Blogue-Blague

After a Hiatus...

2013-07-03T08:05:00.002-03:00

Brazil: soccer and citizenship By Shepard Forman Brazil has long been known as a sleeping giant, a country of vast as yet unrealized potential, whose people by-pass their passivity through samba and Carnaval, fueled by a low-grade sugar-cane rum called Cachaca. But a decade of dramatic economic growth, based largely on China’s appetite for natural resources and a credit-driven consumer market, led to vast private foreign investment and the emergence of Brazil on the world stage. As a serious player on climate change, in international trade negotiations and intellectual property rights, and as a leader in the struggle to contain the aids pandemic, Brazil has begun to exercise a leadership role in global politics that, for a short time, lifted the nation’s spirits to an all-time high. As a prosperous democracy, led in succession by two highly respected presidents, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luis Ignacio (Lula) da Silva, the perennial country of the future appeared to be the country of now. A series of mega-events – the Rio plus 20 environmental conference, the 2013 Catholic youth encounter with Pope Francisco, 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics – were viewed as emblematic of Rio de Janeiro’s renaissance and a new, non-stoppable Brazil. And then it stopped. Page after page of newspaper articles read like a road map to stagflation. Inflation has returned, the value of the Real has declined, rates of growth and employment have slowed, a real estate bubble is forcing potential home buyers and mobile renters alike out of the housing market, the much-touted natural gas and petroleum reserves under the off-shore salt bed suddenly appear out of technological and cost-estimate reach, China has seriously slowed its purchase of Brazil’s commodities, and the Sao Paulo stock exchange lost a huge amount of its value, as did the portfolio of Eike Batista, Brazil’s wealthiest man and the one-time symbol of Brazil’s seemingly unstoppable wealth accumulation. Foreign direct investment has moved elsewhere, and over-use of credit at high interest rates has led to a worrisome rate of consumer forfeitures. Drug traffickers are creeping back into recently “pacified” slum communities, and street crime, including some well-publicized horrific kidnappings and rapes in public transport, have the public on edge. The mood in Brazil has moved in a period of months from euphoric to perplexed – how has it all gone wrong. Paradoxically, Brazil’s other historic opiate, soccer, holds the answer. As Brazil’s great cities prepared to host the Confederation Games, the precursor to the 2014 World Cup, something awakened the national consciousness. It began with the interdiction of the new multi-million dollar mega-stadium known as the Engenhao, whose sliding roof proved to be a major risk due to poor construction. Newspapers began to report on the costs and cost-overruns of soccer stadiums in all of the host cities, including the legendary Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro, which was temporarily opened for the Confederation Games final in which Brazil’s World Cup selection team routed the championship Spanish team, once again placing Brazil at the very top rung of world soccer. But as Brazilians watched with pride as their team of talented young players out-performed their critics’ skepticism and came together as true champions, they also accompanied the largely peaceful massive street demonstrations that have become the real story of the season. Millions of people have poured into the streets night after night in more than 80 Brazilian cities to express their anger at the enormous public expenditures in preparation for the mega-events at the perceived and actual costs to the quality of education, health care, metropolitan transportation and security. And, as the magnitude of the costs escalated, so did public outrage against corruption, highlighted by the conviction and impending imprisonment of dozens of former government officials involved in congressional vote buying schemes and other sordid fiscal malfeasance. To chants of “the people have awakened,” Brazilian’s have made a spontaneous and unscripted set of demands on governing authorities at all levels for vastly increased investments in education, health care and public transportation. They have demanded the end of impunity and imposition of harsh penalties for public officials’ corruption. In quintessential Brazilian fashion, street signs mix linguistic creativity with popular sentiment: “Take your rosary out of my vagina,” read one. “Jesus opposes PEC-37,” read another in protest against the congressional bill that would take investigatory power away from public prosecutors and invest it in congress itself. Governing authorities have struggled to understand the origins and strength of a movement convened and oriented by social media, but to the credit of Brazil’s strong democratic ethic, have not tried to stifle or shut it down. Mayors in most of the major cities thought they could contain the demonstrations by withdrawing the ten cents hike in bus fares that sparked the protests. The Sao Paulo governor and mayor did so rather awkwardly, announcing the reversal while declaring it would be at the expense of social programs. President Dilma Roussef denounced the relatively minor incidences of violence and looting and expressed support for the democratic expression of the people but revived a number of old proposal that had little traction – 100% of new salt bed oil and gas revenues for education; contracting thousands of foreign, mainly Cuban, doctors to bolster the public health system, increased investment in commuter transportation, and a call for a plebiscite on political reform. More recently she convened her 39 cabinet ministers and held a press conference with a kitchen sink list of their responses, only to have garnered public cynicism when the press reported on the payroll costs of her over-bureaucratized administration. Most everyone I know and talk to at every level of Brazilian society applauds the street demonstrations and the fact that Brazilians have discovered their civic side. They continue to believe in the potential of this great nation and the future at its command, recognizing that the major problem lies within the government and that they have the power to demand change. The fundamentals are there. Of all of the emerging “powers” Brazil is blessed with adequate water, energy self-sufficiency, exportable quantities of food production and no external enemies. Its failures at good governance are now obvious to all Brazilians who have now demonstrated their readiness to assume their responsibilities as active citizens. If this is true, as I believe it to be, Brazil has arrived finally at its future. Those of us who had the privilege of watching the young soccer team sing the national anthem before their outstanding victory in the Confederation Cup have tempered our euphoria with optimism: Gol Brazil!

