Planet of the Apes Conundrum

Why does Taylor understand his predicament as an inversion, in other words, understand that apes were ruling men, and not grasp that he had to still be on earth, for this basic observation not to be nonsensical? Because, the audience is being told, this world is not our world, it is a fantasy world in which it makes sense for Taylor to feel this way. 

The movie, the audience assumes, is an allegory: the signifying order is not that of real time, anywhere. Otherwise how could we not already know where we were? In this place, what looks like apes are not; what look like humans are not . . . they are aliens!  Thus to call them apes makes the movie about a realm detached from the real continuum of experience we understand to be operating in scifi movies.  Because in this signifying order, Taylor does not know he is on earth.

Then the end of the film reveals that we are on earth after all, the whole time, and that our framing was wrong. No allegory, this was a science fiction movie after all!  This causes vertigo.

Now you see racism is revealed as such: he hated apes even though he had no idea where he was.  Even though, of course we knew, we sort of knew the whole time.

The context-independent hate is prejudice, racism. The same problems that were destructive of America in the 1960s destroyed her for good-- we were fooled by the Black astronaut's scientific curiosity, so out of stereotype's range, we felt we were in a post racial world -- the forces that drowned Liberty, are in Taylor wherever he goes.

Kenya meltdown

The assassination of 2 human rights advocates means Mwai Kibaki will supervise a huge bloodletting without compunction.  It is as Bernard Porter in the LRB (if you subscribe) says, except, Porter sometimes seems to embrace a weaker version of the prejudices he dismisses in his accounts. There is nothing special about Africans in the world community that makes them "culturally" susceptible to bad government or fraud. It is not only just that the "it is our turn to eat" framework was violated by Kibaki, as Porter has it. It is not only that tribalism was no big deal and then became a big issue under Daniel Arap Moi.  It is that the state is disfunctional to civil society in Kenya, as it is in many postcolonial African countries. The state must be an impartial arbiter, not a slouching leviathan looking to first one, then the next tribe. The looking to first one and then the other tribe is the problem.

We in the United States have to act now.  Today is the time to punish Kibaki's government with measures now, not after a massive slaughter and ethnic cleansing in the cities, no government aid, no more loans, no nothing. Only save travel, the role of human beings going from one place to another, learning about where they are. And medicine so as not to wound the hurt. Other than that no more money. Stop Mercedes from selling Kenyan governmental officials white Benzes. Stop the liquor companies. Prevent the Kenyan bottle company from getting materials from the West. Stop the auto parts. No more container ships.  No more computer deals. No more US money handed over to the forty-person fake cabinet. Just as in 1907, when Casement and Morel reported about the Congo atrocities, publicize the killing of innocents.  Do it now before it gets really really bad.

Reorient the trade to countries that do not attack and kill their own citizens. A very simple rule.

Teaching and Lecturing at a State University

Not a surprise, small devices are creeping into the classroom and being turned on and off while I am "lecturing." (What they hell is that?) Listen, I hate everything new. I don't like not being able to double-space after a full stop when writing these words. But anyway.

Observing a colleague's class, I found myself noting how many students were checking their e-mail, hand-held phone logs, or browsing dietary web sites.  Not that there was a mile-a-minute information overload, but there's participating and there's coasting and whittling away at the time and then abruptly getting up and leaving.

In my class, at the height of my lecture -- my lecture -- on the "red rubber" scandal in the Leopoldian Congo, in which Sudan and other policemen and merciless Kurtzes riding them made a dent in the idea of unregulated "free trade."  Really slavery and labor theft and butchery and terrorism.  Somewhere around the end of the lecture and it is true the class was pretty spellbound at the picture of the boy with his hands cut off, a fellow at the very very back of the class -- the place were guys seem to stroll in and out late in the class period -- pulls out his PDA and starts thumbing the keys.

