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4. ??????????? ????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????“??”????“??”???????

Comical tragedies are sure tear jerkers. Encountered two recently:

A Spoild Man (short fiction, the New Yorker)
Reminded me of a few works I read before … but too tired to remember which ones. Or is it an metaphore of many things in life, including that of the American Dream? The dream was induced by an American, that is for sure.

Turtles Can Fly (an Iran-Iraq movie)
If there is any good artistic rendering of Leviathan’s famous opening: “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, this must be it.

The kid-king setting echos the Road Warrior movies. However, whereas the Gibson movies are meant to be absurdist fantasies, the Kurdish kids life portrayed in the movie are fiendishly real. The most moving moment came when the Blackhawk helicopters flying over a hill full of confused and scared refugees, spreading leaflets that promised a “paradise”.

There can’t be any stronger contrast between the powerful and the powerless, between the weightiness of the promise and the hopelessness of reality.

Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Another surprise find. I thought I watched all the Vietnam movies there are.
This one differs from others in that it tells the story of an anti-hero–in the sense that a “good” guy turning “bad” (from a pure liberal pov) Unlike Born on the 4th of July where a USMC soldier lived through war and turned into a peace activist, “Joker” lived through a battle and turned into a bona fide killer!The movie is full of shit–machoism, libido and adrenaline, but that is why I love it. In fact, I am writing this piece listening to the “micky mouse marching song” on YouTube and Joker’s final words:

 My thoughts drift back to erect nipple wet dreams about Mary Jane Rottencrotch and the Great Homecoming Fuck Fantasy. I am so happy that I am alive, in one piece and short. I’m in a world of shit… yes. But I am alive. And I am not afraid.

It is a story of survival. Also, every one performed so well and the script was just chrisp and juicy. Gunnery Sergeant Hartman was my favorite character until he was shot. I didn’t get Kubrick’s other movies, but I totally dig this one.

Idiocracy

Just a very dark but funny B movie. Goes well with my rant against popular democracy. Movies sometimes are scarily close to life. Wag the Dog was such a case. Had “Idiocracy” been released today, I am sure people will associate it with Sarah Palin. Particularly after she failed to answer what paper she reads–being a journalist major and all that.

1. Just watched the movie “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels“. Pretty funny, particularly towards the end. Very witty. Everyone performed wonderfully.

2. Still haven’t figured out whether the Riviera town we visited was Villefranche-Sur-Mer or not?

3. A new word learned: MacGuffin. According to Wiki:

a plot device that motivates the characters or advances the story, but the details of which are of little or no importance otherwise.

Don’t I wish many things in life are MacGuffins!

Read ????? (1 and 2) after Steve C recommended it. He asked me whether I can still “handle” China but I was interested in the central-local relationship.

The book is similar to a pretty stylized mini TV series: bad guys are bad all around and good guys are good inside out, “????”, etc. And there isn’t as much discussion of central-local tensions till the 2nd series, which, when it comes to that, is very revealing:

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Also, according to the book, the central transfers are often NOT included in local’s budgets! No wonder ????? become so prominent and prevalent.

Two years ago, I’d thought this is abnormal and is something that can be amended by policy or institutional design. Now, I don’t think so any more: the central-local tension is part of China political economy that is beyond regime or even civilization (????????????????????????????????????????????????????)

There is certainly an institutional design component: one may argue that focus on GDP, including the bias toward growth in cadre evaluation, calls for locals to game the system. Therefore, however hard the center tries, it still can’t make ?????–even when provincial heads are centrally appointed.

But defects in institutional design do not explain prevalent corruption. Not even the misaligned center-local interests can explain that. In other words, you can have very clean local officials who still undermine national economy in pursuit of local interests.

Corruption seems to be best explained by property rights (and its principal-agent implication). A national economy has a certain amount of endowed assets–land, natural resources or labor that can only be mobilized politically. The marketization of those assets is often a monopolized process (because the assets are considered public), particularly when there is a pretty strong government (i.e. an agent of public interests).