Spinoza in Shtreimels: An Underground Seminar

2012-09-12T17:27:00.000-03:00

Spinoza in Shtreimels: An Underground Seminar by CARLOS FRAENKEL Number 11, Fall 2012 "I'm sitting in my armchair" Abraham tells me on the phone. He is a Satmar Hasid from New York, calling me in Montreal where I sit—less comfortably I suspect—in my McGill philosophy department office. I don't laugh right away, so he adds, "Don't you do philosophy in an armchair? I'm ready to give it a try!" And then a cascade of big questions (and answers) pours over me: Does God exist? (He doubts there's a proof.) Are space and time finite? (He thinks they are infinite and wonders if the creation story is a myth.) Do we have good reasons to observe God's commandments? ("If there's no God, perhaps as social conventions?") I do my best to reply, apparently to his satisfaction. A friend of a friend who heard that I was interested in doing philosophy with people who are not academic philosophers had given Abraham my number. "I have a group of friends who may be interested," he says. "We're kind of an underground debating club." A couple of months later I move to Princeton for a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study. Once settled in, I call Abraham to organize our first meeting. We meet at the Star Bar, a trendy bar and lounge in Soho. Abraham and two friends—Isaac, a fellow Satmar, and Jacob, a Lubavitcher—wink at me from their bar stools. Their black attire stands out in the hip crowd that has already gathered here for an after-work drink. Jake, the bartender—Chinese letters tattooed on his fingers, an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth—pours us a draft beer that we take with us to the management office on the second floor where Moshe and Miriam, a Lubavitcher couple, are already waiting for us. Moshe owns the property. He made money in the diamond trade and then invested in real estate. Abraham, who deals with professional electronic equipment, proudly points out that the bass drums we hear through the floor come from a sound system bought from him. (Here and throughout, I have changed names and some details to preserve the anonymity of my students.) "So what's in it for you?" Moshe asks me as we sit down. "I'm trying to find out if one can use philosophy to address real-life concerns and to have debates across cultural boundaries," I explain, somewhat professorially. "The clash between modernity and religious tradition, for example, gives rise to fundamental questions. And I want to know if philosophy can help." We are all a bit nervous. I hand out the syllabus: We will start with Plato's dialogues Apology and Euthyphro to meet Socrates and discuss the idea of an examined life and the nature of moral norms. Then we will read the Deliverance from Error, the intellectual autobiography of al-Ghazali, the great 11th-century Muslim thinker. "How do you pronounce his name?" Jacob asks. "Just add an i to chazal," (the standard Hebrew acronym for the scholars of the Rabbinic period: "our sages of blessed memory") I reply, and they laugh. In the Deliverance, al-Ghazali describes how he lost his childhood faith and eventually doubted even his ability to grasp things through his senses and intellect until God restored his trust in his cognitive faculties. It is a great text to discuss the foundations of knowledge and the relationship between reason and faith. We will pursue these issues from a Jewish angle through Maimonides and Spinoza, whom they've already read. Finally we will discuss Nietzsche, nihilism, and what might come after the loss of faith. My Hasidic students nod seriously in agreement. They've been struggling to find answers for years, studying great philosophers while maintaining their busy professional and family lives. (At one of our meetings, the Satmars can barely keep their eyes open after a nightlong philosophical discussion with a friend from abroad.) So this is not merely an academic exercise for them. "From the point of view of our community," Isaac explains, "studying these books is much worse than having an extramarital affair or going to a prostitute. That's weakness of the flesh, but here our souls are on the line-apikorsus (heresy) means losing our spot in olam ha-ba (the world to come)." When Isaac asks me how I became interested in their world, I tell them that while I am not attracted to its content, I am intrigued by its form—a world that revolves around wisdom and God, rather than wealth, sex, power, and entertainment. They are surprised when I say that from Plato to Spinoza most philosophers endorsed this ranking, if not the same accounts of wisdom and God. And they are stunned to learn that I would be very disappointed if my 2-year-old daughter grew up to value lipstick, handbags, and boys in sports cars more than education and ethics. "In some ways you seem to be more Satmar than we are!" Isaac exclaims. "Though I don't want her to wear a wig, have seven children, and owe obedience to her