Posts

Posted on

[freeway blogging]

Topic: Culture

What do you get when you combine graffiti, politics, car culture, and the PrintShop aesthetic? That’s right: freeway blogging! Instead of painting “WENDY I LUV U” or “MIDVILLE HS BRONCOS RULE!!!” on a sheet and tacking it to the overpass, people have been printing and posting political messages. It’s clever, it’s witty, it’s only slightly illegal, and it gets more readers in fifteen minutes than I’ll get in a lifetime. On the other hand, it requires actually getting up and doing things, including walking on a freeway overpass, and that sounds hard. Plus, unlike regular blogging, you can’t freeway-blog in your underwear.

Or I guess you can ? I knew a woman who climbed to the statue of Junipero Serra above the 280 Freeway in California and flashed her boobs at the traffic below ? but I think it’d be kind of tacky. [via New Yorkish]

Posted on

[celebrate brooklyn 2004]

Topic: Around Town

The trees are leafy again, it’s up over 80 degrees today, and last Sunday our whole neighborhood smelled like kerosene. That’s right! It’s summertime again, or at least a mighty fine springtime with summer just around the corner. And what does summer in New York mean? Well, yes, it means beautiful girls in tiny little bits of clothing, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Summer in New York means free concerts!

Not all the listings are out yet, but here’s the 2004 schedule for the stellar Celebrate Brooklyn series at the Prospect Park bandshell. A few shows not to miss:

  • Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Saturday, June 19, 7:30 pm
  • The Unity Sessions, featuring Israeli Chassidic and Palestinian hip-hop, Thursday, July 1, 7:30 pm
  • African Festival, Saturday, August 7, 2 pm – 9 pm

These are by no means the only worthy shows, just a few that caught my eye. I hope to see you there!

Posted on

[an indian upset]

Topic: India
In an election whose results surprised everyone, the BJP has fallen from power in the world’s largest democracy. The BJP, which called the elections six months early, had expected to coast to victory on India’s spectacular economic growth over the last few years ? their slogan was “India Shining” ? but instead Sonia Gandhi’s Congress Party and an alphabet soup of allied leftist parties have won enough votes to prompt Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to tender his resignation and give the new victors a chance to establish a governing coalition.

The BBC, as usual, has the best reporting from India, though their lead headline, Gandhi triumphs in India election, may overstate the case. While this is indeed a kind of restoration, with the Congress party and the Gandhi family back in power (descendants of Nehru, including former prime ministers Indira and Rajiv, no relation to Mohandas K. Gandhi or Ben Kingsley), I think the results are better interpreted as a rejection of the status quo. After all, in Kerala, where the Congress Party held power, they were soundly defeated by one of India’s communist parties.

Indian politics are incredibly convoluted and difficult to parse, complicated by language barriers, illiterate electorates, rampant political corruption, and the country’s sheer hugeness. As such, drawing large conclusions is always a difficult game. Still, I think there are some important messages in this election.

1) India is a secular country. The BJP rode to power on a wave of Hindu nationalist emotion, having played a key role in the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya, which led to anti-Muslim riots that killed over 2,000. And in 2002, when anti-Muslim riots broke out in Gujarat, the resulting nativist feeling helped the BJP win that state’s local elections.

All that would seem to demonstrate that the BJP’s ill-defined but divisive policy of Hinduttva, or “Hinduness,” was a sure winner at the ballot box. But India is a land of minorities, with substantial Muslim and Christian populations. And even among Hindus, there are divisions at least as wide as those between, say, a Polish Catholic and a Texan evangelical. Most of India’s south is uneasy about the BJP’s Hindi-centric nationalism; after all, Hindi isn’t even in their language group, much less in their local languages. Tamil Nadu especially has a long history of domination by northern rulers, and they fear losing their language rights and their cultural heritage. And among northern Hindus, caste differences still matter: the BJP has tried to win votes from the lower castes and Dalits (untouchables) by playing them off the Muslims, but the relationship has always been uneasy.

Gujarat was the biggest surprise in this election full of surprises. The voters there rejected the communal violence of two years ago, which has devastated their economy, and chose instead the party of inclusion.

2) The economic reforms are working. The central plank of the BJP’s platform was the economy. It’s booming, and the BJP’s economic reforms are to a great extent responsible for transforming India from a sluggish cryptocommunist backwater into an economic up-and-comer. The positive effects of these changes are visible everywhere: MTV, fancy new shops, better cars, cellular phones. The trouble, however, is that while these benefits are visible, they’re still unattainable for most Indians. The economic changes have benefited the rich and the urban middle classes, but India’s majority is still rural and poor. The government that spent the election campaign crowing over stock market results and GDP increases also overlooked fundamental matters such as water shortages and rising electricity prices, and they paid for their neglect at the polls. Indians are pleased with the economic boom, and I don’t think the new government will lead the nation back into socialism. But the Indian people are right to insist that the fruits of the recent success be distributed more widely.

So this election is not a rejection of India’s new economy. On the contrary, had there been no boom and only business as usual, India’s voters might not have been disgruntled about not getting their fair share.

3) Indian democracy works. The voters surprised the pundits and made real choices that were based on enlightened self-interest. They didn’t fall prey to apathy or nativism. This is a rare case of a great mass of poor people making their voices heard through a legitimate democratic process. The new government will be all too aware of the power of India’s voters to pay attention and turn them out of office if they don’t satisfy people’s basic needs. In a country of nearly a billion people, the government has been held accountable for the state of the nation. This is a triumph for India, for democracy, and for humanity.

