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Merry Thanksgiving!
Thursday, November 24
Tuesday, November 22
Q
Brits are stereotypically staunch practitioners of strict queueing etiquette. Almost by birth-right, they naturally follow a fair system of "first come, first served". It's quite nice to be able to count on this when it comes time to wait for something. Jumping the queue is worse than farting in an elevator or perhaps even worse than murder. The system seems to work quite flawlessly... until it comes to train travel.
Brits are stereotypically staunch practitioners of strict queueing etiquette. Almost by birth-right, they naturally follow a fair system of "first come, first served". It's quite nice to be able to count on this when it comes time to wait for something. Jumping the queue is worse than farting in an elevator or perhaps even worse than murder. The system seems to work quite flawlessly... until it comes to train travel.
Everyone has a price. For the Brits, in this particular situation, the price is the ability to get a seat on a crowded train. For that they will outright deny their natural tendency for fair queueing practices.
An example: I take a direct train to London every weekday. This service originates at Southampton or Poole, so it is usually quite full when it arrives at Winchester. My fellow travellers form queues spaced along the platform according to where the carriage doors usually end up when the train stops. What starts as three or four people queueing in roughly two rows of two, quickly turns into an amorphous clump of ten or more people with a seat-yearning lust in the eyes. When the train arrives, the clump starts to flex and move. Suddenly, a person who arrived at the station one minute before the train arrives is able to get on before someone who has put in the extra effort to get up earlier so as to get to the station five or ten minutes before the train is due. These queue-jumpers do it with no remorse. And no one says anything! Brits will very quickly correct a queueing infraction in any other situation, so why not on the platform? Because deep down, they know they'd take the same opportunity as the queue-jumper did because they just might get a seat on the train.
My challenge to you, Britain, is to uphold your usual queueing etiquette in all situations. Can you do it?
-RP-
-RP-
Wednesday, November 9
Forgive me for posting this long article but it really stuck in my head after I read it. Since 9/11 I have felt that the U.S. media (well, the U.S. in general I guess) has lost its way but I couldn't really see it until we moved out of the country. Looking in from the outside it seems so clear that Americans are, for the most part, not receiving the same kind of information that the rest of the world is getting from news sources. We Americans are so thoroughly insulated in our big, beautiful and safe (still) country that it is easy to believe that what we get from our media and our government is the truth. I hope what the article says is right, that things are changing and that we are going to recover the optimism that we all remember.
The author, Naomi Wolf, is an American feminist. I AM NOT A FEMINIST and I do not agree with her anti-man statements. However, I do think/hope she is right about the other stuff. I could have deleted the feminazi stuff but I don't feel comfortable editing her work simply because I don't agree with a few sentences.
Would love to hear comments on this from everyone!
Naomi Wolf
Monday November 7, 2005
The Guardian
In the US comic strip, Peanuts, there is a little boy who is always followed by a cloud of dust. Wherever he goes, his cloud follows him. George Bush can't shake his personal cloud. The until recently eerily untouchable president has now lost his mojo. The man to whom the entire US press corps has been on its knees for four years is finally in the doghouse.
It is almost a cartoon of karma. First, hurricane Katrina hit - and the sight of black and brown bodies floating in what had been the streets of a US city, of babies crying for water, of old people shrouded in their wheelchairs seemed to rip right through the collective fantasy of US goodness and infallibility constructed by Dick Cheney and his cabal and hyped by a crotch-strapped Bush in a flightsuit.
How did he get away with so many lies for so long? After 9/11, Bush, Cheney and Karl Rove successfully used the fear of more terrorist attacks and the intoxicant of ruthless jingoism to sedate the country and make it compliant.
They could not have had more fortunate timing. During an era when US prestige abroad had already been declining, when US schools were turning out subliterates, when the US economy was being crippled by competition from harder-working south-east Asians and Chinese, Americans - and especially American men - were feeling the sinking self-regard characteristic of those losing prestige in once-great empires in decline.
