Caylee Anthony

Seems to exert a sick fascination for Fox News
It's like a trip back through time. The era of the flappers
Fatty Arbuckle and the prostitute and the Coke bottle
the Lindbergh Baby
But this time playing to the carnival masses, the people in their houses watching Nancy Grace

Rick Warren: Error Numero Uno for the Obama Administration

Let me write this diary in as frank a vein as possible. I am writing to a few: I've never been "recommended"
Rick Warren makes me sick. So does the "Saddleback church." I am not kidding here. Name your lodge something that doesn't expressly invoke the American Frontier Spirit and Great West! Now, I don't mind the actual praying and the singing and the standing together and feeling grand, and all, but I do mind some Buffalo Bill self-made huckster preacher intoning about Jesus in the inauguration of the only person I've ever truly and deeply supported to be president.
Can I make myself a little clearer?
I don't believe in Jesus. I hope Rick Warren doesn't mention Jesus on my behalf.
As it happens, I would prefer he went light on God, too. Not that I dislike Christians or religious people. Sorry, not so. I just don't see things quite their way. I write about religion and politics in Africa's history, and half my natal family is Methodist. But also personally, which is how I am G-- d----ed writing here in this posting, I do not believe in Jesus, nor feel that melting fealty and inner peace, nor eyes-shut fervent love poured out in tongues or earnestness or whatever, for Jesus Christ, nor the promise of salvation should I vest myself in Him.
For me, hearing about Jesus has no place in the inauguration of a president of all Americans. We're a secular country and not a Christian Nation. John Anderson disappointed me on this score a generation ago and that bill did not pass.
Except in the brief moments God's name appears in the ceremonial. In God We Trust, Swearing In, all that is fine. I don't even mind the pledge of allegiance. But like many people I think, I am sick and tired of having to hear every president sign off with God Bless You. Presidents are not holy fathers but the power of the people concentrated in one executive empowered to do their will.
I am sick of politicians and slickers invoking the earnest love for the Father, the super-leader who's manifest only subjectively, as if a guide lay just beyond non-believers' sight -- look to Him, and you'll be okay!
Now comes Rick Warren, in his ideology of "giving yourself" to God and so therefore having a purpose, which can then open doors to further purpose and action (thank you. I've saved you five dollars for the used paperback, Purpose Driven Life!.) For some people his notions work, but for many they offer a reason to stop asking "why," and "what can I do to change this world?" That's what the Jesus folks have to offer: "Here's how to stop asking, 'Why?'"
But I would say to Rick Warren, the people who were finally asking "Why" again, and more and more loudly, are the ones who just elected Barack Obama president.
Invoke an ecumenical God if God needs invoking, and respect the notion that we can influence our own destiny not only by prayer and hope but by further action. Let us regain control of our country as citizens capable of shaping our own destiny, and leave us to our private worship in our churches and synagogues and mosques.

Writing as therapy: 26 Cliff Notes to Self

The thing about being in therapy is that you are more likely to be at least aware of the shape of your own ill health; and you see quite clearly that others are not so aware, because they do not devote 50minutes per week to thinking about it. And it is not fun being right in this way. It is just not as terrible as standing near the edge of the cliff.

Writing as therapy . . .

1. Already there are students asking for a balance sheet of their grades, beyond asking for their final exams: asking for a sheet justifying what they feel to be too low a grade. What the f . . .?!? I'll not swear any depositions just now. Screw you, e-mail, and your importunate ways.

2. Tentative yes ("Supportive") from one reader at the press that has my book manuscript. Internal relief and egress of fear.

3. I've gotten on an absurdly late schedule. I'm sleeping til 9:00 and after.

4. I miss swimming.

5. I want a wood shop.

6. Art is therapy. Writing is wallowing.

7. [Revoked].

8. Writing recommendations. How to find constantly internal and interesting features, moments, etc. without hating one's own baloney to the point of inadvertent sabotage.

9. Fatherhood. How to remain solid, immobile on the fixtures of life that growing minds have to internalize as immobile, while maintaining flexibility and good humor on all those things that require it, without regard (any regard) for the deliberate, learned, persistent provocations children automatically put out.

10. I will do nothing else except prepare my book until it is done. I will do nothing else except teach my hugely time-consuming Cinema of Colonialism class. I will do nothing else besides being a supportive and flexible husband and father, a centered, stable, friendly presence.

