When the Go-Gos Ruled the World

Some more recent news from around the world: as reported by the BBC, the military coup in Fiji will not be holding elections.

This is a very depressing story, of course; however, Fosco can't really get past the fact that the coup leader's name is essentially Bananarama. Yes, that's right: Fiji is being ruled by Commodore Frank Bananarama. It's almost like we're living in a Pynchon novel. Also, I would recommend that the elected government of Singapore keep an eye on General Wilson Phillips. Just saying.

As for Fiji's future, I heard a rumour that this will be a cruel summer. However, several international celebrities have already spoken out in opposition to the coup, including Venus Williams. Additional celebrity support is imminent, although I've heard that Robert De Niro's Waiting.

Hey, if you ever wondered how the lyrics to "Venus" would be subtitled in Portuguese, well, you're in luck:



Por favor, divirta-se!

Hell Across the Border

Lately, Fosco (like everyone cool) has been reading Roberto Bolaño. His head has been completely lost in the languid and terrifying city that is the centerpiece of Bolaño's masterpiece, 2666 (the city also appears briefly in several other Bolaño novels). He calls it "Santa Teresa," but it is actually meant to represent Ciudad Juárez. In his work, Bolaño has not only renamed Juárez, but has relocated it from Chihuahua (on the Texas border) to Sonora (on the Arizona border). However, despite this geographical sleight of hand, there is a strong attempt at realism in his depiction of the city.

At its heart, 2666 is something of a murder mystery (although the novel is so sprawling, it is probably wrong to try to pin down its "heart"). The mystery is horrifying: the rape, mutilation, and murder of hundreds of young women over more than a decade. What's more horrifying is that Bolaño is not making this up.

As a 2002 article in Mother Jones notes:

And so Mexico's fourth-largest city retains its nickname as "the capital of murdered women." The city of 1.5 million, where an acrid haze of factory smoke and car exhaust hangs in the air, is known for having one of the highest crime rates in Mexico; in 2001 alone, drug traffickers were blamed for more than 60 execution-style murders. But Juarez is most notorious as a place that draws tens of thousands of young women from small, poor towns to take $55-a-week jobs in assembly plants, known as maquiladoras, operated by some of the wealthiest corporations in the world -- companies like General Electric, Alcoa, and DuPont. More than 60 percent of maquiladora workers are women and girls, many as young as 13 or 14.

In Bolaño's novel, the murders are partly the fault of the globalization-driven culture of the maquiladora. (Sadly, even progressive companies, like the one that employs Fosco's boyfriend Oz, have outsourced to Juárez.) However, there are plenty of other factors that have contributed to this holocaust, including government incompetence, apathy, and malfeasance.

Well, because the truth of the world is that things can always get worse, Ciudad Juárez was in the news again last week. According to an article in the New York Times, Juárez is not just an unsafe place to be a young woman; rather, it is now completely unsafe for anyone. The Times article plays up the irony that Juárez is separated only by the Rio Grande river from El Paso, the third-safest city in America. Juárez, on the other hand, is not safe at all:

El Paso still enjoys its status as one of the safest cities in the United States, while Juárez, a city of 1.5 million that has always been rough, has become a battleground for drug cartels. More than 1,550 people were killed there in drug wars last year.

Worse, other violent crimes — carjacking, extortion, armed robbery — have surged as the beleaguered authorities struggle to respond to daily gun battles.

“It’s strange to be the third-safest city in the United States right next to a war zone,” said Mayor John Cook of El Paso, as he gazed at the ramshackle neighborhoods of Juárez.

Let's do the math. Last year in Juárez, 1,550 people were killed (in drug wars alone!) out of a population of 1.5 million. Last year in El Paso, 16 people were killed out of a population of 600,000. If we convert El Paso's murder rate to make it comparable with city the size of Juárez (a city 2 1/2 times larger), there would have been 40 murders in El Paso last year. What the hell is happening in Juárez?

