had a curious, frenemy-like relationship with China, but on this issue of the Tiananmen Square protest, it is complicit. Not complicit in any physical sense, but complicit because America is still supporting the same communist government that used tanks and guns to fire on student protestors. It’s understandable that the Chinese press cannot cover this, since censorship in China will never allow it. But given the circumstances, it might even be understandable why American media is hesitant to cover the story: because it wants to penetrate the Chinese market, and in order to do so, it does not want to piss off the Chinese government.

So much for freedom of the press.

Some commentators see the 1989 protests as a turning point in modern Chinese history, a watershed after which China became “modern” in the industrial sense. It is often said that the Chinese government signed a “reverse” social contract with its people: exchange political freedom for economic prosperity. What a perversion of the social contract! It totally turns the Western conception of the social contract on its head.

And yet we in America continue to support such a perversion of our own values. We turn a blind eye to the countless human rights violations, the lack of any real political freedom. Instead we buy up Chinese mass-products in bulks and pat ourselves on the back from integrating China into the global, liberal economy. We think that such an integration will inevitably “liberalize” China. But we forget that it took a bloody French Revolution to truly instill liberal values into the world, and it took an even messier Cold War to finally make liberalism, as Fukuyama calls it, the last man of history.

In this America is complicit, complicit with the Chinese government in that it failed the dreams and expectations of those students who fucking died that night in Tiananmen Square. America is complicit because it turns a blind eye to the dark side of market-liberalization while extolling its virtues because it can buy cheaper goods.

Hip Hop as Post-Modern (Aest)ethics

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time now, and it’s no surprise, considering that I listened to too many hip hop albums during my formative years. It’s something that has always remained close to my mind, and it saddens me to see the state of contemporary hip hop. So this is both a piece on what I think hip hop is and what I hope it can still become.

To me, hip hop has always been a post-modern art form, meaning that it subverts, if not rejects, traditional conceptions of art and morality. Therefore I have separated this piece into two section, one dealing with the hip hop aesthetic and the other with hip hop ethics. What unites these two parts is their shared subversion of traditional assumptions about art and morality.

Hip Hop as an Aesthetic:

Perhaps the most immediately obvious characteristic that gives away hip hop as a post-modernist aesthetic is its extensive and pioneering use of sampling. While early sampling simply included novel uses of traditional soul and jazz, sampling became much more sophisticated such that today it is possible to construct entire songs without using any real instruments at all. This subverts an entire way of making music that people are used to, i.e., real people playing real instruments. In its lieu we have another way of making music in hip hop: computers synthesizing artificial instruments.

A second, but nonetheless equally important aspect of hip hop aesthetics, is its emphasis on rhythm. In traditional western music, melody is the emphasis. Hip hop, however, almost focuses exclusively on rhythm at the expense of melody. This has unfortunately led to some opinion that somehow hip hop is “less” technically-challenging than traditional, melody-based music. I am not going to venture into that debate, but I believe that rhythm, like melody, are just building blocks, and it’s up to the artists to decide what to do with them.

And sometimes hip hop completely eschews music altogether: see free-style, beat-boxing battle rhymes. No music, no backing beats, just a couple of guys improvising.

Getting beyond the musical aspect of hip hop, now I will get into its textual aspects. Hip hop defies conventions of the English language by inventing new words (see its extensive use of slang that are created out of experience), coming up with strange and unusual syntax, etc. Also, hip hop subverts traditional texts because it is extremely intra- and inter-textual in its approach.

What do I mean by that? Hip hop is intra-textual in that it is constantly self-referencing, whether it’s referencing a previous verse, the rapper’s previous albums, or even a concept that was employed in a previous work (see Dr. Dre’s update on “Next Episode” in 2001, referencing back to “The Chronic”).

Hip hop is also inter-textual in that it is not a self-contained, hermetically sealed work: it constantly makes allusions to other hip hop. For example, just listen to any dis-rap: it is all about referencing and putting down other people’s work. Hip hop artists are also obsessed with the legacy of hip hop: their place within the pantheon, their relative worth compared to the legends, etc. Finally, hip hop is known to reference pop-culture extensively, like movies, cartoons, musicians, etc.

Finally, hip hop is a self-mythologizing art: great hip hop artists have always constructed their own meticulous life story. For an extreme example of hip hop mythologizing, one only needs to look at the Wu Tang Clan. A whole back-story was created, intact with its own self-referencing iconology and symbols, known only to people who are already familiar with the mythos.

These are what I consider to be the predominant aesthetic traits of hip hop, and all of them share this one common thread: they all, in some way or another, subvert traditional musical forms that have become predominant in the West. In this sense the hip hop aesthetic is post-modern because it rejects traditional forms and challenges assumptions about what constitutes art and text. Yet ultimately it’s almost impossible to categorize the hip hop aesthetic since it spreads out into other musical categories. Thus you have the rise of electronic instrumentalism (DJ Shadow), rock (just think of nu-metal), and more pop-oriented flavors (collaborations between a rapper and popular singers). And this slippery quality itself is a characteristic of a post-modern aesthetic.