husband," I quickly add. Still, my idea of a good life calls into question what they have learned about the secular world. Throwing off the yoke of the Torah, it turns out, needn't translate into hedonism. Of course my Hasidic students are not the only ones with misperceptions. When the hip crowd at the bar meets them, all they seem to see is sexual repression. One evening, after discussing Plato for three hours, we go down for a drink. A young filmmaker from the neighborhood-disheveled red curls, carefully groomed tousled look—approaches us to ask if my students would be interested in appearing in her next art film: "I'm dying for a scene with Hasidic men being seduced by a sexy blonde!" At the end of our first meeting I hand out copies of the Apology and the Euthyphro. Jacob asks me to send them an electronic version of the texts as well—"makes it easier to read on the Blackberry." "Our Rebbe went through all this effort to protect us from the pollution of the outside world," Isaac says, "and then came the Internet!" As much as the rabbis would like to ban it, their hands are tied: "We can't do business without the Internet and we can't support the community without business." Of course the rabbis prohibit going on the web for private purposes. "But how can they enforce that?" Isaac asks. "When the last ban came out, it was posted on ‘Hasid and Heretic' and got some 30 hilarious comments!" "Hasid and Heretic," a website maintained by a "conflicted soul, torn between the world of Hasidism and the world of reason," is one of several anonymous online forums for disaffected community members like my students. Other sites they tell me about include "Hasidic Rebel" and "Unpious: Voices from the Hasidic Fringe," which stands out for its cutting edge design. "We know that we're not alone," Abraham says, "but we have no idea how many of us are out there, since we all live in camouflage." We discuss Plato under the inquisitive eyes of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, looking down on us from several pictures in Moshe's and Miriam's living room where they have reserved "the philosopher's armchair" for me. "Not all pictures are kosher though," Miriam says. One in which the Rebbe is wearing a light colored grey hat caused a stir every time family visited. "So we put it away." Their apartment in Crown Heights, the center of the modern Lubavitch movement, is our workshop's second venue. We had to postpone the meeting because the downstairs neighbor had added a visit at the Rebbe's gravesite to the celebration of his son's bar mitzvah. "People would have started talking if we hadn't showed up," Moshe explains. Since my Hasidic students take philosophy to be a secular project, they find Plato's Apology confusing. Aren't reason and religion at odds? Why, then, is Socrates so pious? Not only does he present his philosophical enterprise as a divine mission, but he chooses kiddush Hashem (martyrdom) over disobeying God's command! "He can't have been bluffing for other Athenians," Isaac observes, "since they executed him for impiety." Then another explanation occurs to him: "Maybe Socrates died too early?" Now it's my turn to be surprised. "Well," Isaac says, "I didn't lose my faith all at once, but layer after layer. It started with doubts about the things people believed in our community. So I went back to the rishonim (early commentators). But they also said things that didn't add up. So I went back to the Talmud. In the end, all I was left with was the Bible. For a while I was proud to rely only on the true divine source while everyone else was deceived by misleading human interpretations. I felt real joy at a hakhnasas sefer Torah (the festive procession escorting a new Torah scroll from the scribe's house to the synagogue). When I finally lost trust in the Bible as well, it was as if the ground had broken away under my feet. Maybe had Socrates lived longer, he would have gotten to this stage." Abraham suggests a different interpretation: "Since all Socrates got out of his philosophical investigations was that he knows nothing, he finally just took a leap of faith." "But if Socrates was really just a pious skeptic, why is he so fond of a philosophically examined life?" I ask. "Perhaps asking questions gave him perverse pleasure," Isaac replies. "When I started asking questions, our rabbis told me that it was the urge of a corrupt soul." "Or could one interpret Socrates as a moderate skeptic?" I ask. "When he claims to know nothing, perhaps he means nothing with absolute certainty. Then debating beliefs would be useful, because it allows us to get rid of false ones and to be more confident about those that weren't knocked down, even though they might be refuted later." "But what about teachers who convince us that a true belief is false and a false belief is true?" Miriam asks. "Good point," I say, "that's why Plato doesn't trust rhetoric. In addition to debating techniques, you also need debating virtues. You have to