PRESIDENT CHIRAC stormed out of the first session of a European Union summit dominated by a row over French nationalism because a fellow Frenchman insisted on speaking English.... When M Seillière, who is an English-educated steel baron, started a presentation to all 25 EU leaders, President Chirac interrupted to ask why he was speaking in English. M Seillière explained: "I'm going to speak in English because that is the language of business." Without saying another word, President Chirac, who lived in the US as a student and speaks fluent English, walked out, followed by his Foreign, Finance and Europe ministers, leaving the 24 other European leaders stunned. They returned only after M Seilière had finished speaking.And I would have to agree that this is the best part:
Embarrassed French diplomats tried to explain away the walk-out, saying that their ministers all needed a toilet break at the same time.Vive l'impérialisme culturel Anglo-Saxon!
You cannot escape it, even by slipping into Harry Potter's universe. At least, so says French literary theorist Ilias Yocaris:
On the face of it, the world of Harry Potter has nothing in common with our own. Nothing at all, except one detail: like ours, the fantastic universe of Harry Potter is a capitalist universe.
...
The apprentice sorcerers are also consumers who dream of acquiring all sorts of high-tech magical objects, like high performance wands or the latest brand-name flying brooms, manufactured by multinational corporations. Hogwarts, then, is not only a school, but also a market: subject to an incessant advertising onslaught, the students are never as happy as when they can spend their money in the boutiques near the school. There is all sorts of bartering between students, and the author heavily emphasizes the possibility of social success for young people who enrich themselves thanks to trade in magical products.
We have, then, an invasion of neoliberal stereotypes in a fairy tale. The fictional universe of Harry Potter offers a caricature of the excesses of the Anglo-Saxon social model: under a veneer of regimentation and traditional rituals, Hogwarts is a pitiless jungle where competition, violence and the cult of winning run riot.
Harry Potter, probably unintentionally, thus appears as a summary of the social and educational aims of neoliberal capitalism. Like Orwellian totalitarianism, this capitalism tries to fashion not only the real world, but also the imagination of consumer-citizens. The underlying message to young fans is this: You can imagine as many fictional worlds, parallel universes or educational systems as you want, they will still all be regulated by the laws of the market. Given the success of the Harry Potter series, several generations of young people will be indelibly marked by this lesson.
Dan Drezner has more.
Update: Steve Sachs takes the review apart.
Peter Northrup of Crescat Sententia has a great post linking to several arguments for and against the French headscarf, or hijab (الحجاب), ban. Worth a read if you've though about the issue at all. He eventually argues pretty strongly against the ban:
there really is a problem in some French schools that involves the hijab. Unfortunately, this means that the law isn't just an illiberal overreaction to hysteria over increasing pluralism and immigration; it also leaves untouched a deep failure to protect a vulnerable community from serious harm.
It's remarkable to me how little I knew about the pledge before the Newdow case. For instance, until the Ninth Circuit decision, I had no idea that the "under God" section was added in 1954, lobbied for by "the Knights of Columbus, to draw attention to the difference between God-fearing Americans and the godless Soviet Union", as Jack Balkin points out.
I also didn't know that the pledge was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist and devotee of his cousin Edward Bellamy's national socialist ideas. Edward Bellamy is famous for writing Looking Backward, a socialist "utopian" novel.
And finally, I didn't realize that the original salute to the flag that accompanied the recitation of the pledge was not the hand-over-the-heart that we see today, but instead was the one associated with the "Sig Heil!" of the National Socialist German Worker's Party. Alex Tabarrok is right, these pictures of children saluting the flag are creepy.
They don't teach these things in elementary schoool, do they?
Oh, supposedly Newdow did quite well arguing the case before the Supreme Court yesterday.
Here's an interesting 1998 article on early Christian same-sex marriage in the Irish Times (although the link is to something called drizzle.com, I did confirm through a search, that the article does exist on the Irish Times site, albeit in a subscriber-protected area). Worth reading for anyone who opposes gay marriage for religious reasons. Here's a quote:
Contrary to myth, Christianity's concept of marriage has not been set in stone since the days of Christ, but has evolved both as a concept and as a ritual. Prof [of History at Yale, John] Boswell discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient church liturgical documents (and clearly separate from other types of non-marital blessings such as blessings of adopted children or land) were ceremonies called, among other titles, the "Office of Same Sex Union" (10th and 11th century Greek) or the "Order for Uniting Two Men" (11th and 12th century).These ceremonies had all the contemporary symbols of a marriage: a community gathered in church, a blessing of the couple before the altar, their right hands joined as at heterosexual marriages, the participation of a priest, the taking of the Eucharist, a wedding banquet afterwards. All of which are shown in contemporary drawings of the same sex union of Byzantine Emperor Basil I (867-886) and his companion John. Such homosexual unions also took place in Ireland in the late 12th/early 13th century, as the chronicler Gerald of Wales (Geraldus Cambrensis) has recorded.
Boswell's book, The Marriage of Likeness: Same Sex Unions in Pre- Modern Europe, lists in detail some same sex union ceremonies found in ancient church liturgical documents. One Greek 13th century "Order for Solemnisation of Same Sex Union" having invoked St Serge and St Bacchus, called on God to "vouchsafe unto these thy servants [N and N] grace to love one another and to abide unhated and not a cause of scandal all the days of their lives, with the help of the Holy Mother of God and all thy saints." The ceremony concludes: "And they shall kiss the Holy Gospel and each other, and it shall be concluded."
