David Brooks forced my hand

Brooks got nothin on Olivier Roy

My youngest is in his second year of french language immersion and cracks us up when he jumps into his b-boy stance and commences fledgeling attempts to flow in french..., on the serious though, my longtime friendships with Congolese and Senegalese made this one a no brainer for me personally...,

The last paragraph of the NACLA article on cultural remittances that P6 originally linked to - set the level for my responses;

New and promising cultural processes do not necessarily translate easily into more directly political strategies and lines of analysis. Whatever the progressive implications that innovations in the cultural field may carry, they need not be initiated or informed by a resolute intention to foment social changes of a structural kind, or be directly aligned with activist social movements. What the resonant effects of cultural remittances do indicate, however, is that present-day struggles for change must be transnational in scope and vision, and at the same time sharply attuned to issues of cultural identity: what people call “home� and the ways that they identify themselves beyond the bounds of circumscribed national territories and traditions. As the historian of global diasporas Robin Cohen succinctly puts it, diaspora peoples have changed “from victims to challengers,� a transformation of social roles that contemporary political thinking about Latin America can ill afford to overlook.

and the question P6 posed;

This begs the question: if Brooks thinks "American ghetto life...defines for the young, poor and disaffected what it means to be oppressed," what does it define for those privileged American children that end up in law school?

kind of sort of maintained the thrust, though the introduction of Brooks inanity into the proceedings degraded to an extent the possible arc of the whole. Brooks makes a turettish outburst against the power of black urban youth culture. It's a subject with which he is not personally or directly familiar, and what he fears is something he can't completely articulate, but it makes him uneasy. Brooks is strictly punkazz...., Roy, on the other hand, has a sophisticated understanding. His analysis of what I will refer to as open-source revivalism within Islam gives me pause when he proceeds from there to comment on HipHop as part of the transnational underclass bulwark against westernism. I find this a little troubling if for no other reason than that he's taken seriously by serious people, unlike Brooks. I originally attempted to post the comment on Lieken to this thread, but ran into a drupal/browser/latency induced error as I backarrowed to recover typed in text in limbo, this resulted in my inadvertently posting it over yonder. IMO, what Lieken attempts is naked perpetration. At the end of the day, the issue as I see it is not racism, jihadism, or any of a number of other hot-button divide and conquer distractions, rather, it is resistance to corporatism and the potential embodiment of that resistance in urban black youth culture. At present, it's been badly co-opted and degraded, but there is no reason to believe that HipHop culture cannot rise from its 15 years of lying down with corporate dogs. Axiomatic to this angle is the understanding that; westernism=corporatism

Gwynne Dyer excised the Goebbellian disinformation in the U.S. media....,

The real problem is not the failure of multiculturalism. The Paris riots are actually a splendid demonstration of the successful integration of immigrants into French culture (which has, after all, a long tradition of insurrection and revolution). The Paris riots are not a Muslim uprising. They are not even race riots. They are outbursts of resentment and frustration by the marginalized and the unemployed of every ethnic group. The low-income housing estates that ring Paris and other big French cities are dumping grounds for everybody that hasn't made it in the cool 21st-century France of the urban centers, the old white working class as well as immigrants from France's former colonies in Arabic-speaking North Africa and sub-Saharan black Africa and from all the poorer countries of Europe. Unemployment there is often twice the national average of 10 percent. But they are not Muslim- or even nonwhite-majority communities. Ethnic groups live jumbled together in apartment towers. The kid gangs that dominate the estates steal from strangers and residents alike and fight among themselves for control of the drug trade. But these are models of racial and cultural integration. What is happening now is neither an intifada nor a race riot - small comfort to the owners of the 28,000 vehicles burned on those estates so far this year. This is an incoherent revolt by kids, many of them gang members, who would once have formed the next generation of the French working class. No longer needed in that role, they have no future, so they are very angry. But they are not politically organized, so after a few more nights the violence will die down again for a while. These are neither American-style race riots nor a Muslim rebellion. About half the kids burning cars and buildings are white, working- class, post-Christian French, and they get along with the black and Muslim kids just fine.