The natural conclusion is that it is an ill that cannot be solved by political reform alone (e.g. corrupt but democratic countries like India). It may solve the agency problem but certainly not the rights ill.

But how can one privatize public assets and keep them efficiently deployed without creating injustice? I think this is the real question. Is Norway a possible exception to this? I really need to study the Scandinavian countries more …

Jon Lee Anderson: Fidel’s Heir

Just after I finished Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, I came upon Anderson’s “extremely short” essay about Hugo Chávez. Convinced me more of my criticism of Arendt: in pursuit of an answer to the Holocaust, she stretched extreme instances of popular demagogy into “Totalitarianism”.

Chávez’s Venezuela is arguably at a midway point in the spectrum of demagogy: Chávez is not a total despot, for he does tolerate some opposition, submit himself to fair elections and accepts the results. Yet he is also very manipulative and inflamatory (e.g. how he humiliated Uribe in the Latin America summit meeting). In addition, he has two other traits Arendt would find interesting: appearing selfishless and has an international agenda.

Then there was Augusto Pinochet: who was not very popular (in a liberal sense) but very brutal. He is probably also somewhere on the spectrum. It is just very hard to demarcate what is true “Totalitarianism”. I don’t think Arendt found the right answer to Holocaust. If anything, she should have looked at the Continent during 1968 and find some solace in an emerging liberal civic culture.

To propose an alternative answer, I’d say that: for the Germans, there is always an element (however faint now) of collective romanticism and fanaticism in their cultural tradition. For the Russians, it is the Hobbesian distrust of each other and the longing for a powerful patriarch that led them to Stalin. Therefore, whether there is a countervailing force growing in each civic society is perhaps a much better indicator of how likely the past predicament will repeat itself.

A quick comment: very very painful to write again after school. But I am glad I tried.

Judith Thurman: First Impressions

Just a beautiful article. There is one paragraph talking about the short and possible interactions between the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens that is so very moving:

“They coexisted for some eight thousand years, until the Neanderthals withdrew or were forced, in dwindling numbers, toward the arid mountains of southern Spain, making Gibraltar a final redoubt. It isn’t known from whom or from what they were retreating (if “retreat” describes their migration), though along the way the arts of the newcomers must have impressed them. Later Neanderthal campsites have yielded some rings and awls carved from ivory, and painted or grooved bones and teeth (nothing of the like predates the arrival of Homo sapiens). The pathos of their workmanship-the attempt to copy something novel and marvellous by the dimming light of their existence-nearly makes you weep. And here, perhaps, the cruel notion that we call fashion, a coded expression of rivalry and desire, was born.”

Book: The Origins of Totalitarianism

To put it harshly, The Origins of Totalitarianism is more like a political manifesto than a scientific thesis. The locus of Arendt’s work is the Holocaust hence the applicability and reasoning are rather questionable.

Arendt is not just any Jewish survivor. A student and a lover of the preeminent 20th century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, Arendt had rightfully consider herself a member of the upper echelon of the the Western civilization before, suddenly, she was nearly cannibalized by it. Therefore, for Arendt, the most pressing question for her was “what has gone so wrong”?

In pursuit of an answer to this question, Arendt chooses to forgo the cultural and historical peculiarity of the German nation but to extrapolate a general condition which she argues could forster a monsterous extremist regime.

A central character in her definition of Totalitarianism is the movement’s global aspiration. The existence of an ideology aiming for world domination (quotes needed) is a prerequisit. Although such a framework explains well Nazism and Communism, it fails to explain racial or ethnic triggered mass hysteria. Even today, as what used to be unthinkable in America (p 420 a country least exposed to mass psychology) becomes legal (e.g. warrantless surveillance, suspension of habeas corpus, etc.), what the silent majority buy into is not a desire of world domination or salvation but “homeland” security.