Bush, Cheney and Rove changed all that with their myth making post-9/11. Suddenly those feminists were no longer so threatening: we still needed tough men in firefighter suits to protect the less powerful. Suddenly American men could feel potent at the sight of a statue of a tyrant toppling in a public square, could vicariously inhale the discourse about "liberating the Middle East" and "spreading democracy", could put a yellow "Support the Troops" sticker on their SUVs and forget the spiking mortgage, the downsizing of good-paying white-collar jobs, the increasing obstreperousness of their women. Bush managed to be golden for so long because he made Americans - and especially white American men, his core constituency - feel good about their identity again.
Well, Katrina was like the end of the Wizard of Oz: the tiny, fibbing man was revealed behind the great big voice and the inflated ideals. Scene after scene of the failure of the US to act like the US held a mirror up to our faces. It was like an intervention for a drug addict: suddenly the lies, the hype, the intoxicants, the bad company, looked as destructive to our true selves as Americans as they really had been all along. "This is not who we are," we realised inwardly, in revulsion at our own long bender.
So now Bush can get no slack. The Miers fiasco showed him up as arrogant - no news, but we are sick of it now. The Valerie Plame leak suddenly feels serious, now that Bush has lost the monopoly on the word "treachery". The press is refusing to go away in the face of threats and platitudes. We hit the 2,000 mark for dead young American men and women in Iraq, and no one thought that was inspiring any more. The man can do nothing right.
It's true that, in spite of Bush's current implosion, some rightwing structures will remain well past this lame-duck presidency. The right has a firm grasp on such powerful institutions as Fox News, the network of thinktanks, and soon, probably, the supreme court as well.
But here is the thing about democracy: when it is really working, it is not deferential to institutions. Real citizen action upends the best-laid plans of the best-financed oligarchs. Alabama was locked up politically in 1955 by segregationist old boys - but a bus boycott, sparked by a seamstress, Rosa Parks, who did not want to give up her seat, led the Jim Crow henchmen at the top into irrelevance. Because of an outburst of second-wave feminist activism, Roe v Wade was passed in spite of a number of conservative justices during a conservative Nixon presidency. Before Katrina, when the mass hypnosis of US jingoism still prevailed, there was widespread judicial support for curtailing the rights of war prisoners. Now, because of a changed national mood, judges seem far less eager to hand over authoritarian executive privilege to Bush. Justices, in other words, are people who live in and cannot help but respond to the bigger cultural shifts of their time. I believe in the power of this cultural shift around us to move even the judiciary: Institutions are made up of human beings, and no one likes being looked at with contempt at dinner parties.
But will this shift in the wind affect US relations with the larger world community? I think it could, but not, again, because our role at the UN will change or because we will have an awakening about our pathetic behaviour in relation to Kyoto. The shift in foreign relations will be an outcome of ordinary human shame. We were willing to be held in contempt by those effeminate Frogs - by "old Europe" - when we were intoxicated with ourselves: our isolationism made that easy. But now we are actually ashamed of ourselves at home, we can't bear international contempt in the same way. Now it hurts.
I don't see Cheney being shamed into dropping his Halliburton cronies now carving up Iraq. But I do see a renewed citizen interest in wind power, in driving petrol-electric hybrid cars, in reading about the short lives of the war dead - who, only six months ago, were spirited home away from the cameras in their body bags, when protest was considered unseemly. Today on the AOL homepage there is a headline about Bush being jeered by a foreign leader: that story would never have made it out of the land of blogs six months ago.
Like recovering addicts who have taken a step into a 12-step programme, we are ready at last to hear how we have harmed others - and to try to make amends. Star, the supermarket gossip tabloid, has put Angelina Jolie's work with Ethiopian Aids orphans on the cover, with a bigger photo than that of Paris Hilton's latest outfit. We used not to think black children in trouble overseas had anything to do with us - until we saw what happened to other black children, on our watch, here at home.