The problem is drugs, as the Mexican government fights a losing battle with drug cartels. The mayor of El Paso suggests that the Mexican government's intervention is actually to blame for the increase in violence, by upsetting the fragile balance of competing cartels and creating a "turf war." Whatever the cause, things are not going to get better:

The mayor of Juárez, José Reyes Ferriz, says his city suffers from a woefully undermanned and ill-equipped police department, despite programs to recruit new officers and purge scores of corrupt ones. Mr. Reyes estimated that Juárez needed at least 4,000 police officers to take back control of the streets. It has only 1,600.

He said the 3,000 soldiers and federal agents Mr. Calderón had dispatched to quell the violence had had limited success. The soldiers, for instance, know nothing about police work and patrol in long columns, which are easily spotted and avoided.

In the past six months, the killings have become more frequent, more brazen and more gruesome. One body was beheaded and hung from a bridge. Others were stuffed in giant stew pots.

Most of the victims have been young men recruited from other towns to fight for the warring drug kingpins. But at least 40 of the victims have been innocent bystanders, among them a few El Paso residents.

“This is a real war and the city, unfortunately, is the theater for this war,” Mr. Reyes said.

In 2666, Bolaño's Santa Teresa is a version of hell. In 2009, the real Ciudad Juárez is even worse.

An Apology for Our Way of Life

Fosco was generally a fan of Obama's Inaugural Address, especially his inclusion of "non-believers" in the list of people who make up this country (Fosco's friend Todd was pleased with this as well). And as for the Bushies who were offended by Obama's obvious repudiation of the previous administration? They can suck it.

But now, two days later, Fosco remains a bit troubled by one line from the address in particular:

We will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense.

There are (at least) two ways to read the defiance in this sentence, depending on what you think Obama means about "our way of life."

If this phrase means things like sexual and racial equality, free speech, something like democratic representation, and some level of tolerance for difference, then sign me up. Those are good things and there is no need to apologize for the social benefits of a liberal democratic society. However, who is actually asking us to apologize for these things? Other than maybe a few mullahs? If this is what the line means, I like it; but it's not really a line with very broad application.

However, there are plenty of things about our "way of life" that we really ought to be apologizing for. Our CO2 emissions. Our addicted consumerism. Our economic exploitation of the Third World. Our consumption of an obscene amount of the world's resources (per capita). Our narcissism and exceptionalism. Cultural imperialism. SUVs, hedge funds, high fructose corn syrup, and celebrities. Now Fosco is not speaking to you as someone who is above these things; he is as much caught up in this "way of life" as the rest of us (well, except for the SUV part). But there is a lot about our way of life that is indefensible. And even though it can be hard (very hard) for us to change how we live (to live more simply, more sustainably), that still doesn't make our current way of life right.

So yeah, maybe when it comes to some things about our way of life, we do owe the world an apology. And we also owe a commitment to make things right. And I wish Obama had been more clear about this.

Catching Up on your Reading: Part III

The last few weeks were the holidays and all, so it's entirely understandable if you fell behind on your reading. Today on Fosco Lives! Fosco will be pointing you toward things you should have read over the holidays but might have missed.

This one is going to be a downer. Fosco's recent interest in the Third World has led him to pay much more attention to stories about contemporary slavery. According to this article in Foreign Policy magazine (an excellent mag, btw), "there are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history." The Foreign Policy article is shocking and begins with an anecdote about how obscenely easy it is to purchase a child slave in Haiti:

Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. Before you go, let’s be clear on what you are buying. A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Agreed? Good.

[...]

If you’re interested in taking your purchase back to the United States, Benavil tells you that he can “arrange” the proper papers to make it look as though you’ve adopted the child.

He offers you a 13-year-old girl.

“That’s a little bit old,” you say.

“I know of another girl who’s 12. Then ones that are 10, 11,” he responds.

The negotiation is finished, and you tell Benavil not to make any moves without further word from you. Here, 600 miles from the United States, and five hours from Manhattan, you have successfully arranged to buy a human being for 50 bucks.