Does Totalitarianism exist as one of the “-ism” of the 20th century? Or even, is there a “sin test”–I know it when I see it–of Totalitarianism? If mass murder of the innocent is a inevitable outcome of a Totalitarian regime, as Arendt suggests, the evidence in the late 20th century offers little support–one can hardly say that what happened in Rwanda and Bosnia were perpetrated by totalitarian regimes.

In other words, mass murder cannot happen unless the entire society goes along with a few fanatics. In her book, the chapter on “the classless society” is the one that I can relate to the most: fanaticism is possible when there is a breakdown of social orders (class not in the traditional Marxist sense). But even a chaotic social order is a necessary condition, it is clearly not a sufficient one. For Industrialization and Republicanization (French style) were both traumatic events in history yet not all societies lived through them became radical as did the German, Russian and Chinese nations. In France, the Dreyfus case–as extensively discussed by Arendt–is a case in point: there was clearly a suffocating antisemitic sentiment at the beginning, but it fizzled as quickly as it started (quotes needed).

Therefore, given similar social conditions, given that political and psychological manipulation is innate to human beings as there are demagogues in every historical period in every society, why some nations degerated into totalitarianism, but some did not?

Or, to put the question differently, if there exists a transcendent Totalitarian model, why did it not manifest itself every where, every time? Arendt herself in the 1950 preface says that she wrote the book “out of the conviction that it should be possible to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved into a conglomeration”. Yet even after she seems to have identified many, if not all, of those mechanics, she has yet to convince me that the existence of those mechanics along is enough to breed Totalitarianism.

After the Holocaust, man finds itself still capable of watching massacres unfold in Rwanda and Balkan, and mass hysteria reign in North Korea and, most recently, South Africa. It appears that if history is of any guidance, what Arendt labels as “hidden mechanics” are not that “hidden” compared to something deeper underlying every holocaust.

My observation is that the likelihood of Totalitarianism is negatively related to the liberal tradition of a society. The liberal tradition refers to not only the depth but also the breadth of its societal penatration. In other words, a society that features a clan of intelligentsia and a huge disparity is as illiberal as one that features an undereducated mass.

During the oral defense of my paper, Prof. Chirot asked a question he’d asked us before, “would you call the nationalist sentiments in China, Korea or Vietnam ‘nationalism’”? I thought I answered it rather well: nationalism in its purest form is a Western concept. I am leaning more toward Hans Kohn (”Idea of Nationalism”) and Gellner (”Nations and Nationalism”) that nationalism is a product of the Enlightenment and/or Industrialization. It is associated with the secularization and democratization movement in the 18th and 19th century. With regard to the national identity present among East Asian polities, I stated those should not be labeled “nationalism” because “a body of knowledge only becomes so if it worked. Otherwise, it is just another experiment”.

That is what I implied in the Caribbean paper, that is, nation building does not end with declaration of independence. To expand it further, I don’t think German and Japanese nation building should be labeled as instances of nationalism, since their nation building exercises lead both to path of (self-)destruction. The polities resulted were still monarchical and authoritarian.

In short, my answer to Chirot’s question is not a teleological statement, rather it is a historicist one.

I am also reading Ann Anagnost’s “National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in China”. She frequently cited the national narrative in post-colonial countries as references. I wonder whether she’s bought into the structuralist argument of nationalism. But I have to finish reading it first. It is not an easy read by the way–I can re-write her Introduction part with phrases much easier to understand. For example, instead of saying China has large regional differences and varying ethos in recent times, she uses terms like “spatial and temporal” this and that. Scary, scary.

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When one is physically ill what does that do to one’s mind? I had many hours of sleep but dreaded the dreams. It was the day time stress and anxiety repeated over and again. I was making arguments that at once seemed to make perfect sense and no sense at all. Just like my paper… Early in the morning, I didn’t want to go back to sleep just because I didn’t want to go back to the dreams. But when I was at 39c, it wasn’t always up to me.