Hip Hop as Ethics:

Hip hop also has a post-modern flavored ethics in that it does not accept and even rejects conventional moral wisdom. This is first apparent in its subject matter and actors. The subject matter, like most post-modernist art, is not usually considered “appropriate”, meaning that it is questionable, often times vulgar, and generally unacceptable to polite company. In other words, it is not politically correct. The subjects often dealt with in hip hop–violence, inner-city poverty, hustling, drug-use, prostitution, etc–are not usually considered subjects worthy of portraying in traditional art.

Personality-wise, hip hop shares the post-modernist tendency to highlight morally ambiguous (if not downright evil) anti-heroes. These people are not usually considered to be worthy of studying, since most of them are criminals or come from very seedy backgrounds. These people are usually marginalized from society, people like small-time crooks, street-corner drug dealers, pimps and whores, etc. In this respect hip hop shares a striking similar with noir and neo-noir films that used these low-level social types as their protagonists.

These people and topics are not considered morally elevating, since most of them share an almost nihilistic attitude about city-life and condone a lifestyle of violence, hedonism, and recklessness. However, like post-modern art, hip hop portrays these characters in sympathetic lights, considering them as morally ambiguous people who are only doing what they need to do in the face of problems that they cannot control, such as urban decay, crime, and poverty.

In fact, this sympathy and ambiguity about these shady characters are often transferred onto the hip hop artist himself: thus we get the archetype of the religious-conscious, remorseful hip hop hero who has doubts about what he does but does it anyways, justifying his actions as necessary and even inevitable.

Finally, hip hop narratives usually turn the dominant American narrative–the American Dream–upside down on its head. The hip hop hero condones this ethic, because he thinks that if you work hard, you will achieve success. However, it is the means by which this hard work can be done that is different: instead of doing lawful, honest work, the hip hop hero does dishonest and illegal work.

So in fact, hip hop becomes a post-modern ethical system precisely because it challenges, if not entirely reverses, traditional moral values. It is this topsy-turvy moral attitude that makes hip hop post-modern.

Conjunction and Disjunction:

The question remains: does hip hop necessarily require the aesthetics and the ethics to be unified? This is a difficult question because of the nature of hip hop. My immediate response would be that it does not require the unification of the aesthetic with the ethical. Therefore, I can enjoy hip hop purely as art without condoning its ethical codes in the same way that I can enjoy “The Birth of a Nation” purely as cinema without subscribing to its racist ideology.

Indeed some hip hop bear out this intuition, since they do not talk about, and in fact rejects the typical hip hop ethic. This kind of “socially conscious” hip hop rejects the violence, misogyny, and hyper-masculinity of traditional hip-hop. Just go listen to Common or Mos Def, and you’ll see what I mean. They do, however, retain the hip hop aesthetic to a large extent.

But on the other hand, I’m not sure that even in the so-called “socially conscious” hip hop is free of subversive ethics. They might reject the ethics put forth by traditional hip hop, but this in itself does not imply that they accept mainstream ethics. It is entirely possible that they think that they are advancing a better set of values than traditional hip hop without accepting mainstream social values. Indeed there is also some support for this, since Mos Def does not accept the traditional white-society ethical system and yet does not accept hip hop ethics either.

Conclusion:

And this problem of separability between aesthetics and ethics is typical of hip hop: as a post-modernist phenomenon, it is not a hermetically sealed product. Hip hop is almost entire experienced and explicated in specific cultural, historical, social, political, sexual, and racial contexts. Unlike traditional art, there is no element of timeliness or transcendentalism that is apparent in hip hop. So in listening hip hop, the listener is inevitably tangled up in these complexities.

This is my primary reason for liking hip hop: its complexity and ambiguity. However, most contemporary hip hop has fallen well short of the artistic complexity of essential hip hop music, and I hope that it can remain vital as an art form. But I can only hope.

For The Love of Money

“In the popular imagination, humanities professors don’t have anything to be ambitious about. No one really knows what they do, and to the extent that people do know, they don’t think it’s worth doing — which is why, when the subject of humanistic study is exposed to public view, it is often ridiculed as trivial, arcane, or pointless. Other received ideas come into play here: “those who can’t do, teach”; the critic as eunuch or parasite; the ineffective intellectual; tenure as a system for enshrining mediocrity. It may be simply because academics don’t pursue wealth, power, or, to any real extent, fame that they are vulnerable to such accusations. In our culture, the willingness to settle for something less than these Luciferian goals is itself seen as emasculating. Academics are ambitious, but in a weak, pathetic way.”

-from this article on The American Scholar

So much of this article is right. It is true, I’m interested in political theory for the love of money.