I told him to put it away. When it dawned on him that I was talking to him, I said, "Yes, I am that kind of professor."  And then I seemlessly finished, calm as a sea urchin.

I hate.

I hate rudeness in my face. I hate having to be the one to "educate" in this way: Yes, it is unacceptable to do as you are doing in a classroom.

I asked Bernie C. about this, my Jewish history professor hallway neighbor. He sees no difference between devices, lap tops, or young women dressing inappropriately, necessarily. He also feels that lecturing is a pre-print culture, medieval form of conveying information that is on the way out. Easy for him to say. He's already thinking about retiring in a few years. Why not just make videos, he says, and the students can run them over and over at their leisure.

I'm sure some young people learn better outside the lecture format.  But isn't the point of the lecture format also to teach students to be able to hear a presentation and draw the important points from it, writing down these points, and combine them with readings, to form a body of knowledge that can be verified?  Why is listening to a person speak about something a vanishing mode, to be replaced by data in words and pixels?

Is everyone insane?

Most heinously Evil ad in the world

Chevron has an ad campaign designed to look like a public service, asking people to conserve energy. Now, why would an energy company -- aka an oil company -- want to reduce people's energy usage? They don't.  

Take a look at the ads more closely.  Every single one pairs a face, i.e. "everyman," you, me, etc., with a pledge, and the pledge in every case negates itself or deflects actual transformation.

"I will leave the car at home more often." Everyone knows people act according to habit.  Here we are asked to leave the car at home once a week, maybe once a month.  Whew.  Every third Tuesday, maybe?  Hard to plan that out with the kids and work and all.

Consider an alternative ad: "I will sell my car and take public transportation."

But there is a more important point here.  The Chevron ads collectively are an attack on the actual politics of activism and public pressure.  It looks like a campaign, but it's somehow strangely ineffective, enervating.  "That's all that can be done?" part of us asks, or feels.  "To ask people to make a small change, that they won't make, that I won't make."  It's all so pointless to conserve energy, much less to change public policy or reorient Americans to sustainable lives.

That is the hidden purpose of the Chevron ads.  They are like white noise amped up to high volume when someone is trying to speak.  They are the "they" masquerading as "us."  Their true meaning is to offer a babble of voices that bore, slightly irritate, annoy.

Public citizenship, environmentalism, and self sacrifice: this is what it looks like, boys and girls. It's crap.

Stupidest ad in the universe (and above, Evilest ad in the unviverse)

The antihistamine commercial where the dad comes down and dusts off his old fishing rod, and says he hasn't been to that favorite fishing spot, "a river that runs through a field, a field with pollen."  Some moron figured that the ads with fields of wildflowers meant hayfever, and not a river, so they needed to have the field.

Few rivers run through fields.  The field would be a wetland, or there would be river banks. Small streams tend to run in vegetation.  Fields that weren't wetlands would be plowed to the river bank.

So in the end the father and daughter are shown walking through a forest and then standing and fishing on a brownish green CGI "field" with a CGI "river" put through it and vanishing into light savannah in the distance.  The edge of the "river" looks like a flat silver knife edge.  It's like an idiot dream.

Book contract for Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400 - 1948

Cambridge University Press, New York.

The "Syndics'" caveat or proviso was that the revised ms. be read by a reader selected by the press, but this will be one of the previous readers, and I am following advice.

I'm secretly very happy but I'm keeping the feeling from myself as a neurotic kind of self-punishment.  Now and again I realize for a moment.

All I have to do is take away the textual self-obfuscations and reveal what remains, undistorted.

Huffman is to be praised more than contested.  The point must be to acknowledge the greatness of Great Zimbabwe and other northern states while sharing in the traditions and heritage and effects of the rise and fall of same. People in South Africa rose and grew from the injection of organization represented by the ha rotse and later the rolong order.