While sick, I had time to watch some TV and to read from New Yorker:
1. Watched the Indy Race in St. Petersburg on TV, I think the cry “it is green flag racing!” is very sexy!

2. Watched Carman the opera: I always enjoyed listening to Carman. After all, the Toréador Song was what got me into classical music to begin with. And I watched the opera couple of times before. But this time it was different. Something clicked. Micaëla’s solo in the Gypse’s camp is the most moving: not only the music beautiful, but perfectly encapsulates the obsession of Jose and the power of Carmen. Although Don Jose’s possessiveness is pathological, Carman’s free-will almost justifies one’s total admiration: she is woman worth dying for.

3. Watched One Flew over Cuckcoo’s Nest: It is more Owellian but definitely not Foucaultian. The antagnistic nurse Ratched is NOT how mass society works today. Rather it is the elaborate weddings and ceremonies that David Brooks talked about in the Bobos in Paradise. However, the movie is superb at portraying the tension between the subjected and the privileged once the sensation of being free is discovered and the pursuit of liberation is on.

4. Read Eric Alterman’s “Out of Print” on NYKr. I am certainly in Lippmann’s camp. For a while, I thought that is what Alterman’s argument too. But that is just not progressive enough, uh? This article deserves another entry. But in summary, I do think politics and governance are becoming too complicated, too nuanced to be decided by the general public.

I remember a skit from SNL where a weekend party is going on in a loft apartment somewhere. That was right after 9.11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. Suddenly a guy rushes in and says, “the Northern Aliance just took Jalalabad!” and everybody raises their glasses and cheers.

The moral of the joke is that the world is just too complicated. Alterman seems to be finding hope in the newly burgening phenomenon of “participating” journalism, or a mixture of opinions and leaks and rumors. He is well aware of the ptifalls of such a development: the degradation of journalistic integrity. And more importantly, the polarization of public opinions. But strangely, he seems to say this is actually good for democracy: the reason that more Europeans voted than Americans is because they have so many tabloids.

Of course, his musing stops right there. No further reasoning offered why these two are even corelated! That is rather ridiculous for a serious article (or posting, should I say). But he has several good points, for example, that the “veneer of neutrality” is becoming increasingly unsustainable. And the very effort to stay “above the fray” may render print journalism cold and distant.

5. By the way, just saw my old boss Dan Hesse on TV in a Sprint commercial. I was such a fan of his while at Terabeam. I still think he is a heck of communicator and salesman.

Watched “There Will Be Blood” tonight. After the movie was over, Song and I stayed in our seats, didn’t know what to make of it. Finally, I said, “Boy, I never saw so much anger in one movie.”

Not sure it is my kind of movie but I can tell it is a good one. If it does become some kind of arty cultish movie, I can image why.

I remembered once I went with a church group to hike Mt. Adams. On our way back, the leader, Paster Bob, decided to go spelunking in a cave nearby. When we got to the cave entrance, I knew it was a mistake: it wasn’t so much an entrance as a rat hole on the ground. Following a thread-thin ray of daylight, I could see the hole expanding into profound darkness. We squeezed, crawled, climbed and pulled each other along half a mile. Turning on flashlight didn’t help much, since all I could see was the light beam being sucked into endless darkness.

When I finally shake myself out of the ground, I knew full well this would be my last and only spelunking outing. However, thinking back, I have to admit it was a very memorable trip.

That is how this movie makes me feel: I was very uncomfortable while watching it. But I can totally see why it is extraordinary or why there are others who will like it.

One more thing, I don’t know why the director chose the allegro from Brahms’ violin concerto for the sound track. It is rather strange seeing a primitive industrial machine slowly cranking under an oil rig in the middle of Navajo desert while listening to Ann Sophie Mutter playing her hearts out …

Notes:

noblesse oblige: Benevolent, honorable behavior considered to be the responsibility of persons of high birth or rank
[no-Bless ob-LEE-dge]