Author: Eamon

Music break: Your Sunday Night Oldies Show

/ Eamon / Leave a comment

First in a new series. I can’t promise I’ve got a voice as smooth as Big Daddy Victor Zaragosa — who shepherded many a San Francisco night to conclusion on the radio in my younger days — but I think I can select them just about as well as your standard lovesick Sunday night call-in. Here are some classics to start you off. Whether you have a nice ride to work on or just a window and a beer, turn it up!

On a Sunday Afternoon by A Lighter Shade of Brown

Night Owl by Tony Allen

NB: You gotta read Tony Allen’s bio. 

Samba Pa Ti by Carlos Santana

I’m sort of obsessed with this song by my fellow Bernal Heights original Carlos Santana. When I listen to it I see the view from Bernal Hill, the light through clouds on the Church Street steeples, pepper trees scattering their leaves all over Folsom Street, music festivals and street fairs and jam sessions, I smell herb smoke drifting through a day trying to decide whether it’s going to be foggy or not, burritos, I hear the neighbor’s Chevy Malibu engine revving, bad little kids shouting at each other on Moultrie Street,  and the rain falling through the leaves of avocado trees.

From Five Miles from Frisco

Slow Jam by Vieux Farka Toure

OK, so you probably won’t hear this song on KMEL’s dedication lines tonight, but I think it’s a logical follow-up to Santana — and conveniently named for Anglophone fans of the son of The Greatest Guitarist of All Time, Ali Farka Toure.

A few thoughts on the “Why Do They Hate Us?” FP article, and the meaning of cultural relativism

/ Eamon / Leave a comment

I have little desire to wade into the shouting match that is taking place on Twitter and elsewhere over Egyptian activist’s Mona Eltahawy’s Foreign Policy article, “Why Do They Hate Us?”  which is a call for a revolt against oppression of women in the Middle East. But the debate around it is thought-provoking, so I wanted to offer a few bullet points of reaction.

  • I have an enormous amount of respect for all the heroic people, including Mona Eltahawy, who have put their bodies on the line (to quote my high school soccer coach) in the last year to resist oppression and overthrow despots. I cannot overstate this.
  • I also respect the anger she and many others feel over the absolutely abysmal state of women’s rights both in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. There is no excuse and no comfort for the violence, disrespect, and multifaceted brutality that women endure all over the world. I also agree with her that this is an urgent problem, and one that is deeply relevant to the question of meaningful revolution.
  • However, I am concerned that the concept of cultural relativism, which Eltahawy cautions us against, is being  abused and confused with moral relativism. Cultural relativism is a perspective of inquiry developed in anthropology that allows for the examination and explanation of attitudes, behavior, and artifacts in the cultural context in which they occur, rather than in a vacuum or in the context of the person doing the examining. Cultural relativism, in its original incarnation, doesn’t imply a moral perspective. And it is different from moral relativism — the idea that “there are no absolute or moral standards,” in the words of the Wikipedia article linked above. Cultural relativism does not require a suspension of moral judgment. For instance, it is possible to see violence — say, beating one’s partner — as immoral regardless of the context. But being culturally relative implies that understanding the causes and social and political meanings of that violence requires looking at it in the cultural context in which it takes place. On a practical level, if one wants to end violence, injustice, or other abuses that one considers immoral, the most effective intervention will likely be one that works within the cultural context.

    There are two ways in which people abuse the concept of cultural relativism. One, people claim that, for instance, violence is acceptable because it arises out of a particular culture. This is one thing Eltahawy criticizes. She writes, “You — the outside world — will be told that it’s our “culture” and “religion” to do X, Y, or Z to women. Understand that whoever deemed it as such was never a woman.” She refers to apologists for harm inflicted on others who cite cultural differences as an excuse.

    The second way to abuse cultural relativism is to misconstrue it as moral relativism, and that is one that I’m afraid Eltahawy leans toward. “Call out the hate for what it is,” she writes after describing the many horrendous crimes visited upon women in the Middle East. “Resist cultural relativism and know that even in countries undergoing revolutions and uprisings, women will remain the cheapest bargaining chips.”