Posted on

[i am mcasian]

Topic: Culture
New Yorkish helpfully alerts us to the exciting news that McDonald’s is now pandering to Asian-Americans with a marketing website that ranges from the banal (“As Americans with Asian and Pacific Islander heritage, we have many things in common. But we are very different too”) to the bizarre and upsetting (“We’re Asian and Pacific Islander Americans ‘living on the rim'”). Just the pictures alone are gag-worthy (like the food they’re trying to sell).

But my experience in Korea taught me that Asians are just as happy as we are to scarf down foods that have been scientifically formulated to satisfy our basest chemical cravings. Pizza joints are everywhere, fried chicken is a delicacy (as teachers, we were given it as a gift by our kindergarteners’ parents when their kids’ birthdays rolled around). McDonald’s had it’s presence, of course, and even offered a kimchi burger, which had bits of the pickled cabbage cooked into the meat and was served on a rice-cake bun.

But the vilest fast food was Korea’s own Mickey D’s knockoff, Lotteria, brought to you by the giant Lotte corporation whose slogan is “Lotte: Always With You.” I remember being lured repeatedly by one of their posters with what looked like onion rings on it. Time and again I would get all excited for a moment, only to be reminded that those were in fact ojingeo rings: the dreaded squid.

Lotteria, always in step with McDonald’s, is now offering a supposedly healthier “Wellbeing Life Meal,” which is reviewed by A Geek in Korea, who claims that “Eating this was like dropping a small brick in my stomach.”

Bon appetit!

Posted on

[a prison is a prison is a prison]

Topic: Politics
With all the brouhaha over abuse in Iraqi and Afghan prisons run by the U.S. military, it was only a matter of time before someone pointed out that American civilian prisons aren’t much different. This from a New York Times article that it’s important for many people to read:

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates….

The man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country’s criminal justice system.

I believe that in 50 or 100 years, people will look back on the American prison system of the late 20th and early 21st century the way we look back on Jim Crow now: as having been evidently racist and abhorrent. The disproportion of minorities in prison, coupled with the horrific abuse that is tolerated there, amounts to a systematic torture and dehumanization of certain ethnic groups in urban areas, where up to a third of young men spend at least some time behind bars. The American prison system is both inhumane and ineffectual, and therefore immoral. Let us hope that the shock of the abuses at Abu Ghraib sparks a movement to clean up our prisons here at home.

Posted on

[who’s sorry now?]

Topic: Politics

Expectations for our current president have always been low. He received an inordinate amount of credit after 9/11 simply for making his way through a passable speech without bungling any key passages. So I admit that when I read that Bush had actually apologized for something, I was impressed. After all, this is the man who a few weeks ago, when asked at a press conference whether he’d made any mistakes while president, couldn’t think of any.

The trouble is, Bush apologized to the wrong person.

Mysteriously, President Bush did not actually apologize in public to the Iraqi people, the U.S. military, or the American people. Instead, he apologized to King Abdullah II of Jordan, then came outside and described the apology.

This is just weird. I mean, let’s put this in everyday terms. Imagine that the local police wrongfully kick in your door and throw you to the ground and smash your furniture. There was a mixup with the address, and you were unfairly harmed. The police chief decides to do the right thing and apologize, but instead of phoning you up or inviting you to his office, he phones up the police chief of the neighboring town and apologizes to him, then publicly describes that apology without ever addressing you directly. No compensation is offered for your broken door or your humiliation, either. But the police chief has apologized ? to someone, anyway ? and that should be enough.

That a misdirected apology is so clearly a step in the right direction just shows how far this president has taken us in the wrong direction.

Posted on

[just having fun]

Topic: Politics
I don’t usually give a damn about Rush Limbaugh, but Wonkette caught a stunning quote from the gasbag, responding to a caller who compared the abuse of Iraqi prisoners to a college fraternity prank:

Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the skull and bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?

Except that college fraternities are something you choose to join, and you can leave anytime, and relatively few frat pranks involve military assault rifles and indefinite detentions. I doubt anyone tried to pledge Abu Ghraib.

If Bonesmen want to get naked and climb on top of each other, that’s fine — I believe in people’s fundamental right to get naked and climb on top of each other in whatever arrangements they choose — but I also believe in our fundamental right not to.

And then, of course, there are the threats of rape, the sodomizings with lightbulbs, the electrocution torture, the solitary confinements without food or water, the use of an attack dog, the forced masturbation, the unexplained deaths, the torture wounds that were treated on the spot rather than referred to medical staff … Frat prank indeed.

Posted on

[iraqi prisons]

Topic: Foreign Affairs

The Iraqi prison scandals keep getting worse, and then worse still, all as the White House has just asked the Supreme Court to approve its indefinite detention policy at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

There are so many reasons to be horrified. Tactically and politically, these crimes have turned us from bungling intruders in Iraq to downright scoundrels, making it all the more dangerous for our troops there and further reducing our already slim chances for any success. Morally and ethically, the whole approach to imprisonment is dictatorial. It’s the kind of thing you read about having happened under Pinochet or Stalin or Franco — or Saddam Hussein — and shudder. It’s the kind of policy that, as a Jew, I was taught to see as the first steps down the surprisingly short road from liberal democracy to Nazi death camps. No, I don’t think we’re going to slip that far — I have some confidence in our country and in our midlevel civil servants — but the problem is that our behavior has ceased to be different in kind and is now only different in scale from that of the dictators we claim to oppose.