11. I will write Mission Plan and sell it. I will write LBNLGMC as an empire book connecting Australia, South Africa, and 1881.

12. I will no longer write anything for Daily Kos or any other internet source. The internet is dead for newbies like me.
Or newbies like me who are not great or brilliant at it.

13. Later in the year I will start Paper, a mimeographed journal kept off the internet and available only on paper. I will build a stable of like-minded high-profile contributors in art, criticism, history, and film. No one will write for me. It will fail quickly.

14. This summer I will try hang-gliding.

15. This summer I will take up whittling and sanding. I'll make a knobby back masseuse.

16. All those warranty cards and customer service cards: I'll send them back.

17. I'll start changing the filters and cleaning the filters that stand sentry over the wind tunnels in the house: heating, vacuum, oven exahust.

18. I will plastic-sheet insulate the windows. It is not too late. Yes it is.

19. I will bring or make dinner on Fridays.

20. I will immerse myself among people who do not enjoy grievance. Problem: most people suck. Most men, especially. And it is hard to make friends with women because of the obvious reasons in our f***** up society. I hate rants. But it is true. Most men have insecurity issues that make it hard for them to interact. Some deviate immediately into phony irony and lightness and platitudes. Some demand agreement or else they "don't understand" one. The pugnacity, lightly cloaked. How did men ever make a society of laws? The good times are only when they don't feel threatened and can observe and enjoy what is around them.

21. I have friends: two or three here in D.C., more perhaps if I tried to fill a room, not that close; I have a handful of other friends living faraway, I see then hardly ever: each time is like an installment of the Seven-up series.

22. J. She was my person. I miss you too too much. You were my.

23. Let S. and I. find it easier than E. and me.

24. Let my mom continue to walk around and stay loose and keep on her feet. Let her have inner peace now.

25. Let my Dad stay happy in his study.

26. Let my country stop debasing itself and get up and learn from the past instead of cleaving to its mistakes as a point of pride.

Gaza: Hamas asks Israel for Reinforcements

Israel is invading northern Gaza with thousands of ground troops.

Gaza is a place filled up with people. Israel, over the border, is all fields of green and brown, with a few small settlements.

The resemblance to a gigantic "location" or "township" (reserved for "the Bantu") in South Africa is undeniable.

The "government" in Gaza is Hamas, the acronym offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood nurturing an armed militia. The idea that the Gazans could elect their own state was undermined by Israel's ability to choke Gaza and Egypt's closing of its border. Therefore the most extreme, rejectionist party was elevated to power as a reaction. It would be as if all Soweto was walled off from Midrand, its people disallowed from entering Johannesburg to find work, and then permitted an unedited slate of parties from which to choose their "government." (And then blockaded and attacked.)

Hamas however unlike liberation movements actually wants to change the society that elected it to power, like the Muslim Brotherhood does generally. It's a terrorist organization according to the European Union and the USA. Therefore, it has been willing to engage in strategies that risked alienating Gaza's people in the process, like firing forty or fifty home-made rockets per day into Israel.

Those actions were not popular, because they were obviously likely to lead to further suffering in Gaza.

But when reprisals do come, the collective suffering of Gaza's populace at the hands of the Israeli military make Hamas's emphasis on the struggle seem wise and true. The world is all about blood and fire after all! Hamas' preoccupation, its reason for being, is conflict.

The Gazan "state," by wielding force against the interests of its people, i.e. rockets spun off into Israeli apartments and fields, asks that its people be more fully identified with itself, preparatory to their further transformation: and the state of Israel complies.

One year in 40 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

Reminding myself of my own greatness

May I just point out that Bob Herbert's rant on our incredible "stupidity" over the last years, linked here, and Alexander Cockburn's evocation of Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme as the basic shape of the U.S. economy in last week's The Nation, here, makes the same point I did, in essence, here:

http://paradigmfragment.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-stock-market-lost-486-points-today.html

Exams and disassociative nonresults: 2 classes

Well hot dawg I am finally done with it.

Graded the damn things.  So many of them.

The good ones okay.  The mediocre ones a reminder of death, of the body as a piece of stupid machinery or clockwork.

The very bad ones sometimes hilarious.  One student unnecessarily attempted a thumbnail review of the whole history of technology (in a paper about an African leader) and wrote, "of course people still talk about the wheel."