    Rejecting cultural relativism as a straw-man foil is not an arcane rhetorical problem. Rather, it is precisely what facilitates the condemnation of an entire group of people based on specific social problems that are usually particular to time, place, economics, technology, and other factors that are not universally shared by a society. It views one culture (usually something Western) as superior to another.  Notions of backwardness versus progress, superiority versus inferiority, enlightenment versus darkness, and a nebulous “them” almost always accompany such condemnations. In the past, such condemnations have been used to justify a lot of bad stuff: slavery, colonialism, wars of aggression. The piece doesn’t do any of these things, but I suspect that, to the extent that its tone is consistent with polemics that have made such arguments (more hateful examples here: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/women/), that is much of the reason that it has rankled so many people.
  • I am concerned that the pace and format of these kinds of debates that evolve on Twitter and blogs — on important subjects — means that people are increasingly hurling caricatures of arguments at each other rather than actual arguments; making a sport of debate rather than advancing actual change. Discussions around these kinds of pieces are unfolding so fast these days that it can feel like, if you don’t react immediately, you will never get a word in edgewise. This is not a very original concern, but I’ve seen a lot of sloppy responses to this essay, and between watching reactions to this and to the Kony 2012 debate, it seems like everyone is rushing to get their two cents in without waiting a little longer to put down a fin or a ten.
  • There have been some thoughtful responses, too. Max Fisher at The Atlantic writes about the need for context — and moves toward the kind of intelligent deployment of cultural relativism I’d like to see more of. See this passage: “The intersection of race and gender is tough to discuss candidly. If we want to understand why an Egyptian man beats his wife, it’s right and good to condemn him for doing it, but it’s not enough. We also have to discuss the bigger forces that are guiding him, even if that makes us uncomfortable because it feels like we’re excusing him. For decades, that conversation has gotten tripped up by issues of race and post-colonial relations that are always present but often too sensitive to address directly.”
  •  A final thought: hate, I think, can be an accurate description of an attitude or behavior, but it is rarely an underlying explanation.

The power of social media — and its lack of inherent goodness

/ Eamon / Leave a comment

Shame on me, I still haven’t read Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion. But I just found this clip from Al Jazeera English’s The Stream from last September, in which the presenters give Morozov the space to reorient the conversation away from the not-very-useful debate about whether social media is good or not. Worth a watch.

Here, I think, is the heart of the matter:

So social media is a catalyst for democratization? asks the presenter (9:13), after Morozov acknowledges that it helped the protesters in Egypt. Morozov’s answer:

Of course [it’s a catalyst [for democratization]. It’s a catalyst for many other processes. And it may empower certain factions more than others. In some cases, depending on the existing political and social dynamics, it will favor the protesters. In others it will favor the autocrats. There’s nothing about social media itself that predetermines which side is going to win.

I like this guy.

Intelligent boycotts

/ Eamon / Leave a comment
boycott usa

Photo by Karen Eliot, click for more details.

A recent article I stumbled on today in the Financial Times describes the controversy surrounding Paul Simon’s collaboration with South African musicians on his wildly popular 1986 album Graceland. It contains this priceless quote from musical legend Hugh Masekela, who played on Simon’s tour:

“Some of the most vocal journalists [who criticised Simon] were white South Africans who were living the most privileged lives,” he said. “I had a lot of run-ins with them. I told them to shut the f*** up. You know, one of the first people Nelson Mandela invited to South Africa was Paul Simon. I purposely joined [Simon] because I knew he wasn’t a crook and he wasn’t out to rip off anybody.”

I find the quote and the article instructive as they relate to current debates about certain international boycotts that have drawn comparisons to the successful one against S.A., which helped end Apartheid. Cultural boycotts of countries should be selective to be effective. The wrong kinds of isolation can facilitate a reactionary environment. And it’s generally the privileged that can afford to take the most uncompromising positions, which isn’t always useful.

Agree? Or am I just biased because I spent my childhood summers on blacktop desert highways with the windows down bumping “people say she’s crazy she got diamonds on the soles of her shoes” … ?

Much more good stuff on this subject over at Africa Is a Country.