I do feel hopeful: everywhere I go, I hear disgust at our long drunken lurch through recent history give way to a renewed interest among ordinary people in activism, in justice, in what we used to understand as citizenship. I am less concerned about whether this results in a Democratic or Republican victory at mid-term elections than I am in whether we get to be a democracy again.
I am seeing Americans across party lines look again at what made us for so long, a moral force in the world - our judiciary, our until recently free press, our almost-retired belief in the equality of all - and think, yes, that is who we are. That is what makes us able to face ourselves in the mirror of news events. That is what made the US great, when it was great - not armies, not penal colonies, not a licence to terrify the world.
Bush will never recover his swagger in our eyes: he was our dealer. What remains to be seen is whether we will turn again to the next good drug to come along, with the next charismatic pusher - or whether Katrina's real legacy will lead us to do the hard work of reclaiming a civil society rooted in reality. My bet is on the latter.
· Naomi Wolf is the author of The Treehouse, Fire With Fire, and The Beauty Myth
~K
The author, Naomi Wolf, is an American feminist. I AM NOT A FEMINIST and I do not agree with her anti-man statements. However, I do think/hope she is right about the other stuff. I could have deleted the feminazi stuff but I don't feel comfortable editing her work simply because I don't agree with a few sentences.
Would love to hear comments on this from everyone!
Naomi Wolf
Monday November 7, 2005
The Guardian
In the US comic strip, Peanuts, there is a little boy who is always followed by a cloud of dust. Wherever he goes, his cloud follows him. George Bush can't shake his personal cloud. The until recently eerily untouchable president has now lost his mojo. The man to whom the entire US press corps has been on its knees for four years is finally in the doghouse.
It is almost a cartoon of karma. First, hurricane Katrina hit - and the sight of black and brown bodies floating in what had been the streets of a US city, of babies crying for water, of old people shrouded in their wheelchairs seemed to rip right through the collective fantasy of US goodness and infallibility constructed by Dick Cheney and his cabal and hyped by a crotch-strapped Bush in a flightsuit.
How did he get away with so many lies for so long? After 9/11, Bush, Cheney and Karl Rove successfully used the fear of more terrorist attacks and the intoxicant of ruthless jingoism to sedate the country and make it compliant.
They could not have had more fortunate timing. During an era when US prestige abroad had already been declining, when US schools were turning out subliterates, when the US economy was being crippled by competition from harder-working south-east Asians and Chinese, Americans - and especially American men - were feeling the sinking self-regard characteristic of those losing prestige in once-great empires in decline.
Bush, Cheney and Rove changed all that with their myth making post-9/11. Suddenly those feminists were no longer so threatening: we still needed tough men in firefighter suits to protect the less powerful. Suddenly American men could feel potent at the sight of a statue of a tyrant toppling in a public square, could vicariously inhale the discourse about "liberating the Middle East" and "spreading democracy", could put a yellow "Support the Troops" sticker on their SUVs and forget the spiking mortgage, the downsizing of good-paying white-collar jobs, the increasing obstreperousness of their women. Bush managed to be golden for so long because he made Americans - and especially white American men, his core constituency - feel good about their identity again.
Well, Katrina was like the end of the Wizard of Oz: the tiny, fibbing man was revealed behind the great big voice and the inflated ideals. Scene after scene of the failure of the US to act like the US held a mirror up to our faces. It was like an intervention for a drug addict: suddenly the lies, the hype, the intoxicants, the bad company, looked as destructive to our true selves as Americans as they really had been all along. "This is not who we are," we realised inwardly, in revulsion at our own long bender.
So now Bush can get no slack. The Miers fiasco showed him up as arrogant - no news, but we are sick of it now. The Valerie Plame leak suddenly feels serious, now that Bush has lost the monopoly on the word "treachery". The press is refusing to go away in the face of threats and platitudes. We hit the 2,000 mark for dead young American men and women in Iraq, and no one thought that was inspiring any more. The man can do nothing right.