This corresponded to similar kinds of authority north of the Limpopo, in the Zimbabwean highlands, of the Rozvi (rozvi).  There was a single loan term and a shared way of doing things, despite the difference in ethnicity ("Tswana" vs. "Shona").  There are other such shared ideas and terms, and one example is "ini" meaning little, a suffix.  One links the grasslands of the east with the highveld in a partnership of unequals, which as I show structured brotherhood (putative) among chiefs settling together in "twin-court" settings.  These are Motebele and Motebeyane, or Tebele and Tebeyane, or similar.  This is the paradigm within ha rotse ("Hurutshe") as well as Crocodile and so on lineages on the highveld in South Africa.  This is the ini connection again (in the form, ane: diminutive version of, i.e. "junior court").

Revised 3/26/09

AIG reveals deep cracks in what Americans believe they will take

The AIG crisis shows that Americans will tolerate much more self-abuse than previously  thought.  We can continue to fail to articulate the real contradictions in our political economy, and say things like, "those darned bankers!", when the real issue is not the bankers.  Sure, the bankers are robbing the taxpayer, but we have to continue to PAY them to rob us, indeed, to give the handgun and point it at OURSELVES, so they can buy bigger boats and have chauffeurs and travel first-class.  WHAT THE F - - - ?  What is going on?

The bankers and brokers and traders would much, much rather hold onto their huge bonuses than not hold onto them.  In fact, once they get that money, they'll fight for the rest of their God-given lives to keep it!  That's because they thought they were going to get it, and they like money, just like you and me.  They would rather have that money even if it meant the bailout failed, which they probably feel is a bigger issue than piddly them, FAILED, and brought the entire country into a Depression, because they could always argue it was structural, no one parts with wealth voluntarily at those masses.  No one.  Would you?

So railing against this gigantic concrete edifice of obviousness, that's the way forward somehow?  What frustration are we expressing, besides our realization that we have no view, that we can't ignore the obelisk, that it blocks our path?  That we are looking at the incommensurability of capitalism with the public weal?

Ten years north of the Orange River

Ten years north of the Orange River a story of everyday life and work among the South African tribes, from 1859-1869 By John Mackenzie: "How should I answer to Khari if I changed the of the town said Sekhome to me on one occasion when we were conversing on this subject . . ."

How should I answer.

Swimming

Through the unheated hallway briskly, running on the blue plastic corrugated map.

Exchange pleasantries with Fowad.

Goggles spit on and affixed.

Into the cool blue water. I swim easily, falsely, the Australian crawl because I am not out of breath yet. It is a 90 lengths to a mile pool. I swim the first lap in good form, breathing once on every third stroke on alternate sides. My kick is lousy, mainly to elevate my feet. It's a poor expenditure-of-oxygen-to-velocity part of my stroke, so I economize. Not unrelatedly, when I am rounding my fourth length, lap number two, I am already looking forward to the transition at the end of length five. Because in fact I am fucking out of breath and pushing it just to maintain a brisk form and not start waving at the water and rocking from side to side like a little boat bath toy.

My switch over is to the breast stroke. I can do the breast stroke forever, certainly for a mile (though it would take me almost an hour). I breast stroke happily back to Fowad, sitting on a plastic chair reading a tabloid. I go back to the crawl from the wall to the shallow end. It is not only that I am at this point most comfortable moving from breast stroke to crawl every 25 meters (or whatever the pool is). The fact is, I am better swimming the crawl well toward the shallow end, where the upward slant of the floor tiles give the impression of greater and greater speed. This makes the finish very easy. In contrast, swimming the crawl while almost out of breath moving toward Fowad and the deep end, is to see the tiles move more and more slowly under one's gaze, and feel like a flounder with its eye migrating around so it can stop wallowing and lay still.

After a while I start enjoying it, or almost. About lap fifteen or seventeen, when it is clear that I am going to cover my half mile in a twenty or so minute period. Then I start fantasizing about 27 laps, the 1 KM mark. Most often if I have time to do more than forty lengths (which I call half a mile) I will do fifty, not fifty four. I have not yet swum a mile at the JCC pool.