In a typical paper, move to page five or six, and often a bit of reality intrudes, gets stuck in the gums and is spat out.  An observation.

My unreasonable gratefulness for that much.

The papers aside: the final exams. Each little ballpoint pen essay is a unique piece of torture. Begin with the generalities. Commence ignition. Turn toward the topic at hand.

The recitation of my own communications, now in burlesque form.  

"MK, Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation, was the militant wing of the ANC . . ."  No, the military wing.  The PAC was the militant wing of the ANC.

That's the only moronic pecadillo I am enforcing in my exam.  The rest of it was a giveaway. Hence the huge number of Bs and A-s this season.

Meanwhile my precolonial Africa class did terribly.  

True, some of them did okay, but the final exam was not that hard, and almost no one did well.  I do not know why until I seize the exams from my T.A., who is arriving back from les vacances today, but it does not matter.  Either he is incapable of the mastery of the topic necessary to be flexible and deviate slightly from the answer key I hastily jotted down for him with my fountain pen, or we have failed to hammer home the salient narrative signposts that I put on the test: Mali, Songhay, Mande-speakers, Askiya Muhammad, Fulani and Fulbe-speakers, Wolof, Senegambia; Pende, Kuba, Efe and Lese, these are the basic signposts of any such course today, and half of my students could not in my view (again I've yet to review the finished final exams) hack it.   Am I at fault?  What the f*** would that mean?  I emphasized the pattern of large Sudanic trade-state expansion ca. 1400s, Mande-based, sending peoples and ideas all around south and west, into the forests and coasts, where hierarchical societies reigned; these communities, valuing wealth in people, encountered Europeans desirous of paying for human cargo.

That is it.  Sure, I cover the Indian Ocean routes and Swahili and other networks entailing Great Zimbabwe, etc.  And I know, colleagues, sure, you can complicate this story!  You can attach caveats and reversals to it!  You can and I do add Kongo and Mbundu in Angola, and indeed Feti in Angola!  But in its essence, it holds up as a story about "pre-colonial" Africa without creating a fetishized tribal past.

The narrative is about prestige (Mande-ness; we read the epic, Sunjata, in two different versions), in organizing hierarchy, not wide solidarities; it is about the organization of new states under the conditions of warfare and capture, including Asante and Benin and Danhome. We deal with autocracy and ceremonial killings.  But most of all it is about the Sudanic empires seeding formations in the forest littorals that subsequently opened up routes to slave exports.

And I include a lecture on an African American maroon slave community, the Saramaka / Djuka, based on the anthropologist Richard Price's work and the history of Suriname, because these are if "Atlantic Creoles," also, African people.

But back to this: Sudanic growth: affecting forests: slave trade dynamics.

That is the bare bones story.

Did my students get it?

No.  Most did not.  Most did not take notes in class.  Most did not understand the information I divulged to them as the narrative baseline of the course.  Many refrained from writing down anything unless I posted words in giant Powerpoint.  History lectures about Africa were a new motif for them.  Some rose to the challenge of being in college.  Some could not.

Five could not.  Five failures not counting total no shows.

From "we are descended from a common Bonobo, Chimp, Human ancestor in central Africa" and :South African hominids of 140 thousand years ago are the earliest anatomically modern human beings" . . . to the dawn of national imperialisms, the shift from Brandenburgian forts and Portuguese castles with slave baracoons on the coast, and ending with two sorts of religious, missionary interventions in response to the tumultuous effects of the slave trade: the Western early missions and settlers, and their focus on slavery: and the great Qadiriyyah jihad creating the Caliphate of Sokoto, in its focus on combatting Muslims' enslavement.

But still, I have to point out again, the final exam tested little more than: 

Mali, Mande, expansion / Islam / trade; seeding forests; wealth in people slave-holding societies, not national identities.

Okay.  I know.

It's a sad story.  Not a tale of solidarity or a harbinger of future justice, a righting of wrongs.

Not a happy let's get up and dance story.

It's just the story of Africa as it rushed up to meet the beginning of the long nineteenth century.

I just tell it, I don't make it. 

And the following era, the modern era of "then to now," the Victorians to the Reaganites: epidemics, direct conquest, and mass killing.  That is a much more pleasant tale!  I'm working on polishing it up for the new semester, right now!