It's true that, in spite of Bush's current implosion, some rightwing structures will remain well past this lame-duck presidency. The right has a firm grasp on such powerful institutions as Fox News, the network of thinktanks, and soon, probably, the supreme court as well.
But here is the thing about democracy: when it is really working, it is not deferential to institutions. Real citizen action upends the best-laid plans of the best-financed oligarchs. Alabama was locked up politically in 1955 by segregationist old boys - but a bus boycott, sparked by a seamstress, Rosa Parks, who did not want to give up her seat, led the Jim Crow henchmen at the top into irrelevance. Because of an outburst of second-wave feminist activism, Roe v Wade was passed in spite of a number of conservative justices during a conservative Nixon presidency. Before Katrina, when the mass hypnosis of US jingoism still prevailed, there was widespread judicial support for curtailing the rights of war prisoners. Now, because of a changed national mood, judges seem far less eager to hand over authoritarian executive privilege to Bush. Justices, in other words, are people who live in and cannot help but respond to the bigger cultural shifts of their time. I believe in the power of this cultural shift around us to move even the judiciary: Institutions are made up of human beings, and no one likes being looked at with contempt at dinner parties.
But will this shift in the wind affect US relations with the larger world community? I think it could, but not, again, because our role at the UN will change or because we will have an awakening about our pathetic behaviour in relation to Kyoto. The shift in foreign relations will be an outcome of ordinary human shame. We were willing to be held in contempt by those effeminate Frogs - by "old Europe" - when we were intoxicated with ourselves: our isolationism made that easy. But now we are actually ashamed of ourselves at home, we can't bear international contempt in the same way. Now it hurts.
I don't see Cheney being shamed into dropping his Halliburton cronies now carving up Iraq. But I do see a renewed citizen interest in wind power, in driving petrol-electric hybrid cars, in reading about the short lives of the war dead - who, only six months ago, were spirited home away from the cameras in their body bags, when protest was considered unseemly. Today on the AOL homepage there is a headline about Bush being jeered by a foreign leader: that story would never have made it out of the land of blogs six months ago.
Like recovering addicts who have taken a step into a 12-step programme, we are ready at last to hear how we have harmed others - and to try to make amends. Star, the supermarket gossip tabloid, has put Angelina Jolie's work with Ethiopian Aids orphans on the cover, with a bigger photo than that of Paris Hilton's latest outfit. We used not to think black children in trouble overseas had anything to do with us - until we saw what happened to other black children, on our watch, here at home.
I do feel hopeful: everywhere I go, I hear disgust at our long drunken lurch through recent history give way to a renewed interest among ordinary people in activism, in justice, in what we used to understand as citizenship. I am less concerned about whether this results in a Democratic or Republican victory at mid-term elections than I am in whether we get to be a democracy again.
I am seeing Americans across party lines look again at what made us for so long, a moral force in the world - our judiciary, our until recently free press, our almost-retired belief in the equality of all - and think, yes, that is who we are. That is what makes us able to face ourselves in the mirror of news events. That is what made the US great, when it was great - not armies, not penal colonies, not a licence to terrify the world.
Bush will never recover his swagger in our eyes: he was our dealer. What remains to be seen is whether we will turn again to the next good drug to come along, with the next charismatic pusher - or whether Katrina's real legacy will lead us to do the hard work of reclaiming a civil society rooted in reality. My bet is on the latter.