I make a great show of the last lap and swim the crawl without breathing for the last eight strong strokes, and hop out without using the ladder. I get my towel and 750 dollar glasses. Fowad says, "So how is it Paul. How's he doing?" Who, I sometimes ask. "Obama." Okay, I say. He's got a tough job. We discuss Madoff. I point out absurdly that he took advantage of other Jews, even imitating a Jewish matron I heard complaining on the radio. Fowad shows me Bernie Madoff's black and white profile, his hook nose. "You see." Yes, I say. Look at my profile: and I am only half Jewish. We share a laugh, me and the Moroccan lifeguard at the Jewish Community Center, who knows that Obama is a Muslim and once you are a Muslim you can never turn back, and so has his doubts. But he kind of likes Obama. He's not "doing so bad."

I get into the steam room. It takes about twenty minutes to heat up, and it shuts down if not fiddled with every fifteen minutes. I.e. it's a Jewish steam room. Today I got lucky and the temperature was at 115, a once in a month occurrence. I sat and steamed and read the Washington Post best I could, the print from the reverse side showing through in the wet.

I know all the men in the locker room at this point by sight. I remember about half their names. I used to swim later by a half hour, and there was Paul the financial guy and his wife, who swam together. There's Mike who wears flippers and backstrokes just about a stroke behind my speed. There's a woman who really swims, a fast half hour on the right (1.5 M. shorter) lane. Bye bye. There's a big guy who sticks to the crawl the whole way whom I lap every ten or so.

In the locker room there's a few guys who work out and change about that time. An older financial guy who teaches for a pittance in his retirement. It is much better to exchange views with such people when your penis and overflowing belly are visible. That way, there is only the pretense and farce that can be mustered out of nothing in the conversation, no bullshit stemming from a suit or hidden nipples and so on.

I love old Jews, and loved changing in the locker room in the YMHA on 92nd street years ago with the old handball players. Those guys are all dead now. They would be in their 100s. But I was scared of them then. You saw a couple of tatooed numbers, not many. Mainly thin guys with tits. I remember one man with a hanging weeping willow bonzai hanging between his legs under his hunched over form. Yiddish uptown accents, all gone now. These were the men who you felt you should know, but you did not know, they were foreign. They were New York.

President Obama Pardons Bernie Madoff

CBS Chicago Affiliate Breaking News

"We can't choose our partners in this time of crisis"

. . . etc. "Unfortunately some of the very same people who got us into this mess are going to have to help get us out. If that means elevating Bernie Madoff to a central oversight position . . ."

Rant about February

Not a good month. For me or for us all.

First let me bitch about my class. Let's call 'em as we see 'em. I have offered two intersecting lectures in which I situate Frederick Lugard, the author of Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa, and no, don't let me know if I've misquoted the title, I'm writing purely off the cuff here, and the introduction of Indirect Rule, capitalized, as a concept, follows from this. Lugard accompanied a "Company" militia into Buganda to "stabilize" a complex situation involving Muslims and Christians and a Kingship. Later on, he ruled as governor over the Sokoto Caliphate established by Usuman ("Fulani Jihad" etc.), which had produced the "Hausa-Fulani" aristocracy.

Through Lugard's experiences we look at what Lugard says and does theoretically, i.e. first, "rule through emirs," second, his understanding of naturally-entitled races, and third, the ahistorical and anti-hierarchical idea of ethnicity. (It derived from the necessity of naturalizing the rule of chiefs, creating natural domains of uncontested underlings locked into place. See Martin Chanock.) One effect: permitting and tolerating the perpetuation of slavery in N. Nigeria (Sokoto Caliphate etc.)