love the truth more than you love winning an argument." "So couldn't we say that from a Socratic standpoint it is an advantage to be born into the Hasidic community?" Jacob suddenly asks. "If you're a Hasid in New York you can't help but reflect on what you think and do since almost everybody else thinks that you're weird. But if you're more or less secular and more or less liberal, chances are that you'll never get challenged since almost everybody else agrees with you." He has a point. On the other hand, any debate about values within the Hasidic community is suppressed. "When you started asking questions," I point out, "you had to go underground. But Socrates wants you to ask these questions, and he likes to debate them in public." I propose that for Socrates we all want to live well and how we live depends on our beliefs about the good life. "So getting these right is crucial. And we can't just rely on the authority of tradition. We have to think things through on our own, guided by reason. And since God for him is reason, a life guided by reason is at the same time a life guided by God." My students can, of course, see the problem with relying on the authority of a religious tradition. Most of them have rejected the idea of the good life with which they were brought up. In their communities, a good life is a life devoted to serving God. This is accomplished through study, meticulous observance of God's commandments, and devotion to the Rebbe, who helps the community get in touch with the divine. The desires of the body, by contrast, are strictly regulated, lest they distract from the task of worship. "But if you think that this is all wrong, why don't you just leave the community?" I can't help but ask. One reason is practical: When the last layer of faith finally falls away it's usually too late. As Isaac puts it, "By then you speak mainly Yiddish, you're married, have children, and you're a talmid chakham (rabbinic scholar) with no marketable skills." Jacob—who like me is in his late 30s—misses one meeting because of his twentieth wedding anniversary. (I haven't yet reached my second.) When he got married, he was a brilliant yeshiva student, poised to become a community scholar—"the dream son-in-law," he says ironically. "You know what I asked for as a wedding gift? For my father-in-law to pay for ten more years of Talmud study!" They all know of people who could no longer bear the cognitive dissonance and left the community. "But none of them managed to build a happier life outside," Jacob says. And if there were no practical hurdles, would they leave? From the armchair, I suggest a thought-experiment: "Suppose you could go back in time and exchange your life for that of anyone in the hip crowd that comes to the Star Bar—would you do it?" They hesitate. The truth is that they have come to enjoy the thrill of leading a double life. They are also successful in their jobs. And they take pride in the existential and intellectual depth they were able to achieve by struggling with their lives' contradictions. "This bohemian culture looks colorful on the surface," Jacob says, "but we're grappling with the big questions: God, reason, Torah, the meaning of life!" The trouble is that you cannot bring up your children as modern-day Marranos of reason. I tell them how becoming a father helped me to get clear on the beliefs and values I wanted to pass on to my children. They, on the other hand, must applaud when their children succeed by standards they have secretly rejected. "It can be heartbreaking," Isaac says. "So people in our situation often avoid having more children." Although the use of contraception is prohibited in their communities, the issue is not publicly raised and childless couples or couples with fewer children are generally presumed to have medical problems. "The worst," Isaac says, "is if the spouse is not on board." He tells me about a friend who stopped having sex altogether because his wife did not agree to using contraception. Jacob points out how harsh an indictment of their world this is: "In effect I guess we're saying that it is better not to live at all than to live a Hasidic life." Isaac is the youngest and unhappiest of the group. He is planning to enter the business world like Abraham, Moshe, and Jacob, but before that he still has to get through a second year of Talmud study—a gift from his father. Cutting short his studies would be frowned upon, so he reluctantly goes on. "I'm not sure if discovering that I'm living in a prison was a blessing or a curse," he says. "Most people I see around me seem much happier than I am." He has decided to let his children grow up in the system to spare them his inner turmoil. "Under some circumstances, lies seem to provide a better life than truth." Moshe and Miriam try to accomplish a balancing act with their two children. Their daughter now goes to a Lubavitch school for girls in Crown Heights. "But then she wants to study medicine at Columbia," Miriam says