This blog post is inspired by Donald Trump’s April 2016 declamation: “We will no longer surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism.” When this statement, with its combined affect of simple steadfastness and poetic heroism (a combination that is a common quality of folkish ethno-nationalist movements), resurfaced in the aftermath of last week’s Brexit vote, it drew my curiosity. I mentioned it to a couple of people and one said, “what is this word ‘globalism,’ when the correct word is globalization?” Despite considering these two words side by side for the first time in my life, I found myself fluently defending globalism’s integrity, and difference from globalization. Globalization, I said, captures the practical structures and processes of global movements, trade, communication, and so on. Globalism captures a culture, an ethos, an epistemological framework, a way of understanding the world, I said. The two words stayed with me because something about them seemed to be central to political disturbances in the United States and throughout Europe, with related-but-different expressions in other parts of the world.
I’ve heard globalization a lot more frequently, often hailed by politicians and business leaders as both the driver and result of economic growth and technological progress. With globalization, the world becomes a single marketplace of commodities, ideas, cultural aritifacts, and people. Governments manage globalization across national boundaries, building trans- and multinational infrastructures to streamline processes for inflows and outflows. But these are not globalism, and the apparently comprehensive marketplace of globalization is not the same as a community marketplace of symbolic exchanges, affective ties, and social contracts. The lived world of social contracts and affective ties is still shaped primarily by ethno-nationalist categories and the sentimental content of associated mythologies, certainly for my over-50 generation, and lags behind the structures of globalization. As a result ethno-nationalist rhetoric is still very potent in rallying disaffected people, and “globalist” rhetoric does not yet have discursive or affective depth on a wide scale. I looked up globalism (on Wikipedia, of course, as the lexicon of common knowledge, whether “correct” or not) and found that globalism has been used as a generic term for global ideologies (such as “justice globalism,” “market globalism,” “jihadist globalism,” etc.), but it seems not to have any full or textured content of its own. And yet, Trump’s “false song of globalism” evokes something coherent and complex, a world of symbols, images, ideas, and relationships that competes with (the songs of) ethno-nationalism. The benefits of globalization tend to accrue to well-off people; for them (including people like me) globalism, though largely unnamed, is developing mythological and affective depth. But for the majorities who relatively benefit much, much less (even when some sub-proportion benefits in absolute terms), globalization and its accompanying “false song of globalism” are elitist and exploitative. If globalism is to be a new framework for social contracts, symbolic meaning, and democratically legitimate politics, it needs a concerted and accelerated coagulation of new global language, mythology, structures, and actions that deliberately include the beauty and struggles of local and regional communities, not merely alternations between the pragmatics of globalization and the articulations – sometimes sublime, often shrill – of aging ethno-nationalisms. So all this mulling has led me to ask: What would it look like to have a politics of globalism? What could a new politics of globalism look like? Not globalization. Globalism. Not multilateralism. Perhaps not even a new kind of federalism. This I believe is the gauntlet that Brexit and Trump, as expressive moments, throw before our political imaginations. I don’t have an answer and I don’t think we’ll come up with an answer in the near future. Perhaps our descendants will see an answer retrospectively in fifty to a hundred years. But I believe that these are the paradigmatic political questions of our times.
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In this period of increasing attention to walls, national boundaries, and trade protections, even as we experience climate-change-without-borders, are wirelessly entangled within an internet-(mostly)-without-borders, and watch global-access-flyers – grumbling far above slow-travel-migrants – move faster through every line in an airport, Gabriela Montero’s Ex Patria and Do Ho Suh’s obsessive recursions of “Home” extemporize on old-fashioned nostalgia, while Harrison’s “[Nest]” traces the delicate immediacy of a home qua home. Montero lives in exile in the United States and Do Ho Suh creates art – drawings, netted forms, and simulacra – all over the world while scattering residence across Seoul, New York, and London. Harrison was born in Germany, grew up mostly in New Hampshire, and lives in Maryland. Montero, a political exile, wrote, and plays, Ex Patria in the tradition of the Russian composers of the first decades of the twentieth century, fiercely longing for a beauty that was a promise of youth. The piece, dedicated to the people of her native Venezuela and a memorial for the 19336 people who were murdered in that country in 2011, conjures the memory of an “old country” that is wounded, potentially mortally. Over the four years or so since Ex Patria was first played, Montero’s implacable rejection of the current Venezuelan regime, including its extraordinary musical program, Sistema, for over 500,000 youth, has amplified the piece’s political narrative. Starkly, Montero’s critique of Sistema as a fig-leaf for a criminally dysfunctional government calls for letting the bubble of music pop, so to speak, to say “NO,” to wipe the body politic clean, and start anew. Ex Patria expresses the tragedy of the bubble, Sistema’s success and beauty growing in a fundamentally toxic and violent society, and its inevitable corruption.