So on the exam, after having delivered these lectures, which included another lecture devoted to the history of the Great Lakes kingdoms up to the end of the nineteenth century, including Buganda/Uganda, and after having projected these words on the screen in the dark in giant POWER POINT LETTERS,

I gave an exam with the following question or something like it, amid other "short answers," viz., Frederick Lugard author of Indirect Rule went from a stint militarily in B________ or U__________ (4 letters.)

That's right. I made a mistake: GANDA is five letters. Anyway, here's the end of my little complaint for February re this question on the midterm exam in a class in which every single reading is a computer click away from appearing on their screens.

Not a single student in the sitting class of 75 raised their hand to say, "Professor Landau, I noticed that the answer to the question seems to be five letters, not four."

Not a single person. Not one person in the class both a. knew this enough to do so, and / or b. got this right, and c. were willing to point it out to me in either case.

Only twenty more years of teaching to go.

All right, about this month. Look, there is nothing nice about sliding down into a smaller, more "realistic" economy. The GOP keeps saying Obama will make us into France or Sweden, but that's a BEST CASE SCENARIO. Why can't we see that in the end, Americans are going to have to be driving small, light-weight, perhaps inflatable electric and gas/electric vehicles, if not now, then in the next ten twenty years? With portable engines but top speeds of fifty miles per hour and slow acceleration?

Okay, enough about my love for my car. But the sinking ship that is the economic boom subsiding . . . the money that inflated the market until '99, then went into real estate; the tail end of those buyers were those who couldn't afford to pay off their mortgages unless their properties continued to accelerate to higher and higher values.

Next up is my landlord parking-space rear neighbors, who own three or four parking spaces on this side of the alley. They did not like my telephoning five times over two weeks checking up on why the promised cleaning crew had not come, the crew that they'd called after I reported that another homeless person's SHIT with TOILET PAPER had not been cleaned up in the parking lot DIRECTLY BEHIND my house. Well, the response of this neighborly company, Potomac Development Corporation, has been to send me a Boist diagram of our and the surrounding properties in the block, showing that they own the property up to the very rear of our easement rear yard / deck, and so, they can put up hedges or even a WALL if I persist in . . .

Swinging my gate out over their property, it appears.

In other words, they want no access, or at least alley-access, to my property from the rear. At the least, they've cancelled my ability to enter my own property from their -- "their" -- parking space properties. If they choose they could shut me in further even as an emergency egress. At the very least, the message is: Lay off, and change your f * ing gate. Thank you. I'm glad I called you on your missing cleaning crew not cleaning up the homeless persons' faeces, and that you allow me usually to deal with the cast-aside used condoms, to report the rats caught in the waste bin in the rain, to report the sofa and construction off-scouring left in the alley off "their" parking spaces. My reward: "You can't have free access in the alley anymore."

Because they can. Just like companies can dump thousands of employees and then say they are "investing in their people."

The rear opening onto the alley predates their purchase of those easements (if a landlord friend is right) or property, because it goes back at least fifty years. I remember the rundown but nonethless discernible shape of the rear yards before my neighbor's property was sold, and my neighbor grew up there. The rear yards opened up at their backs onto the alley from her childhood. That was the understanding we had of the property when we bought it, and it remains mine now.

Anyway let me end now after two I am sure irritating premature PUBLISH POSTS. Today I introduced the third point I take away from Lugard: his understanding that successful rulers in Africa as elsewhere in the world had to take something away from their citizens. They had to tax them.

If they did not take regularly and predictably from their citizens, their citizens would have no stake in the direction of the state. They would resist further attempts to tie them therein. One whole part of the Dual Mandate was to mentor native peoples (races), so they might develop their better sons into small aristocracies leading the way forward for their tribes and peoples . . . and ultimately those men demanded to control the state, Nasser's and Nkrumah's and P'Bitek's and Armah's and Dangor's and Achebe's generation. Indirect Rule contained the seeds of its own destruction.

One key element of these four (yes, 4) Lugardian postulates, was the squashing of hierarchies in fact relied upon, into pancakes of ethnic groups.