My take away: even if these ceremonies aren't strictly speaking "gay marriage", they do call into question the assertion that marriage as the union of a man and woman only has been an unchanging pillar of Christian society – it seems much more likely that various unions with various social meanings have been performed and celebrated within the Chuch since the early days. The meaning of love, commitment, kinship, and parenthood are continuing to change as the world around us changes and so should our institutions.
David Brooks seems to get it right in taking apart Sam Huntington's position about the unique challenge of Hispanic immigrants.
While I don't have a lot of patience for people who argue against assimilation and for bilingual everything, I see no reason to think that Hispanic immigrants can't or won't assimilate anymore than the Germans, Italians, Poles, Irish, Jews, Chinese, or Vietnamese weren't able to – no matter what the Reconquista conspiracy theorists think.
And further, Brooks is right:
Frankly, something's a little off in Huntington's use of the term "Anglo-Protestant" to describe American culture. There is no question that we have all been shaped by the legacies of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. But the mentality that binds us is not well described by the words "Anglo" or "Protestant."
Lileks is not happy about the storyline of the Jedi Reader, a story book for young children set in the Star Wars universe — not to mention the fact that such a thing exists. Of course, it features Jar Jar getting into trouble:
Jar Jar closes his eyes, because he does not want to see Sebulba punch him.
“Stop!” someone says.It is Anakin Skywalker!
“Do not hurt Jar Jar,” says Anakin. “Jar Jar is a friend of the Hutts.”
The Hutts are bigger and meaner than Sebulba.
Now Sebulba is afraid.
WTF? What is this? It’s bad enough that Lucas invented Jar Jar in the first place; it’s bad enough that they made childrens’ books with him, but Anakin is DARTH FRICKIN’ VADER. To have him show up and dispatch the bully by suggesting that Jar Jar has mob connections is so totally farged I can’t even begin to untangle the moral idiocy of the story. Boil it down: young Damien from “The Omen” saves Rastus McWebfoot from a beating by claiming that the Corleones have his back.
“Be less afraid,” Anakin says to Jar Jar. “Bullies pick on those who are afraid.”Yes, we know. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering, suffering leads to agony, agony leads to Episode Three....
Andrew Sullivan has a point about the sanctity of marriage:
We live a world in which Britney Spears just engaged in something "sacred" (in the president's words), where instant and joke hetero marriages and divorces are a subject of titillation, and where a decades-long monogamous lesbian marriage is a threat to civilization as we know it. Please.
This chokes me up and made me proud to be a Texan: SOLDIER'S FUNERAL TEXAS STYLE. (Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the pointer).
An interesting review at National Review about an "ecofeminist" book called The Pornography of Meat. By Carol J. Adams, the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, it is about how the eating of meat and the objectification of women are actually two sides of the same (predatory, patriarchal) phenomenon.
The review is, as you'd expect from NRO, highly critical — and it seems to me, rightly so. I haven't read the book, but from the description and quotes it seems to fall into the common academic trap of explaining everything with a single ideology du jeur — in this case the never-dull, white male patriarchy explains everything. What could be an interesting subject area — the juxtaposition of food and sex, the erotic qualities of food, the common imagery used to sell food and sex, cultural symbols of "otherness" — turns into an ideological screed against modernity and men.
Things are always more complicated than a single theory of power relations would imply. Or rather, in most cases, their are a plurality of simple reasons that explain it — in this case, the fact that, hey, sometimes people just like to eat meat. But that never sells as well as one, over-arching theory of oppression.
One thing I'm very proud of The Wife for is that she's working very hard to avoid that trap in her dissertation. In her study of the roots of "shareholder democracy", she's eschewing the easy management/capital bad, labor good, class-warfare argument and going for a more nuanced approach. Yes, it's still about power relations and interest groups, but it's a much richer, and hopefully accurate, view than just slotting yet another historical moment into a nice, neat framework. Here's hoping it gets the good reception it deserves.
Interesting article in the NYT magazine this Sunday about The Opt-Out Revolution. On the surface this is about women who, after Ivy League educations, high-powered professional degrees, years of achievement and promotion in the workplace, choose to leave their careers for "the mommy track". As the article says "women are rejecting the workplace" and "26 percent of women at the cusp of the most senior levels of management don't want the promotion".
But what struck me when reading it, is how much the article resonated with me as a man — and with things I've seen and heard my male friends say and do. Perhaps part of what's going on is the larger story of the death of the career. As the women say,
All that coming and going, they say, is the entire point. ''This is not permanent,'' Kresse says. ''It's not black and white; it's gray. You're working. Then you're not working. Then maybe you're working part time or consulting. Then you go back. This is a chapter, not the whole book.''Van Hooser says: ''I am not a housewife. Is there still any such thing? I am doing what is right for me at the moment, not necessarily what is right for me forever.''
Likewise, most of my male friends tend to be on non-traditional career paths. They don't want to work 9-to-5 at a steady job for 40 years. They switch jobs, take time off, start businesses or non-profits, consult, work part time, write, study, take care of family (dogs), etc. With 7.5 years at Fulcrum, I have the longest tenure of anyone I know from my class at school — and I would be out of here in a minute if I didn't get to pretend to be the boss most of the time.
So, perhaps, there's something bigger going on. Is it driven by technological change? The transition to the service economy? The requirement of our "flexible" economy? Or is it a cultural ripple effect from the feminist revolution — the unleashing of a new group of employees on the workplace making all workers take a look around and say "Hey, this ain't that great." I don't know, but this may be another step towards a Free Agent Nation.