* Suh is not an exile like Montero. His existential mobility is unmotivated, like the life-cycle mobility of a firefly. He explains, “Once my fortune teller told me that I have five horses and that means that I travel a lot….” Embodying a form of mobility that is shaped by the technologies that are laid into our time, his nostalgia is for the form of home: the skeletal underframes, the permeable walls, the obtrusive shapes of haunting exits and entrances, including doors, windows, electrical outlets, and air conditioners. He is, perhaps, best known for his gossamer recreations of his apartment homes, but the most nostalgic piece, the most riveting for me, in the exhibition that is currently on at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, is the piece that combines a miniature version of his traditional home in South Korea (placed on a truck) with a film that traces (or affects to trace?) the journey of the home to Madison Square Park in New York City. Suh seeks to carry “home” like a snail, a virtual snail with a virtual home, mind games, in which all of “home” resides in him, or he is always home. The exhibition in San Diego is presented across four spaces. Along with my local artist friend, Patti Fox, I walked through the two gallery spaces of the Museum, which are next to San Diego’s main train station and the downtown trolley hub, respectively, and separated by a wide road. We started at two o’clock in the afternoon, so the sun was very high and bounded the interior spaces so intensely that I couldn’t avoid attention to the very specific concatenations of radiant light, shadow, translucence, darkness, and projected light as we walked through one exhibition space to another. Suh, to my delight, is obsessively specific. His drawings have fine, straight lines, repeated one after the other until the image is complete. He sticks thread on paper to create figures and stories in which each loose end is perfect. His rubbings of every apartment wall, outlet, plaster pimple, and stovetop draw the viewer into mimicked attention to the banal phenomena of “home.” And his fabric simulacrum of his New York city apartment has astonishingly detailed embroidery and seams.** If Leslie Harrison’s “[Nest]” has nostalgia, it is very brief. The poem captures the fragile uncertainty of time, space, and fluttering materials that a nest represents. At some point, the elegiac home country of Montero’s Ex Patria and the obsessive scurrying of Suh’s “Home” recreations had their origins in wavering, delicate, and fundamentally physical moments like “this lodge that takes the shape of a wasp’s nest paper and swaying.” While Ex Patria bellows the loves and deaths of the multitudes that contain home, and Suh weaves them into nets that look repetitive and forever and then you notice that the figures vary and the nets cross continents, [Nest] whispers “the people on shore wave small scraps of fabric they’re white in the dusk.” Reading Harrison’s poem, with “heart” close to its geometric and literary center (“the heart goes dark the heart becomes just one more vessel waiting”), alongside Montero’s brief concerto and Suh’s art, I glimpse and want to capture how the three together represent the immediacy, mobility, and nostalgia of “home” in the 21st century, but I’m defeated by the over-determined neatness of my synthesis. And so I will stop here. *A contrary view of Sistema, held for example by Gustavo Dudamel, sees it as a hopeful program, preparing youth to be better citizens, morally and otherwise, who eventually will build a more beautiful tomorrow. **In my home city, San Diego, Suh has created a “Fallen Star,” a tilted house perched on the edge of a tall building for engineers. It has a lovely garden in front and pretty furnishings inside, and provokes an impossible imbalance when you enter it. When you leave it though: from the outside, from far away, it becomes a metaphor, an empty signifier, a wish. So I think it’s time to write why I do not support Sanders.
Over the last few months Sanders’ supporters have felt comfortable, indeed impelled, to tell me and the world why they oppose/dislike/hate Clinton. I have not said much about why I don’t support him, in part because I like him and the causes he has supported throughout his career. As a journalist pointed out he (and Trump, like it or not) have effectively expanded the “Overton window” or spectrum of public issues/positions that are legitimate and mainstream to discuss and push. The other reason I have not focused much on why I don’t support Sanders (apart from his fragile electability) is because I’ve found it more interesting to write about why I support Clinton, including how I engage my concerns. But after the appalling increase in negative campaigning by Sanders, I think I should say why I don’t support him. -- I don’t trust demagoguery, especially because of what it tends to produce in the movements it spawns. It tends to produce a self-righteous narrowness among followers, potentially spawning movements that risk becoming reactive and radically repressive of dissent in their own ways. Sanders’ campaign and supporters have tended to project those who don’t join them as the unenlightened, the bad, and/or the handmaidens and footmen of status quo privilege. The attacks on Elizabeth Warren for not endorsing Sanders provide an example. Recently, the increasingly shrill self-righteousness of Sanders’ campaign and supporters (not all, but many of those who make themselves most heard; and if you feel that Sanders and you are mischaracterized by this description, you are feeling, a little, the way Clinton and many of her supporters feel) has reminded me of Yuri Zhivago’s “Revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, men who are narrow-minded to the point of genius. They overturn the old order… but for decades thereafter, … the spirit of narrowness which led to the upheaval is worshipped as holy.” (from Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago) Ok, that is a bit strong and it calls for a much more complex discussion of revolutionary change (and the structures of oppression that revolution at its best seeks to transform), but you get the idea! -- I don’t think he can do what he says he wants to and I would be uncomfortable supporting someone just because he says what I want. From my reading of his record, his speeches, and his interviews, he has neither the knowledge, nor the sociopolitical networks and legislative support, nor a strategy for building the sociopolitical networks and legislative support to make his most visionary statements move forward (leave alone be achieved) in four years. -- I think his electability is more fragile than Clinton’s. Against Trump, he possibly/probably would win. I think the Republicans are going to replace Trump in some way or the other, and with any other Republican (including Cruz) I think the red-baiting and other more general attacks on Sanders (which we have not seen any of yet, and not because the substance and planning aren’t out there) will make it very possible, even likely, that he will lose. And we have potentially three Supreme Court nominations under the next President. -- I think he is impassioned for the right things and good-hearted. I also think he’s fuzzy in his thinking and I don’t like or trust his advisers. Note: I first encountered the notion of becoming dexterous in the activity of power and love from Adam Kahane’s book Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change. He drew inspiration from Martin Luther King.
