Some of the more regular Agonistas may have noticed that I haven't been around recently. It's not because I suddenly got upset at Agonist or anything like that. Nor is it work, though I certainly had plenty that I should have been doing. No, it is a now familiar byproduct of depression, something I've been dealing with for the past five years.

elevated from the diaries

Katrina: America's Shame

I've been watching the cable networks, reading the blogs, reading the papers and I am getting increasingly furious. The networks ignore, tiptoe, or shade the ugly side of America revealed in this horrible disaster. The blogs play petty political games, despicably looking for a partisan advantage in tragedy. Some of the attacks are ridiculous, others recall Falwell and Robertson post 9/11, and some even have some truth to them. But the real issue is rarely addressed head on, perhaps because it indicts the local and state Democrats even more than it does the Republican administration. What is this issue? - America's total disregard for the welfare of its poor.  It is nothing new, but this time the indifference has most likely killed thousands in one quick blow.

By Sayed Kashua

What joy. At long last we have a terror attack of our own, at long last we are on the side of the good guys. True, deep mourning and terrible sadness descended on Shfaram this weekend, but still, for the Arab sitting in front of the screen there was also a kind of achievement in the terror attack, a consolation.

Why do Americans stand for Southerners idolizing the Confederacy, despite the evils of slavery and treason at its heart?

"Let's put this in the starkest possible terms. The cause for which the Confederate leaders fought, namely slavery, was no more noble than the cause for which the terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Al Zarqawi fights for today in Baghdad."

US police pursue girl over rock

An 11-year-old girl who threw a rock at a group of boys pelting her with water balloons is being prosecuted on serious assault charges in California.

Maribel Cuevas was arrested in April in a police operation which involved three police cars and a helicopter.

She has since spent five days in detention, in which she was granted one 30 minute visit by her parents, and has spent a month under house arrest.

Her lawyer accuses the authorities of criminalising childhood behaviour.

Abp Jozef Zycinski, the leader of the liberal wing of the Polish Church offered a strong endorsement of the modern theory of evolution, Darwin, and his work. At the same time his comments on the (US) fundies who reject evolution drip with contempt at the idea that anyone could be stupid enough to read Genesis literally, saying that that's been obvious ever since Galileo (i.e. the confirmation of the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system).  He argues that the attitude of the anti-evolution fundies leads to a growth of atheism and anti-religion feeling among scientists and scientifically literate people. While the Archbishop does not mention Cardinal Schonborn, his remarks are clearly a sharp rejection of the Cardinal's recent attack on 'neo-darwinism.'

Michael LaBossiere

Many feathers have been ruffled recently in the moral debate over foie gras. For those not familiar with this food, it is the swollen liver of a goose or duck. This swollen state is produced by force feeding the bird via a tube-certainly not a pleasant experience for the animal. Not surprisingly, animal rights activists tend to find this sort of thing morally appalling. Those with a more gastronomic inclination tend to regard it as acceptable and even very tasty.

El Pais Spain | IBSEN MARTÍNEZ

When it comes to finding those left-wing backpackers who are lately to be found in Venezuela, I have the sensitivity of an Amazonian lily searching out water: I don't know what it is that brings me in permanent contact with these birdwatchers who come to Chávez's Venezuela under the same Rousseauesque trance as Jean-Paul Sartre when he visited Fidel Castro and the "promising" Cuba of the early 1960s.

by Marek

elevated from the diaries

Reading the right wing press and blogosphere over the past several months it has become increasingly apparent that they were not taught the same version of that old children's rhyme that I was.

It has become quite clear that most (though not all) of the right find over the top, sometimes offensive and idiotic condemnations of the United States to be a far graver act than, say, hanging someone from the ceiling and torturing them, beating their legs to a pulp, or sodomizing them with broken light bulbs.

Le Monde has an article about a project to beatify Leon Dehon, a socially left wing but extremely antisemitic French priest active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  In some ways he resembles Fr. Kolbe, the Polish priest who became a saint under JP II in spite of protests from Jewish communities.  Kolbe, however, at least had the saving grace of opposing the holocaust and giving his life in Auschwitz for a Jewish prisoner. There is no such mitigating circumstance in Fr. Dehon's life.

I was in the mood to make myself a nice meal today. A quick sauted squid and scallop combo served with a morel and zuchini risotto and a red pepper, saffron and sherry sauce.  Washed down with the same sherry - an excellent Manzanilla and a very good but not perfectly matched Mosel Kabinett. Total cooking time about 1.5 hrs. Yum.

elevated from the diaries
Lies and Xenophobia - the Bankruptcy of the French Left

by Marek

Barring a miracle the French electorate will reject the EU constitution this weekend.  That fact, while bad, is not the calamity that some in the `yes' camp make it out to be.  What is a disaster is the role of so many left wing leaders in the no campaign, particularly the former neo-liberal Socialist PM Laurent Fabius.  In a scathing editorial today's Le Monde sums up his rhetoric well -"It was perhaps inevitable that the man who once said that Le Pen asked the right questions would end up offering the same answer."  And indeed the Socialist leaders of the `non' camp have spoken the traditional language of the radical right - with its lies and cheap appeal to nationalism and xenophobia as an answer to France's real economic and social problems.