· Naomi Wolf is the author of The Treehouse, Fire With Fire, and The Beauty Myth
~K
Saturday, November 5
Remember, remember the Fifth of November
Tonight is Guy Fawkes Night, AKA Bonfire Night. This is England's celebration of something that didn't actually happen, as K so succinctly put it. The quick history behind it:
In the 17th century there was a group of people in England who were not happy with the current government. They enlisted the help of a mercenary from Yorkshire, Guy Fawkes. He led a band of rebels in a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, thusly decapitating the government. They dug a tunnel into the basement of the H of P, placed 36 barrels of gunpowder in a cellar, and prepared it to be detonated on the 5th of November, 1605. However, one of the conspirators that hired Fawkes started feeling guilty and so tipped off one of the big-wigs at the H of P. They searched the cellars and found Guy Fawkes with his barrels of gunpowder. The Gunpowder Plot was quashed.
This non-event is celebrated every year all over the country with fireworks and bonfires. To bring the symbolism full-circle, an effigy of Guy Fawkes is commonly thrown into the blaze. This night is of course also an excuse to "have a piss-up" (get drunk) and generally run amok. It's kind of like America's Fourth of July celebrations. Even though tonight is the official Guy Fawkes night, people have been lighting fireworks since about two weeks ago and will probably continue to do so for about two weeks after. Unlike the US, where most states seem to have outlawed fireworks, they have not been banned in the UK... yet (the Nanny State has not gotten around to it yet, I guess).
We are going to partake in this English celebration tonight by going to Winchester's "Guy Fawkes 2005". There will be a "procession" through town, presumably to carry an effigy of Guy Fawkes, to the park where the Mayor will light the bonfire, and then of course the fireworks will follow. Should at least be an interesting taste of English culture!
"Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
We see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes, guy, t'was his intent
To blow up king and parliament.
Three score barrels were laid below
To prove old England's overthrow.
By god's mercy he was catch'd
With a darkened lantern and burning match.
So, holler boys, holler boys, Let the bells ring.
Holler boys, holler boys, God save the king.
And what shall we do with him?
Burn him!"
-RP-
Tonight is Guy Fawkes Night, AKA Bonfire Night. This is England's celebration of something that didn't actually happen, as K so succinctly put it. The quick history behind it:
In the 17th century there was a group of people in England who were not happy with the current government. They enlisted the help of a mercenary from Yorkshire, Guy Fawkes. He led a band of rebels in a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, thusly decapitating the government. They dug a tunnel into the basement of the H of P, placed 36 barrels of gunpowder in a cellar, and prepared it to be detonated on the 5th of November, 1605. However, one of the conspirators that hired Fawkes started feeling guilty and so tipped off one of the big-wigs at the H of P. They searched the cellars and found Guy Fawkes with his barrels of gunpowder. The Gunpowder Plot was quashed.
This non-event is celebrated every year all over the country with fireworks and bonfires. To bring the symbolism full-circle, an effigy of Guy Fawkes is commonly thrown into the blaze. This night is of course also an excuse to "have a piss-up" (get drunk) and generally run amok. It's kind of like America's Fourth of July celebrations. Even though tonight is the official Guy Fawkes night, people have been lighting fireworks since about two weeks ago and will probably continue to do so for about two weeks after. Unlike the US, where most states seem to have outlawed fireworks, they have not been banned in the UK... yet (the Nanny State has not gotten around to it yet, I guess).
We are going to partake in this English celebration tonight by going to Winchester's "Guy Fawkes 2005". There will be a "procession" through town, presumably to carry an effigy of Guy Fawkes, to the park where the Mayor will light the bonfire, and then of course the fireworks will follow. Should at least be an interesting taste of English culture!
"Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
We see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
Guy Fawkes, guy, t'was his intent
To blow up king and parliament.
Three score barrels were laid below
To prove old England's overthrow.
By god's mercy he was catch'd
With a darkened lantern and burning match.
So, holler boys, holler boys, Let the bells ring.
Holler boys, holler boys, God save the king.
And what shall we do with him?
Burn him!"
-RP-
This is what I've been doing in my new research position at Bournemouth University...
http://www.artlab.org.uk/lego.htm
Doesn't actually feel like work!
~K
http://www.artlab.org.uk/lego.htm
Doesn't actually feel like work!
~K
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