“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change…. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites—so that love is identified with the resignation of power and power with the denial of love. Now we’ve got to get this thing right. What [we need to realize is] that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr. “Where do we go from here?” I came across Kahane’s outlining of the need for facilitators and leaders to balance power and love when I was still a maturing practitioner in the fields of dialogue, conflict resolution, and leadership development. The simplicity of this polarity-that-must-not-be-a-polarity provoked the kind of “aha” that is exhaled when a cognitive frame slips easily into some slot of experiential being. While Kahane builds his developmental model for the integration of power and love with a kinetic metaphor of movement – a narrative development from falling, through stumbling, walking, and culminating with the intensely hopeful phrase of “stepping forward” – I absorbed his and MLK’s insight in terms of language. My dialogue and conflict resolution work was fundamentally about communication and a colleague used the phrase “bilingual in the languages of power and love” and that phrase found its perfect slot in my being of words. Now, as I have shifted into being a writer, a new kind of trader in words, I find myself viewing and understanding the balancing of power and love as a whole body effort of kinetic, emotional, and verbal actions (and stillness) in relation to others. When I first encountered it, the beauty of King-to-Kahane’s model of power and love was immediately relevant to every relationship in my life, every situation in which I made choices about assertion and reception, assertion and empathy. It gave me permission to be, consciously and often delightedly, both powerful and loving: as a parent, a spouse, a friend, a colleague, a boss, a subordinate. In some cases, the choices and balance were easier and more obvious than in others. Looking beyond myself, looking for ambidexterity with power and love in our leaders, I found that the larger the scale, the more diffuse and tertiary the relationships, the higher the stakes in terms of gain and loss, the more complicated and difficult the balance. In fact, for leaders of large, complex entities, it is not just one balance, it is many little (often counteracting) balances, except in the core of the single person. The greatest leaders develop and maintain that ambidexterity deep within themselves despite inevitable imbalances in particular relationships and actions. Of course, I’m thinking and writing about this because we are in the midst of a crucial election in which we will choose a leader whose actions will shape the lives of millions. The European Union is already struggling with the desperation and pathos of numerous refugees, the aggressive nativism of longtime residents, and the shape-shifting enmity of diversely disaffected peoples who are recruited, or drawn by, a reactionary cult that calls itself Islamic. In this context, today’s March 22, 2016 attacks in Brussels heighten the will to power in both ordinary people and in leaders. More than ever “love” feels anemic and “power” risks abuse and reckless escalation. As people closer to us – in distance and cultural formation – are killed cruelly, those who have been similarly killed in Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, so many elsewheres, become even more faceless, and yet responses – balancing power and love – to any one of these acts of violence must be articulated with responses – balancing power and love – to all the other places and people affected by related acts of violence. In the midst of global outrage and the lengthening grief of real people, I find myself asking: are European leaders marshaling their whole bodies and full brains (brain stem, limbic brain, cerebral cortex) for ambidexterity with power and love? And what can we do to allow and encourage our own leaders, our not-too-distantly-to-be-new-President, to do the same? The Miami debate was largely a good one for Sanders and largely poor (or at least mediocre) for Clinton who was asked the tougher questions, got on the defensive, and made disingenuous, counter-productive attacks on Sanders. She’s been better. So has he. Her best response at the debate got no play from the media that I’ve seen: her direct, personal response to the Central American woman with five children. She sounded genuine (I think she was) and hit all the right notes, directly acknowledging the woman’s courage in speaking and her commitment and struggle in taking care of her five children on her own, and responding to the woman’s question about reunification in a personal way – sympathetic, related to a policy frame, but without over-promising. In contrast, to my ear, Sanders got the family relationships mixed up and sounded like a distant savior who would solve all such problems of all such people.
The above was one of three things that stood out for me at the debate. The other two were videos: one a video that Clinton mentioned, the other a video that was actually shown and discussed. The video that was named is a supposed Koch brothers’ video that supports Sanders. Clinton raised it in a clumsy way that suggested that Sanders and the Koch brothers are in cahoots in some way. Of course he is not, and I am assuming she knows this. If this video does exist and I have seen nothing to suggest that it does not, the more significant question is why are the Koch brothers behind such a video? Well, of course, because at this point they want to suggest that Sanders is better than Clinton. In the long run, does anyone think that the Koch brothers care, that they would prefer Sanders to any of the Republican candidates? Of course not. Which brings me to the second video, the one of Sanders talking about Cuba and Nicaragua. Leave aside, for the moment, whether you support his ideas or not, and ask why the Koch brothers are not showing this video. Now, even if you agree with Sanders’ ideas, do you think that more than fifty percent of the U.S. electorate will buy those ideas? Holding the above question, consider a recent headline from The Nation which says that the way that Trump can defeat Clinton is by attacking her from the left and from the right. If Trump and Clinton do end up becoming the nominees, Trump may try that, but for the most part the left (even those who dislike Clinton) will close ranks against him. It is now that Clinton is being effectively hammered from the left and the right; The Nation’s headline is simply extrapolating from what is happening now. Meanwhile Sanders is being (largely) supported by the further left, supported or getting a pass from the center-left (many of them Clinton supporters like me, but who like or at least don’t dislike Sanders), and mostly ignored by the right. If Sanders becomes the nominee, we know that every rock in his life will be turned over. Trump’s phrase, “our communist friend,” will become more virulent, with interviews and speeches quoted and televised as evidence. The right will easily be mobilized against him. The left will unify behind him. Videos like the one on Cuba and Nicaragua will be used to sway the center – the big question is how large is that center? And will the Republican nominee re-fashion himself enough to appeal to that center? Both Clinton and Sanders are flawed candidates. Clinton is clumsy-to-disingenuous from time to time (not always, but sometimes with more unnerving frequency than other times); an incrementalist who is mostly quite comfortable with status quo institutions and laws, though she believes they could be better; and a foreign-policy hawk (who, if she is in office, I hope will be tempered by more sensible advisers and the legislature and public holding her accountable). She has these flaws, and, over the last twenty or so years of ambitious political efforts, has become an easy and favorite target, both through her own making and through the efforts of political adversaries. So every mistake she makes is hugely amplified, while Sanders’ mistakes seem minor in the light of his more inspiring aura of revolutionary change and genuineness. Sanders is selling a populist fantasy, one that provokes and inspires change in many wonderful ways (I do think his campaign has the potential to be a game-changer in U.S. politics!), but his political range is very limited, his legislative record is stunningly incrementalist (much stronger in amendments than bills; apparently only three of his bills were passed, two of which were for changing names of post offices), and his knowledge of foreign policy is limited and naïve (admittedly his foreign policy naiveté