Semantic Attacks: The War of Words in France does a very nice job of parsing the political and verbal nuances of the situation that American disinformation apparatchiks attempted to spin as Muslim, convergence point with HipHop, potential jihadist point of entry into America, etc.., Of course, we must content ourselves with merely knowing the truth, as none of these damnable Murkan mainstream slanderers will be held to account for their flagrantly dishonest attempts to exploit American fear and ignorance. The real story appears to be rooted in some fairly nasty French identity-politics temperature taking;

On October 25th, Sarkozy responded to his waning fortunes by firing an opening salvo that would help spark the gravest civil unrest France has experienced since May 1968, or perhaps even since colonial Algeria's war for independence stirred near civil war in France almost half a century ago. He took a retinue of journalists for an American-style photo-op to the "territoire" of the estranged young of one of Paris's poorest suburbs. There, he boasted about the success of his hard-line anti-crime policies. Standing outside one of the drab, run-down cement high-rises that are typical of such cités, surrounded by TV cameras, Sarkozy shot back at a woman who had cheered him from her window: "I'll get rid of this 'racaille' for you!" The full force of this insult has not been captured in the American media, where the word racaille has been regularly translated as "scum," or alternately, as "rabble" or "hoodlums." At the time, a French right-wing blogger used a quote by the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus to justify the Minister of the Interior's use of just that word: "Si l'on mettait toute cette racaille en prison,...les honnêtes gens pourraient respirer" ("If you put all this scum in jail,...honest people could breathe.") Yet "scum" fails to capture the actual subtext of racaille for a French ear. An extreme right-wing web site, closed down in 2003 with jail time and fines for inciting racial hatred, was simply called: SOS-racaille.

On another recent thread I challenged the "wabbit's" contention that France's policies toward its immigrants were liberal, and stated they were no different than America's monocultural hegemonic project--no hyphens, no problem. Here's a quote from a speech given by archconservative and former Senator Malcolm Wallop last night at the Ronald Reagan Gala, the same affair Dick Cheney used as a platform to attack critics of the war.

DW put on your rabbit ears... this one's for you:

"Yet with all of that the American people stand proud. They live their lives, raise their children, worship in their chosen ways, support their communities and make a nation strong.

They do not live with hyphens to define them. And when, to our sorrow, they die in service to our country their markers do not read “here lies an Hispanic-American soldier, nor a Jewish-American soldier, nor an African-American soldier. It says here lies an American soldier.”

They are first and last Americans regardless of their color, their national heritage. Oh yes they resist when their government challenges their liberty, restricts their movement, and taxes their labor. Yet they go to work, and live with a serenity that only lives lived in freedom can provide.

Politically correct hyphens divide us unnecessarily. Indeed in the search for a mandated celebration of diversity we have, in the name of tolerance, become a sadly intolerant country. It is wrong and can be seen as needlessly wrong.

Did we not see a spectacular example of that a couple of weeks ago when Rosa Parks lay in state in the Capitol? She lay in state not as an AFRICAN AMERICAN but as a true American heroine whose quiet dignity and courage expanded the freedom of each of us. She was recognized not for her race but for her defense of liberty. No hyphens here. Only her national stature, earned in front of us all, brought the thousands of Americans by to celebrate her life."

Your thoughts on the assertion that the great satan is corporatism? Further, what do you make of this specious unitarian talk coming from high places? Do you suppose that there is a degree of trepidation on the part of the fable-ists concerning the power of their big lies to hold things together? I mean, very obviously it still seems to work on Cobbs and hassenpfeffers - but does it seem to you like there is a rebellious groundswell of cognitive activistism potentially capable of sweeping a lot of just plain folks into alternative points of view?