[Edit: fixed ridiculous typo.]

The Kony 2012 campaign dismays me. But the debate around it is inspiring.

/ Eamon / 1 Comment

Here are some thoughts I have cobbled together from interesting conversations I’ve been having on Facebook today about the now notorious/celebrated Kony 2012 campaign. It has been talked about so much in the last 48 hours that it may be hard to believe I think I have anything to add… but I do! I’m sorry I don’t have time right now to link to all the amazing things that have been going around that provoked some of this thinking, but please check my twitter feed in the sidebar for many examples. Whydev.org has also provided an extensive and useful digest.

Some loosely organized thoughts:

It is not a good movie

Apart from what it’s advocating, Kony 2012 is a slick but inferior film. It treats the viewer like a 3 year-old, almost explicitly, by framing the narrative around the filmmaker explaining things to his 3 year-old. This is suspicious since it is a movie about grave violence. I felt disrespected as a viewer. It’s also emotionally manipulative. It uses the natural sadness and rage one feels in response to seeing the aftermath of atrocity, and channels that energy into unquestioning support for the goals of the org. I don’t like the helplessness with which it portrays “Africans” (rarely is the term made more specific). We see the filmmaker talking to Jacob like a child when he’s not a child (for example when he’s touching the dolphin). It is full of serious factual errors. The movie sells a brand based on the possibility of saving Africa from a perch of superiority, an idea that has been around for 200 years or so and is behind a lot of bad stuff. It has the pacing and slickness of a superbowl commercial, which is why it is of course effective.

But it doesn’t matter if it’s “effective” messaging

Some folks are willing to give the film and Invisible Children some credit, despite admitting the movie was emotionally manipulative, because it is “effective” — not in stopping Kony obviously but in getting viewed. It had millions of views in the first 24 hours. But to what effect? I will not deny that it is a positive development that perhaps a few million more Americans can now locate Uganda on a map (even though the film incorrectly identifies it as being in Central Africa, and even though Kony is no longer there). But the cost of this new awareness is unbearably steep. It’s not just the $8 mil this org spent last year. The cost is that it is promoting a misunderstanding of the conflict that may be harder to untangle than simple ignorance. There is no mention of Uganda’s 25-year president, Yoweri Museveni, self-appointed arch prosecutor of Kony. He and other politicians were the target of large Cairo-inspired protests in Kampala throughout 2011. Although the movie does not mention him by name, I would imagine it is a welcome break for the president, and a barrier to Ugandans who would like to focus on more important changes. Its disregard for the facts in the service of its mission is also distasteful. I want the truth, and this doesn’t show it. The factual issues have been heavily reported, and I won’t repeat them here. Suffice it to say that I think it is so inaccurate that on the whole it gives a completely false representation of what is happening in Uganda now, and the region. More dumb myths are perpetuated about this nebulous Africa, which the film forgives us all for understanding on the level of a three year-old.

Net awareness has decreased, not increased

Another apology for the film claims that at least Africa will now be on the radar screens of many Americans who had stopped thinking about it. That’s not worth very much to me, because they’re getting the wrong facts, which makes people less aware of what’s happening, not more. If the wealth of information on the Internet means that this film prompts people to do their own research and find out more about Uganda, Kony, and Africa, that’s great. But that’s a fortunate side-effect of an ill-conceived film, and says more about the possibilities of modern technology than it does about the merits of the campaign. Analogy: If I made a heart-wrenching documentary about HIV, with painful testimonials from people suffering from AIDS, and then told you that it is transmitted by hugs and caused by poisonous mushrooms, have I helped the situation at all? Some people may claim that ignorance about Africa is so deep that anything that makes people think about it is good. If this is true it’s extremely sad, but I don’t believe it in principle or in practice.