Sickening. Similarly, a recent Huffington Post story explores child maid trafficking from Africa, based on the testimony of a former child maid rescued from slavery in Irvine, California:

Shyima was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in northern Egypt to work in their California home. She awoke before dawn and often worked past midnight to iron their clothes, mop the marble floors and dust the family's crystal. She earned $45 a month working up to 20 hours a day. She had no breaks during the day and no days off.

While this particular story has a happy ending for poor Shyima (she gets to go to Disneyland a lot!), the evildoers don't learn their lesson.

I'm sorry to have to recommend these articles, but we have to know these things if we are going to stop them.

Pictures from the Edge

A must-read from today's San Jose Mercury News: photographer Dai Sugano publishes photos and video from the month that he spent in India, documenting its neoliberal economic explosion and the (often overlooked) consequences.

Fosco has written about Mumbai recently, as a consequence of reading Mike Davis's remarkable book, Planet of Slums. Sugano's photos and videos offer an exceptional (although at times, slightly pretentious) visual accompaniment to Davis's book.

As Sugano notes,

About one-third of the world's poor people live in India. More than 450 million Indians exist on less than $1.25 a day, according to the World Bank.

More than 6 million of those desperately poor Indians live in Mumbai, representing about half the residents of the nation's financial hub. They dwell in gigantic slums and roadside shanties that press up against the shimmering high-rises that serve as the most conspicuous symbols of India's new affluence.

This type of inequality isn't completely beyond our imagination (as anyone who has driven through parts of Los Angeles can attest to), but the scale is beyond anything we Americans have been led to believe (thanks to the cheerleaders of neoliberal globalization). Mumbai may be one of the great "success stories" of a globalized Third World (driven partially, as Sugano points out, by Silicon Valley cash), but it's also a social nightmare straight out of Victorian England. And for reasons both ethical and practical, we can't allow this kind of inequality to continue.

Your Africa Update

One of the things that Fosco learned this past academic quarter is that there is no excuse to ignore the Third World. As residents of the richest country on earth, we cannot pretend that our lifestyle has no relation to the rest of the world. Governor MooseMunch may not know that Africa is a continent, but the rest of us have no excuse. Recently, Fosco has begun to educate himself about Africa. In what will become a periodic feature here at Fosco Lives!, here is your Africa Update:

• Fosco has recently become very interested in Nigeria. The city of Lagos is one of the planet's most interesting (and most horrible) megacities. The best place to start your reading about Lagos is "The Megacity: Decoding the Chaos of Lagos" by George Packer from The New Yorker. A second accessible step would be the novel Graceland by Chris Abani. It's the story of a young Elvis impersonator trying to hustle a living in the contemporary slums of Lagos. The premise may seem too clever by half, but it's a surprisingly powerful novel. It's also written in English, which alleviates some of the potential translation problems.
  
  The recent political news from Nigeria? Strangely enough, their Supreme Court just ruled on the legitimacy of their 2007 presidential election (sound familiar?) in favor of the sitting president. President Yar'Adua plans to use this decision to consolidate his hold on power. Although Yar'Adua is apparently mildly anti-corruption (which, in Nigeria, is pretty remarkable), some observers still question the possibility of a clean Nigerian government. As Professor Yusufu Obaje notes:
  

  Any serious administration must address this issue of political illiteracy. As long as this is prevalent in our society, we cannot have free and fair election in Nigeria.

  Fosco is fascinated by this idea of political literacy--something that everyone seems to assume is prevalent in the US (probably more so than it is).
  
  Last Nigeria item: from naijablog, a video of "Ikotun, an unloved and anonymous part of Lagos."
  
  
  
  
• Welcome to Zimbabwe. Things here aren't very good right now. As you may have seen on the news, there is a widespread cholera outbreak. Zimbabwe's ruler, strongman Robert Mugabe is an absolute monster, but is he to blame for the cholera? Well, it depends. If you are a member of the reality-based community, the outbreak is clearly a result of the water and sanitation policies of Mugabe and his government. However, if you are a member of Mugabe's delusional government, then the cholera is actually a biological attack launched by either the British or the US State Department. This type of rhetoric would be funny, of course, if thousands of people weren't dying of an easily preventable disease.
  