could lead to a freshness; I’m just not sure he has the strategic suppleness to leverage the freshness). Of course, I will support Sanders if he becomes the nominee, but I do worry that he would lose to the Republican candidate. Before the Miami debate, I had worried more that, as President, he would not be able to deliver on his promises. After the two videos, I am worried about his electability. An aside: I would love to see a Clinton-Warren ticket, and I was rather appalled at the way Sanders’ supporters excoriated Warren for not endorsing him before the Massachusetts primary. I’m not sure Clinton is risk-taking enough to do it, and I’m not sure Warren would want to do it, but if they could work together, they could push U.S. policy-making into very interesting new territory. Thomas Hirschhorn A Ruin Is A Ruin Galerie Susanna Kulli, Zurich, Switzerland January 27, 2016 – March 31, 2016 A few weeks ago, in the middle of February of 2016, on my day off work in Zurich, I went to the Galerie Susanna Kulli to look at Thomas Hirschhorn’s collages on A Ruin Is A Ruin. I walked from the Hauptbahnhof, the main station, down a “military” road and past ordinary, tired buildings. A few steps led into a small gallery. Immediately before me was a large, undulating piece of cardboard, presenting a striking foundation of ruins from which an isolated ruin rose and gave way to a wasteland. A message in awkward orthography proclaimed what at first looked like: A RUIN ISA RUIN. Almost immediately I turned away from the large poster, putting my initial, peripheral view of more posters behind me, and turned to the collection of simulacra and writing under the glass of a small display case next to the entrance. In Hirschhorn’s terms, I turned from the art to the information. Hirschhorn is explicit about his aims in his writing and interviews. “Affirmation,” in the manner of Warhol, and “truth…that refers to nothing other than itself and asserts itself as a form.” His Ruins posters are layered, acquiring a three-dimensionality from both the vertical and lateral pasting of images, as well as from the building of the poster with a bottom and a top and an architecture that leverages height. Most of the posters have letters, usually words, usually including Ruin, in one case an overlapping RR, unavoidable persiflage of a monogram. The coda is provided on a small scrap of cardboard, in size a fraction of the large posters, on which is pasted the image of an indisputable ruin, accompanied by an honestly handwritten (uneven, with mistakes scratched out) text from Derrida: “… And then I would love to write, maybe with or following Benjamin, maybe against Benjamin, a short treatise on love of ruins. What else is there to love anyway? One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such, except through the experience, itself precarious, of its fragility: it hasn’t always been there, it is finite.” While the Derrida quotation and Hirschhorn’s Ruins collages both exclude people, connecting this exhibition to Hirschhorn’s earlier work on Ur-Collages (his collages presenting beautiful and ravaged bodies) leads me to suppose that love, loving people, also requires fragility, finitude. “A ruin is a form,” Hirschhorn says, and quotes Gramsci, “the content of art is art itself.” In a very ordinary way, I would propose that the content of art is also what it is not, what it excludes. In that sense, Hirschhorn’s A Ruin Is A Ruin exhibition both excludes information and surrounds itself with Hirschhorn’s own words, the Derridean coda, and layers of ancestral rubrics. So each poster is a form, “a truth… that refers to nothing other than itself,” and my delight with his work arises from the question: what is it not? The question what (each poster; the exhibition as a whole) is not implies a relationship to what it is not. In my encounter with the exhibition in Zurich, I found myself noticing four relationships: to information; to discursive and disciplinary context; to physical/spatial context; and to the agency of the viewer. I have written above about the relationship to information: both its deliberate exclusion, and its being hugged close via the coda and rubrics with long genealogies. This relationship to information merges with the relationship of the art to discursive and disciplinary context. In his interview with Sebastian Egenhofer on the occasion of his 2009 exhibition of Ur-Collages at the Galerie Kulli, Hirschhorn plausibly rejects (his own) consideration of “the public sphere of the art scene,” and, most understandably, even trivially, sees his work in relationship to that of Piet Mondrian, Andy Warhol, Martha Rosler, Caravaggio – a few of the artists explicitly named. His A Ruin Is A Ruin, interpellated by a Derridean coda, is also fundamentally present through its distinction from and location relative to other works (and subjects) in “the public sphere of the art scene.” Walking away, the relationship of the exhibition to physical/spatial context becomes evident, as I observe the slow dissolution of the urban landscape from the reserved, classically bourgeois buildings around the gallery to browning sidewalks that took me to a tunnel that stepped me through staccato colors out into an area of subsidized housing where I found walls with rounded, nature-sci-fi murals, Journey through the Jungle, all of this far from, and related to, the beautiful Altstadt and the heartbreakingly lovely contradictions of the Chagall windows in Our Lady’s Church. Hirschhorn’s ruins were there, then, in the middle of that geography with its particulate, too-big-for-one-telling histories. The collages in A Ruin Is A Ruin have a seductive beauty. Only one contains an obtrusive human (dis)figure, and that highly stylized. But this exhibition’s antecedent in the same gallery, Hirschhorn’s Ur-Collages, contained works that each displayed images of glossily beautiful humans and ravaged bodies – dismembered, flesh, entrails, blood. The gallery assistant, Anna Vetsch, who will one day run a gallery or museum of contemporary art, showed me photographs of that exhibition and warned me that they would be hard to look at. Remarkably, the images of that earlier exhibition did clarify my attention to the current Ruins exhibition, and, yes, the images were difficult to look at. I did not want to look at the disfigured human bodies; and I was not interested in the fashion photographs to which they were attached. I was curious about the compositions, but didn’t want to look at them. And then I read Egenhofer’s interview of Hirschhorn in which Hirschhorn says: “I am astonished time and again when viewers say, ‘I can’t see that,’ or even worse, ‘I don’t have to see that’ or ‘I don’t want to see that.’ That is an incredible thing to say, that is an exclusion of the other, and it is pure egotism when someone claims that he has the option of not seeing. Of not seeing the world as it is. That is an incredibly luxurious thing to do, a self-segregation, a turning away from the world that I will never understand.” So when Hirschhorn challenges the agency and choices of the viewer with his Ur-Collages, we can only suppose that, with his Ruins collages, he is also challenging the agency and choices of the viewer. His works ask – When you turn away from the Ur-Collages what do you look at? When you look at the Ruins collages, what are you turning away from? Contrary to Hirschhorn’s apparent intention, the truth of his work is not simply in the art itself. Perhaps there was only one moment of that truth when I viewed the exhibition, the moment when I walked in and glanced at the first poster before turning to the information encased in the glass. Perhaps there was a moment of truth for each work, a truth that became available in a brief liminal pause, during which the image hung separate, preceded and followed by inevitable captivity to context and information. The longer truth is that Hirschhorn’s work caught my attention, led to this writing, and will “hold up” because it must be seen within its larger contexts, which are specific and granular around this art, today, but schematized by the form of the work in ways that make contexts of other times and places relevant and questioned. A note about the photographs: All the photographs are taken by me with my iPhone. The photo showing some of the works in the Ur-collage exhibition is of a page in the booklet containing Sebastian Egenhofer’s interview of Thomas Hirschhorn. The booklet is available for 18 euros at the Galerie Susanna Kulli, which organized the interview and has published the booklet (bi-lingual in German and English). The last photo shows a keepsake collage that I created on a photocopy of the review of the exhibition in a Zurich newspaper.