proudly. Her younger brother is fascinated by the theory of evolution. "We don't let religion set limits to their intellectual curiosity," Moshe explains. When Moshe reminds him that according to Jewish tradition God created all animal species in two days, he replies "I know, but I'm talking scientifically, not biblically." "And which one is right?" Moshe asks. "The Bible of course!" he answers without hesitation. "That's the default assumption," Moshe says with a hint of concern. They know that they are treading a fine line. On my way back to Montreal, at the end of the year, I visit them in the Catskills, and they tell me that their daughter is attending a special Lubavitch camp. Recently she has also gotten involved in kiruv, religious outreach activities. "When I was her age, I was just as zealous," Moshe notes. "I hope it's just a phase." Abraham expected Socrates to be easier going. He is surprised to find the great philosopher chastising Athenians for caring more about the wellbeing of the body than the wellbeing of the soul. "You'll have no better luck with Plato," I tell him and the group. "He compares our appetites to a ‘multi-colored beast' that the faculty of reason has to control." "What about Epicurus?" Abraham asks. "Doesn't he say that the best life is a life of pleasure?" "That's true," I concede, "but he argues that the greatest pleasure doesn't lie in satisfying our appetites, but in the peace of mind we reach when we are satisfied and free from irrational fears—the fear of death, for example, and the fear of divine retribution. So we're best off if we find satisfaction in a simple life lived in the company of philosopher-friends." Plato's psychology reminds Moshe of a distinction between the "animal soul" (nefesh behemis) and the "intellectual soul" (nefesh sikhlis), made by the founder of Lubavitch Hasidism, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, in his chief work of philosophy, the Tanya. The distinction surely doesn't come from the Bible. But could it have come from Plato? Jacob notes that there's also some concern among the Lubavitchers about the similarity between the Tanya's description of moral character and Aristotle's. One explanation people in the community give is that Aristotle studied Torah with the rabbis. "That's like al-Ghazali!" I say. "He turns Aristotle into a disciple of ancient Sufis." Of course, the historical truth in Rabbi Schneur Zalman's case is that he read classical medieval Jewish thinkers like Sa‘adia Gaon, Yehudah Halevi, and Maimonides who, in turn, knew the Arabic theological, scientific, and philosophical literature of their time. "How could the medieval thinkers get away with interpreting the Torah according to Aristotle or the Sufis?" Jacob wonders. "Well," I say, "they thought that if Judaism is true, it must agree with every true insight, even if it came from a Greek or a Muslim. The Haredim, on the other hand, think that they have to shelter true Judaism from any supposedly corrupting outside influence." This leads us to discuss whether the Haredi fight against cultural contamination is a lost cause from the start. I point to an interesting passage in Toledot Yaakov Yosef, the first published Hasidic book, by Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye, a disciple of the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov. R. Yaakov Yosef draws a contrast between a "small" and a "great" struggle; the former refers to a battle with weapons, the latter to the moral wrestling of the soul with the "evil inclination" (yetzer ha-ra). The source of the metaphor is actually a famous hadith frequently cited by Sufi mystics. In this tradition, the Prophet Muhammad tells a group of soldiers that after returning from the "smaller jihad"—the jihad of the sword—they now must take up the "greater jihad"—the jihad of the soul against pleasure. Of course, the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples didn't study the Sufi masters. But they did study Bahya ibn Paquda's Duties of the Heart, which was translated from Arabic to Hebrew in the 12th century and became a classic of Jewish thought. Bahya's account of the soul's ascent to God was strongly influenced by Sufism and includes a version of the hadith in question, without, of course, the reference to the Prophet Muhammad. As Isaac points out, excitedly, the Satmar Rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum, was also a devoted student of Bahya's Duties of the Heart! Where do they come down on the Euthyphro question? Do moral norms depend on God's will, or does God want them because they are objectively valid? To clarify the question, Isaac says: "Consider our friend Moshe here. Is Miriam attracted to him because he's objectively beautiful or is he only beautiful to her because she loves him?" In the Euthyphro, Socrates seems to be committed to the objectivist view. The gods love that which is holy or good because it is, in fact, objectively just that. "That would mean that