  
• Finally, steel yourself to read about this recent massacre in the Congo. Sadly, this massacre has exposed the farce of UN peacekeeping efforts in the area:
  

  And yet, as the killings took place, a contingent of about 100 United Nations peacekeepers was less than a mile away, struggling to understand what was happening outside the gates of its base. The peacekeepers were short of equipment and men, United Nations officials said, and they were focusing on evacuating frightened aid workers and searching for a foreign journalist who had been kidnapped. Already overwhelmed, officials said, they had no intelligence capabilities or even an interpreter who could speak the necessary languages.

  Before you consign the Congo to memory oblivion, allow Fosco to note that this country is as populous as France. At some point, we are going to have to take the mental responsibility to think about places like the Congo.

[UPDATE: Please note the new list of "Africa Blogs" in the right column of Fosco Lives!]

Weekend Stories

Some quickbites from the weekend:

1. Will the real Bill Ayers please stand up? Oh, there he is, on the Op-Ed page of the NYTimes. He sounds like a pretty reasonable man, actually. The one good line:

We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism

Why do I love the the phrase "extreme vandalism" so much? Because it reminds me of this (from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle):


How extreme was your vandalism, Bill Ayers? Extremely extreme! Wooo!

2. Let's stay on the NYT Op-Ed page for a second. In this piece, Patrick French needs to tell us that "They Hate Us — and India Is Us." Apparently, the terrorists hate Mumbai because

Despite its manifest social failings, India remains the developing world’s most successful experiment in free, plural, large-scale political collaboration.

The problem here, as Fosco has noted in a recent post, is that the phrase "despite its manifest social failings," brackets some serious contributing factors to the kind of violence directed against Mumbai. It's also worth noting that referring to Mumbai, which is the slum capital of the world, as "the developing world's most successful experiment" is a bit like calling Lubbock the most exciting city in Texas's South Plains. It may be true, but it's not really a cause for celebration. You know--it's as if the NYTimes op-ed columnists aren't reading Fosco Lives!

3. Did you hear that George W. and Lori Laura Bush bought a house in Dallas? Sounds like a perfect neighborhood for them, too. According to this story,

until 2000, the neighborhood association's covenant said only white people were allowed to live there, though an exception was made for servants.

That's right: "until 2000"! Now, I don't know if Kanye West was right that George Bush doesn't care about black people, but it sure seems like Bush doesn't want to see them at the block party.

4. Perhaps the saddest news that Fosco has to share with you today is that the recession is finally hitting Fosco's favorite sector of the economy: fine dining. From an article in the SF Chronicle:

Not since 9/11 have Bay Area restaurants, whether it be the fancy, white-tablecloth ones or the cozy neighborhood hangouts, seen such a lull in business. But this time, restaurant owners say, it's worse. Even in an area known for its obsession with food, some restaurants say revenue is down as much as 40 percent. Many restaurateurs are laying off workers; others reducing the days they are open.

Worst of all, there is no immunity for the Bay Area's premier temple of culinary art, Restaurant Michael Mina (home of two Michelin stars--the highest rating in the city):

For the first time in its nearly five-year existence, Michael Mina, the four-star restaurant in San Francisco's Westin St. Francis Hotel, will close two days of the week - Sunday and Monday. Chef-owner Michael Mina said those are his slowest days in an already slow economy. He said his sales fell 10 percent during September and October. Tables aren't filling up like they once did, and diners are shying away from expensive wines.

This is especially sad to Fosco as he has a thing for Michael Mina (the restaurant). In fact, this is where Fosco and Oz celebrated their first anniversary this past summer, over a meal that was spectacular in every way. Including dessert:


Hang in there, Michael Mina (the restaurant)! Fosco and Oz will be back (if the recession is over by their second anniversary).