A few days ago I watched Deadpool. I hadn’t heard of it until my spouse and daughter told me it is the hot, new cult movie.
So here is a quick review. Wry, clever opening credits. Some very good, funny lines. I knew and liked most of the music. And, in general, this is a very well-made, contemporary, white-bro fantasy, racist and sexist despite its sometimes successful attempts at irony. A dream movie for someone who wants to achieve (white) bro-hood through a mass-killing (with a not-so-background fantasy of a beautiful woman who loves you despite your ugliness, and is delighted by your big dick). But I’m writing this review because the movie provoked questions and connections that go well beyond its cool+fantasy appeal, not just to spout my middle-aged feminist judgment. Deadpool is very successful. I gather that many young people, including young women, think this is the best movie they have ever seen. I’m not sure what the young women love about it; my ability to empathize in this context is very, very limited. There is a cool teenage girl, perhaps the coolest character in the movie, but with very limited play. There is also one very tough (white) woman fighter, who in the end is defeated. I didn’t quite understand the plot purpose of an elderly, blind, African-American woman. In the scenes that included her, there were fleeting moments of intimacy and affection, but those moments had little other support in the movie. I very faintly sensed that her role had something to do with pushing the envelope on ironic offensiveness – what could be more aggressively non-PC, and therefore potently ironic, than making an elderly, blind African-American woman the butt of bro jokes? But the jokes in relation to her fell flat, so all that I ended up with was culturally foundational racism, sexism, and age-ism. In these scenes and in general, Deadpool seemed to me an expression of the U.S. zeitgeist, related to, and amplified in, Trump’s successes. My spouse and primary review partner pointed out that the culturally foundational elements of sexism, racism, and age-ism are just that, common to many, if not most, Hollywood productions, and told me that calling them out does not make for interesting commentary because they are to be expected. He pointed out that the success of Deadpool doesn’t come from these elements (though he would probably agree that the kind of success it has achieved would be hard to get without these elements) but rather derives from its layered persiflage of many years of self-important, taking-themselves-too-seriously, overly-earnest super-hero movies. From his perspective, this is what delights audiences who have been fed these movies regularly over the last decade or so. Certainly, Deadpool is substantially more sophisticated in ironic humor and self-reflexivity than the one Fantastic Four movie I’ve seen, and one of the best jokes in Deadpool is about X-Men. I’ve not seen many other movies in this genre so I can’t make a deep comparison. But while I might agree with his point about this reason for Deadpool’s success, I don’t think the foundational racism, sexism, and age-ism, that provide the warp for the movie’s weaving of its contemporary white-bro fantasy, are simply old news. In Deadpool, this foundation is refreshed as the movie connects to, expresses, and is viewed in the context of, a contemporary, mostly-bro, fantasy of recovering American (individualist) greatness, a fantasy that finds its most loud, caricatured, and white version in Trump’s speeches, but which also has more romantic versions that are more widely available, not just for white people and not just for boys and men. The romantic version in Deadpool allows any of us to long for one of the two fantastic social roles it celebrates – the heroic, bro-ish role of someone who survives and succeeds despite a hard life and ugly edges (and who ends up whupping the bad guy); and the immortalized object of the hero’s desire, who is, by the very nature of the role, someone attractive, loyal, and monolithically, uncomplicatedly loving (no doubts, no uncertainty, no resentments, not much discernible subjectivity; dirty socks are just dirty socks outside, waiting to be washed, there are no durable and mutating dirty socks of and in the heart and soul of the beloved). Deadpool rattles through its romantic version of quest for and achievement of individualist greatness, occasionally, very occasionally, with a titillating tenderness, and, beyond the effectiveness of its persiflage, the movie’s success also lies in pulling viewers into glossing some core part of themselves into one (or perhaps both, in some alternating format) of these roles. The Quartz article, “A tip to Americans from an Italian who saw Berlusconi get elected again and again and again,” is not about Deadpool, but it compares Trump and Berlusconi in a way that casts a darkroom’s red light on the U.S. zeitgeist that Deadpool refracts into (more) successful entertainment. Happy Birthday, Mom! -- by Arjun Chakraverti Mom was born in February 1932, the eldest of what were to be four children. Her parents were what we would today consider a strange mix of Indian and Western. Her father, born in 1903, came from a Calcutta family of means. His father had been a District Judge, which was a position of great authority and influence at the time. His mother came from one of the 3 families that ran the Kalighat temple. Like others of his time, the Judge was a male chauvinist who believed that a woman’s place was in the house. His wife was made of different stuff and using the little streedhan (women’s wealth, usually in the form of jewelry) she had, bought a nice plot of land in the marshlands and forests of South Calcutta at the turn of the century for the seemingly insignificant sum of 108 rupees. The judge was livid with rage as she had made the purchase without informing him but he did condescend to build a house on it, a house which saw the odd adventure such as the Viceroy’s daughter falling off her horse in front of the gate and being revived with a glass of milk from the judge’s feisty wife. Eighty years later the land, when sold, was to prove a godsend for the family. I still bless Tarangini Devi for her foresight and gumption. My grandfather was the younger son of the judge and grew up to be a tall and handsome man with a flair for literature and the arts. He studied at Presidency College Calcutta, arguably India’s best college at the time and was selected to join the Imperial Bank of India as a Probationary Officer, in what was only the second batch of Indians allowed into what was hitherto, a “whites-only” domain. The Mookerjees hailed from a village called Bhablagram in what was then 24 Parganas district. Bhablagram adjoins Basirhat on the Ichamati river and is very close to the border with Bangladesh today. The Bhablagram Mookerjees are a well-known family, the best known scions of which are the famous industrialist father-and-son, Sir Rajen Mookerjee and Sir Biren Mookerjee. Although the family was westernised, it was also obsessively, almost chauvinistically, Bengali. My grandfather, in all his years of travel and stay in North India, never picked up more than a smattering of