there's no need for revelation," Jacob says. "We don't need God to tell us that tomatoes are red, so we also wouldn't need Him to tell us that stealing is bad." "But what is it in the act of stealing that is objective like the color of a tomato?" Abraham asks. "I can't see that stealing is bad the same way I can see that tomatoes are red. So if revelation is out, and if we can't show that moral judgments are objective, then they must be subjective." Most modern philosophers, Abraham suggests, are relativists. "Of course we don't always act on our desires, but that has nothing to do with objective facts; it's just the social context. You don't steal because you're afraid the police will catch you. Would we continue observing the mitzvos if we were on a desert island and didn't fear the community's response?" On this point I disagree with him. "If you ask the hip crowd at the Star Bar, a lot of them might turn out to be subjectivists or relativists about morality. I'd guess many will say that what's good for one person needn't be good for another. But neither of the two major schools in contemporary moral philosophy—Kantians and consequentialists—defend relativism. Kantians say that moral norms are absolutely valid: whether you're under the eyes of a police officer or on a desert island—stealing is always wrong." "So the bottom line," Jacob cuts in, "is that even if we throw off the yoke of the Torah, few philosophers would say that we are free to do as we choose." Al-Ghazali begins the Deliverance from Error with an account of how he lost faith in the authority of "parents and teachers"—that is, the beliefs and values stemming from the contingent circumstances of our socialization. This happened when he realized that he might have been just as fervent a Jew or Christian as he was a Muslim, had he been brought up in a Jewish or Christian community. Jacob describes a similar childhood experience: "I would get up very early to study Torah for a couple of hours before shacharis (the morning prayer). On the way to shul, I noticed that Muslims were already praying at the mosque. So I asked myself: if we're both passionate enough about our religion to get up while it's still dark—how can I be sure that my religion is true and theirs is false?" If al-Ghazali can't rely on the authority of his religious tradition, then how can he know anything? We discuss Plato's classical definition of knowledge as "true, justified belief." Why doesn't a true belief qualify as knowledge, regardless of its justification? Moshe reports a conversation he overheard between two elderly Lubavitchers. "They were discussing a text by Rabbi Schneur Zalman that said that most of the earth is covered by water. ‘That's a strange thing to say, but if the Alter Rebbe said so, it must be true.' So they had a true belief, but clearly not knowledge!" Al-Ghazali's problem was that he came to distrust both the senses and the intellect. The senses tell us, for example, that the sun is the size of a dinar coin. Here the intellect can identify and correct the mistake. But can we really trust the intellect? We can conceive of a higher cognitive faculty, al-Ghazali argues, that would identify the mistakes of the intellect in the same way as the intellect identifies the mistakes of the senses. The fact that we don't have such a faculty or know about such mistakes doesn't mean that we don't make them, since we also wouldn't know about the mistakes of the senses without the intellect. Al-Ghazali's skeptical crisis only ended when God cast light into his heart, restoring his trust in his cognitive faculties. "Does that mean that you can't get from skepticism to philosophy without the help of God?" Jacob asks. Although studying Maimonides' chief philosophical-theological work, the Guide for the Perplexed, is virtually prohibited in their community, my Hasidic students have all read parts of it in secret. Maimonides is a bit like a Trojan horse of reason inside the gates of rabbinic tradition. His monumental Mishneh Torah, the first systematic code of Jewish law, is on the shelves of every yeshiva. But his reinterpretation of Jewish beliefs and practices in light of views derived from Greek and Muslim philosophers collides with today's ultra-Orthodox idea of the Torah's purity and self-sufficiency. "Some of our rabbis say that Maimonides wasn't really a philosopher; he only used it because the members of his community were so confused by philosophical ideas," Isaac explains. "Others say that a genuine Jewish philosophy exists, but teaching it to the masses is strictly forbidden. But most agree with the Vilna Gaon that the ‘accursed philosophy' led Maimonides astray." The Gaon's ire was sparked by Maimonides' claim that the only benefit of reciting a charm over someone bitten by a snake or a scorpion is that it puts the mind of the superstitious at ease. How dare Maimonides explain away the countless stories in the Talmud in which miraculous charms reveal God's power? Isaac