Another Explanation for the Mumbai Attacks

The attacks in Mumbai were horrible. We are still learning the full details of the events there, from the horror of those trapped in hotels to the moments of heroism. We are also still learning about the causes of the attacks--as much as we can ever know about the causes of mass murder. We have been told about the reputed link to Pakistan, the role of Kashmir, and the suggestion that al-Qaeda used the attacks to draw attention away from their hideouts along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

In the NYTimes, Suketu Mehta offered his own explanation for the Mumbai attacks in an essay called "What They Hate About Mumbai." Mehta offers an eloquent tribute to "his city" as a "a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia." And yet, there are people who hate the city. For Mehta, the hatred of Mumbai is driven by religious fundamentalism, a fundamentalism that hates Mumbai's materialism and sensuality. The terrorists hate Mumbai because

being South Asian, they would have grown up watching the painted lady that is Mumbai in the movies: a city of flashy cars and flashier women. A pleasure-loving city, a sensual city. Everything that preachers of every religion thunder against.

It is the traditional fundamentalist hatred of pleasure and earthly gain that has led them to single out Mumbai (as well as cities of the Western world) for punishment.

And Mehta has watched this religious fundamentalism grow in his city. As he notes,

In today’s Mumbai, things have changed. Hindu and Muslim demagogues want the mobs to come out again in the streets, and slaughter one another in the name of God. They want India and Pakistan to go to war. They want Indian Muslims to be expelled. They want India to get out of Kashmir. They want mosques torn down. They want temples bombed.

For Mehta, Mumbai has become a front in the war of fundamentalism against Western life. And for him the appropriate response to the attacks is for the West to fight back even harder:

But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever.

The key to winning the war against religious fundamentalism, Mehta says, is to have more fun.

Fosco has sympathy for much of Mehta's analysis. Indeed, religious fundamentalism does seem like a reasonable explanation for the Mumbai attacks (especially as we learn more). And far be it for a self-described "hedonist intellectual" like Fosco to put a limit on pleasure. But, even so, Mehta's analysis and his prescription sound eerily like those offered by George W. Bush after 9/11:

1. the terrorists hate us because our way of life is just too awesome.
   
2. the best way to respond to the attacks is to go shopping.
   

Instead of recycling these lies/platitudes/idiocies, Fosco would like to suggest a more complex way of thinking about the causes of the hatred directed against Mumbai (and the West).

Part of Fosco's response to the news of the attacks (on Thanksgiving Eve here in the US) was colored by the fact that he was reading Mike Davis's remarkable book Planet of Slums at the time. Planet of Slums examines the hellish underworld of poverty that comes into existence simultaneously (but invisibly, to Western eyes) with the rise of glitzy Third World megacities. One of Davis's case studies is, of course, Mumbai, a city of 19 million people with 10-12 million of those people living in tenements or squatting (in fact, probably 1 million people in Mumbai live on the sidewalks). This is the Mumbai that Mehta does not talk about in his essay, the Mumbai where

• breathing the air is equivalent to smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes a day.
  
• in the Dharavi slum district, the population density is 18,000 people PER ACRE.
  
• about half of the population does not have access to a toilet.

This Mumbai is indeed far removed from Bollywood dreams.

Now, I don't want to blame Mehta for glossing over this side of Mumbai; he is not trying to mislead--Mumbai is also the rich and glamorous city that he loves. However, I do want to follow Mike Davis in suggesting that there are consequences to the type of economic inequality that we find in Mumbai (and all over the Third World). When you consider that similar conditions of inequality hold in cities across India (Delhi, Kolkata) as well as in the cities of India's (frequently hostile) neighbors (Karachi, Pakistan; Dhaka, Bangladesh; etc.), you have to start to wonder about the political and religious consequences of extreme inequality. It should be no surprise that terrorism (especially religious terrorism) seems to grow best in the slums of places like Karachi, Kabul, and Baghdad (in fact, the dangerous Sadr City area of Baghdad is the largest slum in that country).