Hindi. He did not see why he needed to, when he could make do with Bengali and English. It was therefore, unusual, to say the least, for such a person as my grandfather to be married to Nilima Banerjee from a well-known Bengali family from Allahabad. She was as fluent in Hindi as he was in Bengali. She and her sisters spoke Hindi in both the Sanskritised and Urduised versions. They sang Thumris and Kajris. In fact, Nilima’s younger sister Ila, used to sing for a radio channel of the time. Their food was different, a hybrid of Bengali and UP cuisine, of which the vegetarian dishes I still love. The Banerjees had also penetrated “Bollywood” in its early years. My mother’s maternal uncle, Sachin Banerjee was a character actor of note in the forties, fifties and sixties. The Banerjees also had imbibed some UP-style prejudices, especially with regard to color and ritual purity. Nilima’s elder sister never ate food cooked by a non-Brahmin …. and she died in the 1990s. Ila had no such prejudices and Nilima, who had an untimely death in 1946, was probably somewhere in between. These characteristics were each to find a place in Mom’s psyche, contradictory though they may have been. Above: Rita Mookerjee with her parents and brother in Lahore, 1939 Since the Mookerjees were very influential in Calcutta, certainly by the time Mom was born in 1932, she was granted admission to the best girl’s school in Calcutta, Loreto House. She already had a couple of cousins there, Biren Mookerjee’s daughters. However, my grandfather steadfastly refused to shift from the ancestral home at Purna Das Road so she went home to very Bengali surroundings every day. Loreto had a profound impact on her in terms of her world view, her English, and her fascination with Catholicism. She studied a short while at the Loreto boarding school in Darjeeling as well and in time her sister was to study at Loreto House, Loreto Simla and Loreto Lucknow and my sister was to study at Loreto Delhi, Loreto Lucknow and Loreto House, Calcutta. Her father had a transferable job which took him to places as far apart as Chittagong and Lahore. While at Lahore in the 1930s and 1940s, she studied at the Sacred Heart School but whenever he returned to Calcutta, she went back to Loreto. My mother met my father three times before they were married. The first time was at a marriage in Agra in 1935 where the two of them were “Neet bor” and “Neet Kanya” (miniature/pretend groom and bride), a rather odd custom that I have seen only among Bengali Brahmins. Many years later I was to be Neet Bor too and some old-timers started speculating on whether I too would marry the Neet Kanya. Mercifully for the lady in question, that didn’t happen! The next time they met was in Patna in 1952-53. My father had just returned after several years of flight training in England. However, the Indian government had not purchased the aircraft they were to fly so all the pilots were sent off on forced leave. He did get to dance with her at the Bankipore Club but declared her “fat” and a “spoilt brat” and said he didn’t want to have anything to do with her. Maybe there was something in what he said. My grandmother, Nilima, had died of meningitis in 1946. If she had been in Calcutta, the chances are that she would have lived, as Calcutta had modern facilities, including antibiotics. As it happened, she was in Allahabad and although the medicines were sent for, they reached too late. And so it was, that at the age of fourteen, Mom effectively became the mother of her siblings as well as her father’s hostess. Her father doted on her and she went with him to parties and organised his parties for him at home or at the club. She got used to getting her way with him so when she met this cocky young Navy pilot she treated him with cold disdain. She was used to hobnobbing with Generals like Thimayya and Thorat so a mere Lieutenant was below her station. The third time they met was in Lucknow in 1956. This time, she had matured (and slimmed down) so, with some encouragement from General Thimayya, among others, she decided to say “yes” to my Dad, now a Lieutenant Commander. Above: Rita Mookerjee, 1956 Above: Tuhinendu and Rita Chakraverti, 1957 The life of a Naval wife was very different from that with the Imperial Bank. Where she had had dozens of servants, now she had only a few to help with the essential women’s work of cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Moreover, while she had travelled all over North India, she had never seen the South and she was to spend most of the next twelve years in South India. She took to it pretty easily and gave birth to two children in the process. Despite her many strengths, one thing she was NOT good at was languages. It has always baffled me as to how she never learnt Hindi, despite being born in Allahabad to a Hindi-speaking mother and having subsequently lived all over North India. In fact the only three Bengal postings her father had were to Calcutta, Jalpaiguri and Chittagong. As against this, he was also posted to Lahore, Simla, Agra, Lucknow, Benares, Gorakhpur and Patna. She was later to marry a Hindi-speaking (Bengali) husband (whose recent ancestors hailed from Ajmer and Aligarh) and produce a Hindi-speaking son but her Hindi borders on the comical, peppered with terms like “Ghode ka anda!” (“Horses egg”) or “Na Hathi!” (~ “like an elephant!”). These terms are literal translations from Bengali and mean absolutely nothing in Hindi. I was to discover, many, many years later, just how much she was loved in the Navy. My father was a hard taskmaster and a rather gruff person, but she more than made up for it. And then, as her children grew up and she had more time on her hands, she decided to go back to college, do a B.Ed and teach. She was more than 45 years old when she finished her B.Ed but she got a Gold Medal for it and began to teach, where else but in her Alma Mater, Loreto House in Calcutta. She retired from there in 1994 but continued to teach, now in Chennai’s best school, Sishya. And when she moved from Chennai to Dehradun in 1998, she continued to teach, now at the Doon Girls School which is, among other things, a preparatory school for Welham Girls School and Mayo Girls School. In fact even as I write, this 25th day of February, 2016, Mom will be celebrating her eighty-fourth birthday teaching little girls the nuances of the English language and culture. Their parents come from Badaun, Bahraich and Bulandshahr and their constant refrain is “Mem, meri beti ko bhi Mem banaiye!” They couldn’t have asked for a better teacher. My sister and I know. We were put to the grind as children ourselves, not just to improve our English but our deportment and table manners as well. All so that “when the need arose, we could conduct ourselves properly with the Queen!” And so, on your Eighty Fourth Birthday, here’s wishing you many, many happy returns of the same and thanking you ever so much, for everything you have given us! About My Mother, On Her 84th Birthday -- by Meenakshi Chakraverti “My father said he would send me to Girton College,” my mother told me when I was growing up. One reason that didn’t happen was because her mother died when she was fourteen and