more on cultural studies

The Michael Bérubé article I linked to recently has caused a quiet uproar. Silly me, I saw it as a defense against the sorts of people I see attacking the field (and a few supporters) who largely ignore what it can do. However, others (mostly those who misread the article or who are a touch sensitive about Theory's failed plans for world domination) saw it as an attack on the field. So see this follow up from Bérubé at Crooked Timber dealing with those issues. But also see this article by Ellen Willis that came up at MB's own blog.

My Jew is a better Jew than you

Apparently, an article supposedly by Richard Falk is making the rounds, questioning Israel's criticism of the Goldstone Report. Of course, some people will say (as Philip Weiss, who is also Jewish, not-so-subtly does) that both are Jewish. What is neglected is that both were appointments of the UNHRC, which is itself part of the problem. (Fer chrissakes, Mary Robinson turned down Goldstone's position because she found the mandate biased from the start.) Falk was not merely terrible; he's a Truther who blames the Mossad for 9/11.

Converts to Christianity were often the most antisemitic, because they had to prove the sincerity of their conversions. I came across an article by James Baldwin recently which includes a relevant quote:

The poor, whatever their color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason to, and God knows we didn't. "If you must call a cop," we said in those days, "for God's sake, make sure it's a white one." We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared the black cops ever more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder--on your head--to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other niggers.

So long as antisemitism dominates, it doesn't matter if the people hired to criticize Israel are Jewish or not. They certainly have every right to speak for themselves, but they do not in any way speak for Jews (any more than Michael Steele speaks for Blacks). Just as Christians promoted converts, antisemitism continues to try to put up "Good Jews" to silence other Jewish voices. That's colonialism, plain and simple.

institutionalized bigotries

This would be an example of institutional antisemitism. Facebook isn't staffed by Holocaust deniers, certainly, but their responses to Denial go beyond inadequate.

Btw, I checked Newsvine. They seem to have instituted a policy that to accuse anyone of being antisemitic or Islamophobic is against their terms of service. As for actual antisemitism or Islamophobia, I'm sure it's still allowed.

God is great, but is not quite "God"

Interesting interview on Fresh Air, with Karen Armstrong. She argues the idea of God we tend to use today is a recent invention. I think in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (it's been a while), Stephen Dedalus is asked whether the God he believes in is the "personal God" who hears your prayers, and intervenes, and has a long white beard, and so on with all the trappings, to which Dedalus answers, "Is there any other kind?" Well, yes, there is another kind.

Religion tends to work in two distinct ways. For some, it's a teaching to be learned. For (less numerous?) others, it's a process to promote learning. One of the problems with anti-theists lately is the failure to engage with both kinds.

In which I suggest defenses of cultural studies

Read Michal Bérubé in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I've thrown my lot in with a lot of people who are quite dismissive of cultural studies, but I quite like it. It offers, for example, an response to the Z-Left that's far more compelling than the usual precisely because it has the empathy and respect for people that Noam Chomsky only pretends to have. (And, bonus, explains the inevitable frustration that turns Chomsky into James Petras.) The answer to bad Theory Leftists is not an attack on Theory, but better Theory, and Bérubé is generally, as in this article, is quite good at that. I'm looking forward to upcoming release of The Left At War. See also, the joke his article sprouted.

Marc Garlasco on Afghanistan

"I don't think people really appreciate the gymnastics that the U.S. military goes through in order to make sure that they're not killing civilians," Garlasco points out.

"If so much care is being taken why are so many civilians getting
killed?" Pelley asks.

"Because the Taliban are violating international law,” says
Garlasco, “and because the U.S. just doesn't have enough troops on the ground. You have the Taliban shielding in people's homes. And you have this small number of troops on the ground. And sometimes the only thing they can do is drop bombs."

That's him speaking in 2007, well after leaving the Pentagon for HRW. Kinda wow. He's defending (not to mention a logic that HRW would deny to Israel) collateral damage rates way beyond what Israel has caused.

At the Pentagon, Garlasco was chief of high value targeting at the start of the Iraq war. He told 60 Minutes how many civilians he was allowed to kill around each high-value target -- targets like Saddam Hussein and his leadership.

"Our number was 30. So, for example, Saddam Hussein. If you're gonna kill up to 29 people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that's not a problem," Garlasco explains. "But once you hit that number 30, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld."

Garlasco says, before the invasion of Iraq, he recommended 50 air strikes aimed at high-value targets -- Iraqi officials.

But he says none of the targets on the list were actually killed. Instead, he says, "a couple of hundred civilians at least" were killed.

(via.)

More on Inglourious Basterds

David Bordwell, who co-wrote possibly the most widely used textbook in film studies, devotes much of this post to the film. He also provides links, one of which leads here, which uses a title that ought to really catch anyone interested in antisemitism.

One of the basic reasons we go to the movies is their bottomless capacity for wish fulfillment fantasy. It is a shade of escapism, or perhaps vice versa. These wishes and their cinematic granting may be base, unhealthy, cathartic, pathetic, unarticulated, mysterious or unhealthy. The movies provide a potentially powerful and relatively safe arena for working it out.

One of the fascinating things about The Parent Trap, for example, is its bizarrely naked fulfillment of a fantasy harbored by children of divorce, that Mom and Dad will reconcile -- that they can be forced to reconcile. When given some thought, surely no one would want their own children clinging to the desperate, futile hope, wallowing in the stunted, immature understanding of relationships, or the practicing the conniving and cruel schemes of Sharon and Susan to reunite their parents. And yet adults made the film. It is irresistibly sunny and extremely incorrect at the same time, with no hope for the faithless to say it is charmless or unfunny or the faithful to untangle it.

Oh, but about IG:

A swastika Zoller whittles into his sniper's perch in Nation's Pride rhymes with the Basterds' nickname carved into a rifle butt, and of course, Raine's handiwork across the foreheads of surviving Nazis. These echoes draw disconcerting parallels, connect ideas to be compared, but do not necessarily imply coequals. Continually complicating matters are glimpses of common human experience peeping through holes in Nazi uniforms: the one-word story of Rachtman's Iron Cross, an off-duty soldier celebrating his child's birth, Landa's disarming dorkiness beneath his hard, smooth legend. In the person of Pvt. Zoller, this stinging theme is distilled. He thinks he and Shosanna are in a romantic comedy, plays his role with much charm and confidence. At the Nation's Pride screening then, what is it that makes him flinch, avert his eyes, abandon his seat? Embarrassment at his performance? Pain at the memory of taking hundreds of lives (his explanation)? Pain that it took the power of cinema to make him feel the weight of those deaths; that his favorite art form had turned on him? Or the crushing realization that he is not in the movie he thought he was in? In Zoller's defining moment, he disrupts Shosanna in the projection booth, tries to play romantic lead one last time, is pushed too far, and threatens to assault her. He feels entitled, as occupying force. Human, certainly, and a G.W. Pabst fan to boot, but the equation is unbalanced: he's a human being that has irrevocably chosen to throw in with the Nazi Party. There are, in the end, those things Nazis believed, things they did, which cannot be made up for by doses of charm, frailty and circumstance. Things get complicated, Inglourious Basterds admits, but some of identities we flicker through stick with us and muck up all the others. And Zoller's a Nazi.