links for 2009-02-10
February 10, 2009-
To add to the complexity, Israel’s elections bring out five more or less permanent tribes to debate these issues: groups of electors defined by primordial ethnic or religious loyalties. Each comprises about 20 percent of the electorate, or something around a million and a half people. The tribes have had immigrant experiences at very different times, and so tend to think of Israel in different ways. They sometimes melt into each other and more often chafe against one another. For some time now, Israeli coalition politics has been a game of temporarily patching them together.
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Palestinian violence then, is always terrorism. Additionally, it is often framed as irrational, rooted in cultural-religious factors, or even practiced simply for its own sake. Israeli violence is retaliatory, defensive, while Israeli military operations are subjected to in-depth analysis about the aims and tactics. Criticism of Israeli violence, when it does emerge, is focused on the question of ‘proportionality’ or whether or not the operation is strategically wise (not whether it is legal or moral).
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Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.
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Not a word was mentioned in Sandman about the Clinton scandals, the Contract with America, the Rwandan genocide, the siege of Sarajevo, the dot-com bubble, the rise of the militias, the expansion of the internet or the End of History, and yet it’s difficult to imagine a piece of fiction (with the possible exception of The Corrections!) which more clearly enters a number of conversations about ethics and aesthetics that were going on in the ’90s.
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Along the way, he grotesquely misrepresents the state of academia regarding the study of fascism, which, while widely varying in many regards, has seen a broad consensus develop regarding certain ineluctable traits that are uniquely and definitively fascist: its populism and ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully groomed culture of violence, its insistence that it represents the true national identity, its treatment of dissent as treason, and what Oxford Brookes scholar Roger Griffin calls its "palingenesis" — that is, its core myth of a phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity in the mold of a nonexistent Golden Age. And, of course, it has historically always been vigorously — no, viciously — anti-liberal.
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If a man is not trying to undress you, he's not into you. If he doesn't want to marry you in the next 10 minutes, he's just not that into you. If your lover is impotent, distant, tired, anxious, busy, brusque, depressed – anything that proclaims him to be a human being, not a Disney hero with cartoon flowers, nice teeth and a 24/7 erection – he's just not that into you.
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I hope you don't mind me mentioning to you things which I consider to be 'suspicious'. I consider it suspicious that my nation's elected government allows people to be tortured and does nothing about it. I consider it suspicious that we do nothing about torture and murder overseas, preferring to pretend that it's part of a 'war against terror'. I think that's very suspicious indeed.
I wish you every success in dealing with these suspicious characters.
