Geek Players, Love Slayers -- In Africa.

In a creative writing workshop in college, a professor had us read Steve Almond's "Geek Player, Love Slayer". I loved the somewhat disturbing ease with which he depicts the unnamed female character and her crush on the computer geek in her office, loved the first person narration, the generous layers of humor over all that longing. Then I read the rest of the stories in the collection, My Life in Heavy Metal, and loved them, too. I'm yet to get around the next short story collection he's got, The Evil B.B. Chow, but I suspect that one is also well worth reading.

I knew, based entirely on his writing, that Almond would be hilarious, but this video where he takes on Toto's hit with that infectious "I bless the rain down in Africa" hook I've heard drunkenly bellowed at the top of youthful lungs at many a karaoke event in my college years puts it beyond all doubt. Just like his work, this is hilarious, but with an unexpected depth.

Obama the Anti-Colonialist

Lately in the United States, it seems as though a day does not go by without someone saying something breathtakingly stupid and unfortunate. Or, you know, both. Like this "intellectual" slandering Obama as a "Kenyan Anti-Colonialist". The offending article by Dinesh D'Souza, via Adam Serwer:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

This was the hot topic around the American blogosphere, and D'Souza was -- thank God -- roundly criticized. Over at one of my favorite blogs, Ta-Nehisi Coates highlights a Kenyan reader's comment that highlighted the fact that colonialism in Kenya was, well, bad.

Not to go too deep into it, but Colonialism was horrible. In Kenya, blacks were forced off their lands (there is a reason the most agriculturally productive part of Kenya was called 'The White Highlands'), subjected to harsh rules (pass laws, head taxes, enforced segregation, concentration camps etc), and during the Emergency, an estimated 70,000 - 200,000 blacks were killed (torture, malnutrition disease in concentration camps etc). I could tell you my parent's stories and my relatives stories, but that would take too much time. A good book on this is Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya - Caroline Elkins

And just because D'Souza is Indian does not mean he has the first clue about African Colonialism. There are some similarities between African and Indian colonization but given the fact that the British had a racial hierarchy (whites, indian and then blacks at the bottom) means there are things the British did in Africa that they never would even have considered doing in India.

Suffice it to say Colonialism was truly evil. Essentially Britain treated Kenya and Kenyan people as possessions to be exploited by any means possible. The only reason that Britain let Kenya go is that after WW2 Kenya begun being a net drain due to the Mau Mau uprising (whose core group was formed by African WW2 veterans who has been conscripted into WW2 on Britain's side and learned military skills and lost their awe of the white man once they saw that he too could be killed just like any man). And even then, they handed the country to people they knew who would be friendly to their interests (Jomo Kenyatta etc).

At independence, most of the wealth and the land in Kenya was in white hands. The Kenyan govt, over the next few years, took ruinious loans from Britain to buy back the land from those same British land owners. Keep in mind that this is land that had been previously stolen from us. In addition, a huge part of the Kenyan economy has been (and is still) foreign owned leading to a huge outflow of capital.

Stupidity shouldn't be given an audience, this is true, but it is times like these that me wonder if our long years of imperialism where people with a bit more melanin had to endure everything from Tuskegee to Mau Mau has rendered us incapable of equality. As horrible and inhuman the treatment could be of those who wielded their "civilization" like a sword over those who they mercilessly ruled, it still bears reminding that even after all this, people like Obama's father had to go to Western world for his education. People like Obama's father understood that they were living in a world that they didn't create, and had to learn its rules. They were like Okonkwo in "Things Fall Apart" watching the world change before their very eyes, and they could either change with it, or die along with the past. To move forward is to go 'there', whether by physically moving from Kenya to Hawaii, or by learning to speak the language. And even after you do, there's no guarantee you would be seen as who you are. The cruelest irony of the post-colonial years is that people keep running into the arms of those who pushed them away.

On Religion and Morality

Dr. Lionel Tiger takes on the weighty topic of how and why people find reasons to divvy themselves into groups, and the importance of groups to individuals. An interesting interview.

Floating supermarkets in Brazil? But of course!

This, from FT, caught my eye:

The vessel is designed to enhance Nestle’s reach among the lower income consumers that make up a core part of its market. The company has been in Brazil for 89 years and products like its powdered milk are staples among Brazil’s poorer consumers. As the economy continues to grow quickly, Nestlé is hoping that rising incomes among the poor will bring its higher priced goods within their reach, too.

The best solutions in economic situations are always tailor-made.

Recognizing humanity

I'm in the middle of Aravind Adiga's award-winning book "White Tiger", and one of the things that strikes me about his character Balram Halwai is the miserable circumstances in which the guy grew up in, and the fact that, seriously, the dude's a sociopathic a**hole.

Pardon my French.

Seriously. He has a bit of Jack Sparrow in him, in the sense that you know he's a jerk who can't be trusted with anything, and yet you want to get on that ship to see what trouble he lands into, and even hope for his safety against your judgment. I'm about half-way through, and this book is truly a feat of characterization and voice, in that paints strips all the characters of any easily categories: The rich people do some vile things, even as they are not always vile themselves; the police extorts, not protects; and the poor people are certainly long-suffering survivors, but they can be vultures and relish the chance to oppress themselves. There are no heroes here. In the book, we spend a lot of time with rickshaw-pullers, chai-walas, drivers and servants, all of whom are depicted in as unsparing a manner as land-owners and ministers and businessmen. I can imagine many thinking that Adiga's dark picture of modern India is perhaps a bit unfair (I imagine this, because I'm sure as much will be said if the city was Lagos, not Delhi and Dhanbad), but I think that Adiga's hit upon something real and profound when he does not treat any of his characters with kid gloves.

One-dimensional representations of the rich or poor should not be par for the course, that's really not the case, is it? The representation of poor people more often than not vacillates between pity and disgust, so it always surprises me when someone depicts poor people as, well, people. But that's what they are, isn't it? They laugh and cry and have weddings and drink more than they should and manipulate and fret and fuss. They sometimes spend their money on worthless crap. They sometimes don't even realize how much they lack. They're not always nice to each other. And however bad things get, they always, always, find a way to deal. In recognizing that people somehow face down the most dire of circumstances to build lives for themselves and have weddings and birthdays and burials has always filled me with more a sense of wonder than pity. It is something to be admired, and to me is key in recognizing the humanness of us all. And how do you help someone, truly help, when you don't recognize their humanity? How do you expect best-laid plans to "help" when you don't even know who these people are? Mono-dimensional representations of anyone -- Middle-Eastern, gay, black, [insert-minority-here] -- are always, always vehicles that aid and abet in their continued oppression.

This really would only merit a shrug on my part if it didn't affect policy approaches meant to help poor people. I think Bill Easterly explains that part better than I do.

Eddie Murphy on Finding an African Bushbitch Wife

Is it bad that I actually laughed at this?

Curious about how big the oil spill is?

Here's a good idea:



All this dilly-dallying on the part of BP was enough to make Obama mad (Well, show a certain flash of mild irritation).

“I have to say though I did not appreciate what I considered to be a ridiculous spectacle,” President Obama said this morning. He was talking about the testimony of executives from BP, Halliburton, and Transocean, the companies behind the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (and not, say, about his own game of make-believe with Hamid Karzai). “The American people cannot have been impressed with that display, and I certainly wasn’t.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2010/05/how-big-is-the-spill.html#ixzz0o7SYy7FA

Wow. Them's fighting words, Mr. President.