that is, the relationship between the citizen and the state, how they are defined, represented, made real. human citizens have to compete within a 'free market' petri-dish in order to have the state serve their needs, while stronger, larger, and more powerful cybernetic organisms became ideal citizens: corporate-machines. humans now serve such machinery, and represent its needs as lobbyists for hire in the halls of government, on behalf of such corporate representation, bypassing the traditional electorate to directly engage the elected officials and full and equal (if not moreso) constituents. the end result for humanity is to strip it of its remaining autonomy from a world governed by and for machines. the market of democratic representation is thus now completely dominated by such special interests of a particular group of citizens, who happen to be machines. that is, organization structures and mechanisms which, with the addition of human power and human workers, adds up to a type of functioning organism with a certain set of traits or behaviors, a highly-refined intelligence in a given realm of inquiry (such as energy ecosystems), yet which can also be completely unintelligent, rightly so, with regard to other aspects of experience outside its domain and self-interest (such as human rights). what evolves in such an environment is a crude type of sentient machinery, composed of both humans and technologies, which create a larger sentient machinery, like Lewis Mumford's Megamachine, a crude yet ever- refining type of intelligence which ultimately is totally dehumanized and beyond any human governance. humans no longer compete against and cooperate with one another, nor will humans and corporations continue to be juxtaposed in such existential matches: within a democratic environment, such machinery can now compete against itself and cooperate with itself for greater representation, ('reality, inc.'), and for the state to serve its interests, values, and to develop accordingly. devoid of human goals, needs, oversight, or principles. the .US constitution as it exists legitimates, protects this. the government as it exists, serves this basic planning. the mass media, by default, represents, promotes this. that is, if it is left outside of public review and critiques, and is considered profane by fundamentalist decrees that the sanctity of tradition today remains untouched by a vast new electromagnetic paradigm and its reality. when 2/3rds of a public believe the state is headed in the wrong direction, and yet the basic steering or governing of the state is basically fixed to a set of beliefs which are, at their core, a major cause of the larger events (such as poverty, hunger, disease, etc.) it becomes a question of the impossibility of challenging the prevailing paradigm of such an incorporated reality, monopolized by mass media markets and their private representations of events themselves, and how to lay siege to this built-in mentality that itself does not serve the human constitution and democracy, as it foils any attempts at greater questioning by way of self-interest. as it would impinge upon its (a corporate machine that is a citizen in a democratic state) right of representation. the internet and networks recently emerged from such a context, and currently have become a balancing force, potentially. to attempt to democratize monopolistic mass- media markets by placing under review how events are being represented, and to provide an alternative version of the reality portrayed as in the public interest - that is, to differentiate between human and corporate citizenry.

"Further, what do you make of this specious unitarian talk coming from high places?"

Could you please elaborate?

I play am talk radio as a daylong irritant and this may have led me to a biased perception, but it seems to me that there is a full court press on by the GOP, GOP cheerleading big media, and even corporate leadership, {judging from some of the public forums that have been held lately hereabouts} to persuade us that the corporatist leadership has been operating in complete good faith to preserve our way of life. The excerpts you posted upthread were spot-on this theme. While I take a jaundiced view of these faux communitarian appeals, {if it were more than lip service, the quality and tangibility of American interpersonal communion would be entirely different than what it is - frankly I take these marketing appeals no more seriously than I take the seasonal pleas to shop, spend money and eat to excess in the name of thanks and jesus} Like I said y'day in response to P6's post that the Big Lie has limits;

Never has there been a use of public resources on such a scale on the basis of less hard evidence for all to see -- or in support of something less clearly defined, with less clear objectives (beyond the vagaries of public rhetoric), or with less clear motives. Something really special is going on.

I don't remember any previous juncture at which those in authority felt that such appeals for unity had to be made. I believe that previously consumption as the axis of our way of life never needed to be abetted by appeal to unifying patriotic sentiment.

"Seems to me that management and its sundry spokespeople are beginning to take the collective temperature for a technology-enabled fascist clampdown."

I feel the screws tightening everyday.

They have been...but take into account am talk radio's audience.

I'd note an operational distinction here P6. While it is abundantly clear that corporate management works in diligent good faith to maximize benefit to the corporation and the corporate way of life, most could not care less about continuation of popular American enjoyment of the same. I was in discussion with a U.S. heavy equipment manufacturer last week and one of the individuals responsible for Asia Pacific business noted matter-of-factly that China now accounts for 2/3rds of this company's global sales. China is what matters to this company, and great many like it. Now that the furor over Enron and defrocking of Arthur Anderson has died down, what if anything have you heard lately about compliance with and enforcement of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act?

"China now accounts for 2/3rds of this company's global sales. China is what matters to this company, and great many like it."

Americans see China as a vast marketplace for selling goods and products. But for every dollar America earns from trade with China, Walmart, by itself, returns fifty cents through its purchases of Chinese goods.

The other day I asked a Chinese colleague how to say "good morning" in Mandarin. I tried several times but I just couldn't get the pitches right. My colleague used to teach English in China. She informed me there are as many Chinese English speakers as there are Americans. China graduates five times as many engineers as America every year. I'm sure similar statistics exist in every other academic and technical field. How will America compete when Johnny can't read beyond the fifth grade level? Hell the president can't read beyond the fifth grade level.