What the campaign is advocating

I think it is pretty clear that the film advocates a muscular US measure, i.e. a military one of some kind, to stop Kony. Of course, in the wake of the criticism, Invisible Children has affirmed how much they love peace and hate war, which is very nice. I have heard the same from just about anyone who has ever advocated a military intervention. In the context of 2012, the implicit solution is to take Kony out with a drone or similar measure. I realize this conclusion is a leap from the actual content of the movie, but I don’t think it can be understood another way. The utter lack of specificity requires us to infer their goals. The campaign admonishes the government to “do something,” calling on several public figures including Condoleezza Rice, to help them. The activists are shown cheering when they hear that 100 US military advisors are being sent to Uganda, last October. I do think that it is relevant when thinking about this to say that the US is trying to establish a stronger presence in East Africa because of Somalia, and also that oil is about to come online in Uganda.  Things to think about. Perhaps 100 military advisors are quite helpful, but I’d like to hear more on that point — I’m not sure why this is viewed as an essential part of stopping Kony or helping Uganda. And we don’t really need more of this.

What’s inspiring

As fast as this campaign blazed around the net, people brought up doubts about it. Some of the first to take hold were on reddit.com, usually known as a font for memes and atheism debates, but now increasingly sophisticated and wide-ranging discussions. People working on the ground in the region, not to mention Ugandan journalists and thinkers, had a chance to respond instantly to the condescension and inaccuracies, and with the right hashtag their voices were projected around the world, surfing the wave of the original campaign to criticize it with equal effect. As dismaying as it is that such a throwback, stereotype-laden film could be produced and hungrily consumed in 2012, I must say that it seems the debate and the thinking about such campaigns have really matured a lot in the last five years. This is to the credit of the technology and to the many people who have been working hard to deconstruct the most harmful and paternalistic American thinking about Africa.

What the outcomes of this campaign could be 

The best effect this whole thing could have is really getting people to think critically about far away issues, by questioning the simplistic film. On the other hand, its dishonesty could promote so much cynicism that people care even less than they did before. Either way I don’t give the movie much positive credit.

We critics should be quiet unless we have a better suggestion!

This comment, which I’ve seen floating around, drives me crazy. If my car is broken down because it’s missing spark plugs, and you offer to change my transmission, should I accept your expensive, misguided help just because I don’t have any spark plugs? Of course not. Please stop saying this.

What we can do, what I would support

There are future atrocities brewing in the world, and Americans can advocate for our government to take meaningful action (or stop taking harmful action, which is actually more common). Unfortunately it’s not as simple as finding neglected victims and kicking perps’ butts. We have to have significant policy shifts where we stop causing civil wars through aggression or stupidity. When there is a slick awareness-raising campaign for that kind of movement, I’ll be completely behind it. Similarly, flashy campaigns are fine by me when they get money to the many effective, smart organizations that are doing great work. IRC, MSF, many others. (Will need to save more thoughtful recs for another post.) On the other hand, I don’t think outright emotional manipulation has a place… ever, really. It stinks.

OK, I’m done… for now.

[small edits on 3/9 for clarity and enhanced utility]

America’s 99% are rich by global standards. So what?

/ Eamon / 1 Comment

Photo: Paul Stein, used with a Creative Commons license. Click photo for info.

I’ll admit that it has crossed my mind: there is a small flaw in the “we are the 99%” slogan adopted by Occupy Wall Street. By global standards, most of us Americans are actually the Richie Riches of the world, even those of us living paycheck to paycheck — or unemployment check to unemployment check.

This has been the source of some criticism of the Occupy movement in the last few weeks. Some have even claimed that America’s 99% is the world’s 1%. Take, for instance, this reddit-style poster linked on The Daily Beast. Suzy Khimm of The Washington Post has tracked down some number-crunchers who showed that, accounting for purchasing power, the idea that the bottom 99% of Americans make up the world’s top 1% is not quite right, but that even the poorest Americans do occupy a privileged income decile vis-à-vis the world.

It’s an interesting and important observation. Global inequality is a serious issue, ultimately far more important to humanity than domestic American inequality. But to the extent that it’s being cited to implicitly discredit the protesters, it stinks like hamburger meat left unrefrigerated beneath a Zucotti Park tarp for a week.