This is not to say that the Mumbai attacks had social inequality as their explicit motive. Nor is it to excuse the attacks in any way. However, it may be time for the rich First World to start asking itself whether the economic abjection of the Third World is breeding resentment, discontent, and ideologies of violence. Maybe instead of bombing the hell out of Pakistan (and other Third World slum societies), the First World should think about creating a livable existence for the global poor. This might be a case of how the right thing to do is also in our best interest...

Thankful.

The weather here was finally beautiful today. Fosco walked down to the beach. The waves were the color of tea and they were large. Lots of surfers. You can sorta see them in this video:



Fosco is a very enthusiastic amateur bird-watcher and so he was quite excited to see a new bird today: the Black Oystercatcher. Fosco couldn't get a good picture, but here's the picture he would have like to have taken:

There were three of these guys browsing the tidepools this afternoon.

This was a nice afternoon and that's what Fosco needed today. To be honest, Fosco has had some trouble feeling appropriately thankful this Thanksgiving season. In many ways, Thanksgiving felt like a bit of downer this year, even though Fosco spent the day with family and his boyfriend Oz.

For one thing, Black Friday was even more distasteful than usual, what with the trampling death of a WalMart worker and the general economic meltdown (although, in the interests of full and somewhat-embarrassing disclosure, Oz and Fosco did buy an Xbox on Friday). And then there were the horrible attacks in Mumbai (more on that in an upcoming post).

Part of the problem is that Fosco is pretty ambivalent about the emotion of gratitude. What does it mean to feel grateful for something? And why should one feel that way? These questions are not that easy to answer if you think about them in terms of something like Thanksgiving.

Obviously, there are simple gratitude situations in everyday life. Say I'm 25 cents short at 7-11 (buying my favorite Chinese melamine chews) and the surfer dude behind me gives me a quarter. I'm grateful. Easy enough. Fosco is not a monster.

The problem is when a holiday like Thanksgiving comes around and the conventional wisdom is that you feel something we might call ontological gratitude--that is, gratitude for one's way of being in the world. By this, I mean feeling gratitude for one's essential position in the world, e.g.,

• I'm grateful that I'm smart.
  
• I'm grateful that I live in a rich Western society.
  
• I'm grateful that I have a family and friends who love me.
  
• I'm grateful that I'm alive.
  

These are the "big things" that Oprah is always telling you to journal about.

There are two problems with this kind of gratitude as Fosco sees it. The first is that gratitude is an other-directed emotion. If you are grateful for a good thing, you are feeling grateful TO somebody/something for that good thing. Gratitude implies an agent who produced that good thing for you (like that dude who helped me buy my melamine chews). So who do you thank for one's talents, one's relatives, one's nationality, one's existence? I suppose that's where God comes in, but that's not very helpful for those of us living the post-God existence. The God substitutes don't really work well for Fosco here either--being grateful to "The Universe" just feels stupid.

The related problem here is the question of desert (and I don't mean dessert). I'm not sure that you can feel grateful for something that you don't feel like you deserve (even just a little). Can you feel grateful for dumb blind luck? Fosco can't. This isn't a problem for most everyday applications of gratitude--after all, there is certainly part of Fosco that feels he deserves his melamine chews at 7-11 (as he's already paid almost all of the purchase price) and the surfer dude who gives him a quarter is just helping him get what he deserves. But what exactly did you (or Fosco) do to deserve not to be born in the Third World? What did you (or Fosco) do to deserve to be born with all of your limbs?

What I'm trying to suggest is that there is something slightly obscene about being grateful that you are much less existentially miserable than most of the world. After all, if you are the person who misses a plane that crashes, are you grateful that you didn't make the flight? Or do you just feel stupidly, guiltily, undeservingly lucky? The difference here is that lucky (unlike grateful) is not an entirely pleasant feeling. With luck, there is always the recognition that there is no reason why you have good things. That's why no one keeps a "luck journal."

And so, how does one feel on Thanksgiving, when one has a table full of food and a safe place to live? Fosco feels lucky, not grateful. And while you can still enjoy the good things that are yours because of luck, you cannot do so without some ambivalence, without the recognition that you have those things over other people for no good reason. Happy Thanksgiving.