You would think that if there's one thing the NYT reporting staff would know well it's Ivy League schools.  So when I saw that the latest piece in their 'Class in America' series was on Christian Evangelicals in the Ivy League, specifically my alma mater, I was expecting an interesting analysis of how class and religion combine in the overwhelmingly secular upper and upper middle class student body for whom that sort of religion isn't just alien on cultural grounds, but also identified with a different class.  But no, instead we get a breathless (and clueless) article about supposed inroads of Christian evangelicals at the University.

It's postwar Poland day for me, to start some Zbignew Herbert

Lots and lots of fun looking articles in a special issue of the German Law Journal  Haven't read them yet but I'm definately planning on taking a good look.  Table of contents below the fold, go to the link to get individual pdf links to all of them.

It seems that the campaign of certain British academics to boycott Israelis and Israeli institutions is picking up steam again.  

For some strange reason there seem to be no calls for a boycott of academics and educational institutions in Arab countries which commit human rights violations and/or limit academic freedom.  Equally surprising is the silence of Juan Cole who is so assiduous in writing about right wing attempts to impose their politics on academia. [irony off]

Why has the U.S. government become so allergic to displays of soft power abroad when the British, French, German, Spanish, and now even Chinese are hard at work maintaining, expanding - or yes, developing - their own cultural centers, libraries and language training institutes across the globe?

The U.S. used to be a master at the game. For years we taught hundreds of thousands of adults aged 16 on up to speak and read English. We also provided free access to the latest American magazines and books. We showed the best - although not necessarily the latest- American films and art works. We staged performances by American musicians, dancers, theater troupes and, in certain countries, mounted large, impressive exhibits of American life - exhibits that offered in the Soviet Union, for example, backdrops for and personal connections to young, vivacious American Russian speaking guides.

On Monday night I watched the HBO film "Sometimes in April," a fictional film about the Rwandan genocide.  It is quite unusual for a genocide movie. The typical film about the topic falls into two categories.  In the first a resourceful and lucky member of the targeted group somehow survives, for example The Pianist,  The Killing Fields or Europa Europa.  Schindler's List and the recent Hotel Rwanda are the other type.  There a brave and decent member of the murderers' ethnicity saves the lives of others.  The movies are often excellent but they are lies. In genocides almost everyone dies. Sometimes in April is a good movie, not a great one.  But it is not a lie.

Over at John and Belle have a Blog. Prompted by an article by Zizek in the LRB

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/zize01_.html

and a letter to John from Jacob Levy

The debate is here:

http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2005/03/jacob_levy_emai.html#more

Le Monde | March 19

Florence Beaugé and Philippe Bernard

General Schmitt, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1987-1991 has been accused by FLN militants arrested during the battle of Algiers in the summer of 1957 [FLN-National Liberation Front - the Algerian anti-colonial resistance organization, very effective an utterly ruthless, systematically used terrorism as a tactic] They affirm that the officer, present during the [torture] sessions, `ran the operations' The general has always denied participating in such practices.

Something the Iranian Government and I Agree on:

I particularly like the involvement of the victims' relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he'd killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing -- and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act -- was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there's a good explanation.

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

Released in 1962, "L'Eclisse" ("The Eclipse") followed "L'Avventura" (1960) and "La Notte" (1961) as the concluding film in Michelangelo Antonioni's trilogy on alienation and desire. It is the most radical film of a highly experimental group, and as time passes it increasingly seems to be the most pure and perfect expression of Mr. Antonioni's pioneering modernist sensibility.

[...]

NYTimes link here.

see all three, plus if you can find a good copy Red Desert is pretty amazing as well.  All much better than the heavily overpraised 'Blow Up'  If you don't have a big screet TV and you live in a place with top notch repertory cinemas wait for it to appear there

SPIEGEL staff writer and historian Michael Sontheimer reveals his family's Nazi past and explains why even his 11-year-old son still has a burden to bear. As the 60th anniversary of Germany's defeat approaches, he analyzes the ever-present debate about German guilt, memory and responsibility that still divides the country.

by Ashis Nandy

 South Asia is the only region in the world where most states define themselves not by what they are, but by what they are not.

Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal try despe-rately not to be India; Bangladesh has taken up the more onerous responsibility of avoiding being both India and Pakistan. I once used to think India was different. But the Indian politicians have now begun to say, at the drop of a hat, that India is not Pakistan.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine (conservative), Germany's top newspaper has recently been harping on Germany's demographic crisis.  The stuffs in German but a few graphs are interesting