she took on responsibility for her three younger siblings. This story existed side-by-side with “My mother cried when the family of an eligible, handsome man of twenty-five refused me because I was only ten years old, too young to be his bride. If my mother had lived, I would’ve been married by fifteen.” I never found these stories contradictory because my mother is seamlessly both the woman who would have gone to Girton and the woman who would have been married off at fifteen. Throughout my life she has combined constant intellectual curiosity and independence with quaint, and often annoying, conservatism on especially gender issues. She was born in 1932. She is now eighty-four and just returned to teaching at the request of the school in Dehradun where she has taught for almost two decades. She follows and discusses politics brilliantly, loves reading, and claims she wanted to be a physicist. When a colleague once asked me, many years ago, whom I admire most, wryly because of the triteness of my response, I said, “My mother.” She enjoys life, I explained, and she’s brave, and she laughs, all this with an unwavering selflessness in relation to her children. She goes out to life with inquisitiveness and delight, and a wicked sense of humor. She lost her mother at fourteen, and took on responsibility for her two younger brothers and younger sister. My brother and I often felt that the two youngest, an uncle and an aunt were almost Above: Rita Mookerjee and her siblings, 1946 our older siblings, and they often talk about her strictness (some of the stories are hair-raising) but always with loyalty and love. We all make fun of her and we all laugh. Perhaps my second greatest gratitude to her is for her teaching me how to laugh. Her father worked for the Imperial Bank of India, which became the State Bank of India after Independence. He was a single parent to his four children for eleven years. He died when my mother was twenty-five and his youngest was sixteen. My mother and her siblings adored him. Above: Rita Mookerjee with her father and siblings, Simla, 1951 Oddly, while she kept telling me that women are uniquely nurturing and kept trying to prepare me to be a good wife (among other things by wanting me to practice serving my future husband by making my brother’s bed – which I refused to do) and mother (by training me in practices of abnegation, for example by making me allow everyone else to get their choices first), her stories about her father gave me the most clear evidence that men can be deeply nurturing and that parents can work outside the home and be fully parents. Her father was posted in different parts of India, so my mother lived in Lahore, Agra, Patna, and Lucknow, among other places. She speaks of Lahore, now in Pakistan, with great fondness, with memories of its graciousness, and of the generosity of their Muslim neighbors. But the stories were not simple, nor simply sentimental. When a Muslim neighbor, whose little daughter was my mother’s friend, sent my mother’s Brahmin family fabulous food for Id, my grandmother gave all of it away. My maternal grandmother’s family had lived in Allahabad in Hindi-speaking North India for a couple of generations before my mother was born so, in addition to her childhood peregrinations across the northern swath of British India, her maternal influences exposed her to the graces and manners and Hindi-Urdu language of the north, much of it intermingling cultural provenance that some would distinguish as “Muslim” and “Hindu.” My mother grew up cosmopolitan even though she did not leave India until 1985 (at the age of 53) when she came for my graduation from the Master’s program at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. Her father’s family lived in Calcutta and came from Bhabla, a small village that she visited as a child. Her father spoke fluent Bengali; many of her relatives did not speak much English. She was very comfortable sitting in wholly Bengali environments and adapted her whole demeanor to the social, emotional, and intellectual rhythms of that language. She spoke and read Bengali, but she went to “convents” that European nuns ran for expatriate Europeans and elite Indians. The idioms of nineteenth century and early twentieth century England form the bedrock of her fluent English, a colonial legacy that echoes in my writing, even after thirty-five years in the US. Her father worked with Britishers and, when her mother died, she played the role of his hostess and companion at parties – from the age of fourteen. So she developed a part-syncretic, part-revolving habitus that includes proficiency in Bengali, British, and North Indian ways. It is completely normal to hear the cadences of my mother’s voice, and her gestures, change depending on whether she’s speaking Bengali, English, or (somewhat Bangla-fied) Hindi. Like her father, who worked for a British bank and who loved the language and many of the practices of the British, but who also loved reading Bengali literature and wore khaadi in resonance with the Nationalist movement, my mother is both fiercely Bengali and bemusingly Anglophilic. In a further variation on her easy living of a wide cultural range, my mother is simultaneously a devout and practicing Hindu and one of the most Catholic people I know. To some, these might look like contradictions. They don’t look and feel like contradictions to her and they haven’t looked and felt like contradictions to me. Her father died a year after she married my father, right before my brother was born. My mother always speaks, with immense gratitude and love, about how my father’s family helped her take care of her two youngest siblings and welcomed them. With my father, she travelled to new parts of India, to the South and along the coastline, making homes for him and us in Coimbatore, Cochin, Coonoor, Bombay, and Goa. She reveled in the multi-culturalism of the Navy and she and my father enjoyed exploring new places. My parents’ marriage was tumultuous, with much love and new adventures, but also great challenges. Above: Rita Chakraverti with her husband and two children Around 1975, my mother found she needed to work. A couple of years later, at the age of 45, she decided to go back to college to get her teaching degree. I’m smiling as I write that she got a gold medal for that course! She’s been a teacher since then and, as I mentioned early on in this blog post, she was just inveigled back into teaching. She turns eighty-four today, February 25, 2016, so I’m writing this piece to celebrate that birthday. She has so much more living ahead in this life, and luckily for those of us who have a rebirth mindset, what doesn’t get explored in this life can be explored in future lives. I can well imagine my mother erudite, laughing, loving, and curious on some distant, off-planet colony! … And, for those of you who might be wondering, my greatest gratitude to my mother is for the security her love has given me all my life. I know that she would move heaven and earth, or would try to, to make things right for me if I needed it. Even today, when I am mature (heading into post-maturity!) and independent, and she is eighty-four. It’s ridiculous, but true.