For one, “we are the 99%” is a slogan for a domestic political movement, so it really shouldn’t be held to this global standard. It is a fact that the wealthiest 1% of Americans control 40% of the country’s wealth and the top 1% of income-earners take in more than 20% of the income. Those are horrendous figures (and are, in a sense, made more horrendous by the global picture — a tiny percentage of Americans control a vast amount of global wealth). Pointing out that OWS protesters would be big balling out of control if they moved to a developing country is not very useful — they live here.  It’s akin to criticizing a movement to stop air pollution in LA because Ulan Bator and Peshawar are X times worse. Does that mean Angelenos are spoiled for wanting clear air? Clearly not.

Another important point is that income, even adjusted for purchasing power, is not the sole or even most important indicator of well-being. This discussion has been gathering steam lately, as more economists point out the inadequacy of GDP (analytically similar to income) as a holistic data point. Bhutan has famously pioneered a different measure with its Gross National Happiness.

A more detailed comparison of the average American’s well-being to the world will have to wait for when I have way more time on my hands. But let me explore this anecdotally. I’ve been to a grim locale or two in my day — places that recently emerged from civil war, and some of the poorest countries in the world. But in the contest for grimness, the depressed corners of America are right up there with the shantytowns of developing countries. If you’re a poor American with a service job, you might be able to buy a used car, which is an unimaginable luxury for much of the world. That is little consolation when you live in, say, an American housing project where the threat of violence is ever near, unemployment is rampant, education options unsatisfactory, and — perhaps most importantly — the possibility of upward mobility is very small. This may be an extreme example, but I think it illustrates that subjective factors matter, as do indicators other than income.

Then there is the matter of the burden of poverty in a rich country, which is not a new subject. W.E.B. Dubois put it so succinctly in The Souls of Black Folk that I don’t think I need to elaborate: “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”

So the 99% slogan works as a domestic statistic, and it also works as a shorthand for the experience of most Americans, who may be in the world’s top deciles of income earners, but are not necessarily among its happiest — whether you consider happiness as a nebulous term or as a collection of a bigger basket of statistics.

I don’t think most people pointing out the flaw — from a global perspective — in the 99% slogan are doing so to discredit the Occupy protesters as a bunch of whiners. But I can see the observation being marshaled for that argument. And that would be a shame, not only for the domestic movement, but for the push for greater global equality. Whatever you think of Americans, the 99% or the 1%, those protesting for greater equality here are almost surely the most likely to participate in a similar international agenda.

HT Dayo Olopade, without whose tweets and posts today I would have been unaware that this discussion had evolved so much, or read the WaPo post linked above.

Somali-language anti-piracy song from last year

/ Eamon / 1 Comment

Obviously you read Jeffrey Gettleman’s story in the NY Times Magazine last week, “Taken by Pirates.” Perhaps you were curious about the music video he mentioned, put together by the Somali community in the UK to ask for the release of Rachel and Paul Chandler.

Abdiwali and some others at Universal TV then turned to Abdi Shire Jama, who was a freelance interpreter in London and a talented songwriter. Jama thought a music video would help spread the word, so he produced a song called “Release the Couple,” soon broadcast on Universal and YouTube. It begins with a Somali kid with a British accent saying, “I hope this message gets to the people who are responsible for holding Rachel and Paul Chandler.” Then, after a burst of synthetic drums and some squeaky Somali music, five Somali singers break into song.

“Our people fled their homes. . . . The host countries did not look at the color of our skins. . . . We need to show our debt to them, for it is the donkey who does not acknowledge the debt.”

Well, here’s the song. Interesting stuff.

Hat-tip AK.

Dangriga, Belize: Photos from before the digital age

/ Eamon / 4 Comments

Before I published my last post, about Aurelio Martinez’s “new” album, I wrote my Belizean-American-San Franciscan (last modifier should really come first) friend, director Ezra J. Stanley, to see if he had some good pics from the Garifuna community where he has family roots.

Well, I didn’t get a response before my post went up, but boy was it worth the wait. It is with humility that I share Ezra’s beautiful photos of children in Dangriga, Belize: Ezra, I’m not worthy! These are some real gems from a visit he paid in 1999 — which, I remind you, was long before the vintage look became so annoyingly popular in photography. Copyright Ezra J. Stanley, all rights reserved. Enjoy.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.