Note: I was inspired/pushed to write this blog post by my brother who was inspired by a lovely blog post by a Bengali/Bangladeshi friend who was celebrating her mother’s birthday. I’ve suggested to a Pakistani friend that she write a blog post about her mother. There’s something about blog posts about parents that makes borders irrelevant and history larger. I came to the US in late August 1980. In early September, my pocket was picked while I waited for a bus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was distressed for all the obvious reasons, and even more so because I was in the US and I’d never had my pocket picked in India! Most of the people around me looked uninterestedly sympathetic. Someone suggested I call the police. When the police came, they were large men, one light-skinned and one dark-skinned. One of them, I don’t remember which, asked me if I had caught sight of the pickpocket. I said I thought it was a tall man who had been right behind me in the throng, who walked away in the moments before I noticed my wallet was gone. The policeman asked, “What color was he?” I gaped at him, thinking green and blue. He looked at me. This was a college town. I was clearly a foreign student, fresh off the boat. “Black or white?” he asked.
That was my first direct encounter with the peculiar taxonomy of colored people – white or black – in the United States. Others, at least in the very late 20th century and early 21st century, don’t have color: they are either Native Americans or immigrants with some ethnic identity. I knew the term “Red Indians” from movies and novels, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a real person use that color designation about another person; nor have I ever directly heard a person described as a “yellow”(-colored) man or woman. In the early weeks of that fall, I sat at the dining hall table that had only dark-skinned young women around it, several of whom were lighter than me; and I discovered that I couldn’t affiliate simply because they and I shared the same color range. FOB and young that I was, I didn’t understand that color was the superficial indicator for a much more deeply alienating taxonomy. After 35 years in this country, and now American myself, I am still learning. Today I, fuzzily and somewhat fearfully (because every word on color in the US is potentially hurtful), see “white or black” as the division between a category of people who have held the standard for voice and authority in the US, whether used poetically, violently, patronizingly, or just nicely, and another category of people who have struggled for authority, whether over their lives, relationships, or words.* This is not about individuals, whether black or white, who may struggle more, or less, depending to a very significant degree on their class background and access to the educational resources and habits of the upper classes. This is about a pernicious typology that makes the experience of one profoundly different from the experience of the other, such that the same words spoken by one and the other have cultural and emotional referents that are different. I was stimulated to write this post by a chance thought: what if Macklemore, with his White Privilege II, and Morgan Parker, with her poem “If You Are Over Staying Woke” were to chat. I’d hazard that no other white American could listen more carefully than Macklemore, and, yet, I would speculate that some core of Morgan Parker would not feel heard. I would guess that Parker would appreciate Macklemore’s honest speaking out as a powerful ally, and I wonder if she would hear patronage, regardless of his self-conscious intention to avoid being patronizing. As I write this, I’m deciding that just leaving the song and the poem side by side may be more effective than a direct conversation. Placing them side by side allows more space around each as well as space between, in which meaning can be heard, said, felt, witnessed, and created without being narrowed by the potential politenesses and pedantry of a conversation. These thoughts are at the surface of a messy confusion in my mind, the mind of a minority brown woman in the US who lived her formative years as a class-privileged member of the majority community in India, and therefore, to a significant degree, has a majoritarian mindset (i.e. oblivious to its own fundamental assumption of standard). I find myself both assimilating to the majoritarian mindset of white America, and spitting it out as I find it resonating with current and deep histories of injustice and cruelty. It’s easy for me to spit it out because I am a brown woman, I’m not white. But am I simply using my brownness as an alibi, pretending my majoritarian equanimity is brown Indian equanimity? Of course, there are surely instances when the majoritarian mindset of white America spits me out, but my own majoritarian mindset, along with class privilege, allows me to be oblivious. These thoughts, questions, my confusion, have increased in recent years as #blacklivesmatter raps insistently on my eyes and ears for attention; as I’ve developed deeper friendships with African-Americans; and as I’ve found and read more African-American writing. So where is my increased awareness, which is the other side of my confusion, taking me? In general, to curiosity, to dialogue, to protests, to expressions of solidarity, to Twitter and FB activism, to voting choices. In this blog post, it takes me to revealing my naiveté and confusion. I’m still learning. I care, and learning is one way to make that caring count. * As African-Americans have struggled for authority and voice, they have suffered violation and loss, but they have also produced great beauty (writing, art, music, performance) and extraordinary moral leadership, not just for Americans, but for all humans. |
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