shows me a photo of an advertisement in Yiddish that he saw at Christmas: "Zu farqoifen a machalah oder a tsarah for a arel" (For sale an ailment or a misfortune for a non-Jew). "No wonder that our rabbis side with the Gaon!" For my Hasidic students, Maimonides' bold philosophical reinterpretation of Judaism played an important role at the first stage of their gradual alienation from their community. "He gives you the confidence to reject all kinds of superstition—for example that our Rebbe can miraculously heal or foresee the future," Isaac says. "And many of the biblical stories that people in our community take literally turn out to be parables according to Maimonides." My students, however, did not become Maimonideans. Modern Orthodox Jews often revere Maimonides as a model for reconciling Torah (or revelation) and madda (reason). My Hasidic students don't buy it. All attempts to integrate secular life and Jewish tradition ultimately ring false to them. In a sense they keep Torah and the secular world as strictly apart as their rabbis do; they have just switched allegiances. Moshe tells me about a Lubavitcher friend who led a double life for years. "During the day he was a brilliant Talmud teacher, during the night he explored Manhattan's culture and art scene. Then he became Modern Orthodox and started teaching in a more liberal Yeshiva. But he still doesn't believe in any of it." They have a good laugh when I tell them about the Yom Kippur sermon I heard in Princeton's conservative synagogue. The female rabbi argued that there was no contradiction between obeying God and personal autonomy. The mitzvot must convince us that observing them is beneficial for us. ("If you want a day off from email, cell phone, and other disturbances—keep Shabbat!") What God tells us to do coincides with what we really want to do. "Let's hear how good a case a piece of bacon can make for kashrus," Isaac jokes. When I say that I have no qualms about circumcising my son, Abraham is surprised: "Why would you do such a thing if you don't believe in the bris shel Avraham (Abrahamic covenant)?" They also doubt that Maimonides truly believed he had bridged the gap. "Did he really think that Moses was a great philosopher?" Isaac asks. "Wasn't he just bluffing to escape the anger of the masses?" They are more attracted to Spinoza. Jacob mentions an old Hebrew book on Spinoza's life and thought by Hillel Zeitlin, a Jewish writer and intellectual who was raised in Lubavitch and strongly identified with Spinoza after losing his childhood faith. In the last chapter, Zeitlin claims that central ideas in Spinoza can also be found in Maimonides and other Jewish thinkers. "But Spinoza was more honest than Maimonides," Jacob says. "He didn't pretend that his views fit with traditional Judaism. That's why he was excommunicated." "But is it true that Maimonides was only bluffing to protect himself?" I ask. "Why did he spend so much time on halakha and reinterpreting Jewish beliefs? Maybe he was a kind of philosophical reformer who wanted to put the Jewish community on a firm intellectual foundation." I also express doubts about their contrast of the insincere Maimonides with the bold Spinoza. "Sure, Spinoza was excommunicated, but after his excommunication most of his close friends were progressive Christians. And his portrait of Christ as a philosopher sounds a lot like Maimonides' portrait of Moses. Maybe he also wants to philosophically reform religion, not get rid of it altogether." "But what's the purpose of all this?" Jacob asks. "My sense," I reply, "is that while Maimonides and Spinoza didn't want religion to interfere with reason, they also thought that most people just can't live a rational life on their own. So they tried to make religion into something like reason's handmaid: it should offer guidance to those who aren't capable of being perfectly rational without meddling in the affairs of the mistress." They find the idea interesting, though they can't see how such a project can be made to work in the communities they know, communities defined by their rejection of all things secular. At the same time, Spinoza is fascinating to them not only because he is a fellow lapsed Jew. They also hope to find in him a philosophical expression of Jewish ideals—from the love of God to the quest for peace and justice—that doesn't require the baggage of traditional beliefs and practices. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (along with two other curious Hasidic philosophers) even join me at a Spinoza conference that Dan Garber, the distinguished scholar of Early Modern philosophy, has organized. Their presence causes puzzlement among the professional philosophers. "Should I have ordered kosher food?" Garber, whose grandfather studied in a yeshiva in Vilna, asks. He then tells a famous joke about a Hasid who arrives in heaven, finds a superb restaurant operated by Moses and supervised by God himself. "I'll have the fruit platter," he says. Another Jewish colleague asks me in surprise: "Did I just see a Hasid eating potato salad at the buffet?" During the lunch break I find Abraham chatting with the eminent analytic philosopher Harry Frankfurt (best known outside of academia for his bestselling little book On Bullshit). Frankfurt tells Abraham about the Talmud classes he's taking at the Jewish Learning Initiative on campus now that he's retired. "So tell me," Abraham seizes the opportunity, "aren't Spinoza and the Talmud at odds when it comes to the truth? Spinoza is sure that he has grasped the truth; he only tolerates disagreement because he thinks that most people aren't able to get it—so he grants them the freedom to make mistakes. The Talmud, on the other hand, says about the disagreements of Hillel and Shammai elu ve-elu divrei Elokim chaim (these and these are words of the living God)." Frankfurt isn't convinced. "Even if two philosophers differ, they would be speaking the words of the living God for Spinoza as long as they genuinely seek the truth," he claims. When Abraham asks for my opinion, I say that I think he's right. "I can't see Spinoza allowing disagreements in the divine intellect." What does Nietzsche mean when he claims that "God is dead"? I suggest he means the breakdown of what we used to see as the natural and moral order anchored in God—the framework for our judgments about what is true, good, and beautiful. "So I think we experienced nihilism," Isaac says. "The foundation of our faith crumbled and we realized that what we believed in was just a myth organizing life in our community." He tells about a friend who, when he decided that he was living a lie, threw the writings of the Satmar Rebbe on the floor. At the end of our first Nietzsche session, I ask them to think about how Plato, Maimonides, and Spinoza would respond to Ivan's claim in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov that if God is dead everything is permitted. "Thanks, Carlos," Isaac responds, "now at least I've something to keep my mind busy at shul on Shabbos." But how far are they willing to go with Nietzsche? Socrates, al-Ghazali, and Maimonides all tried to replace discarded, childish beliefs with new and better ones that were still grounded in God. Nietzsche, on the other hand, makes a stronger claim: there is no objective order at all, only blind, aimless, ever-changing forces of nature. My Hasidic students aren't sure. "I'm an optimist," says Abraham, "I still think that one day I'll come up with definitive answers." I suggest that Nietzsche might dismiss this as fear to embrace life in a world devoid of objective meaning. "But Nietzsche could be wrong," he replies. "How can he be sure? Spinoza says that there's an objective order without assuming that things follow a divine plan established by a transcendent God." Nietzsche's main concern, however, was that worldviews grounded in God give rise to a morality that cripples our life here and now for the sake of an illusory afterlife. Rather than realizing our potential on earth, we are taught to be humble, obedient, and self-sacrificing to secure a place in heaven. "That's true for us," Isaac says, "but is it also true of biblical religion? The Bible doesn't really distinguish between body and soul and certainly doesn't take the good life to be the soul's reward in heaven; living well means flourishing on earth—being blessed with wealth, a beautiful family, and so forth." I suggest taking his argument one step further: "Maimonides not only rejects traditional views of the afterlife, but also divine reward and punishment in this world; he claims that Moses uses these threats and promises the way a teacher uses them—to direct people to the true love of God. Once you get there, you no longer need fear of punishment and hope for reward as motivation; loving God is its own reward. Or take Spinoza who says that intellectual love of God—which is to say nature—is the highest good, no matter whether the mind is immortal." "So why does Nietzsche reject any objective standard of human excellence, not just the ones involving heaven," Jacob asks. "For Nietzsche a good life is one in which you realize your own nature with its particular set of instincts and desires," I reply. "In our community it's the exact opposite," Isaac says. "The more you desire something the worse it is; it's the yetzer ha-ra trying to distract you from serving God." But is the difference really so glaring? "Nietzsche," I suggest, "is just as much a champion of self-control as Plato or Maimonides. Can an Übermensch, a ‘superman,' be enslaved to his passions? Take even the Jazz band that is playing tonight at the Star Bar: doesn't it take a lot of disciplined effort to become a good musician? When Nietzsche equates a noble life with a powerful life he doesn't mean power over others, he means the ability to reach one's goals without being diverted by lust and fear." Moshe points to a similar concept in the work of Rabbi Schneur Zalman: "He distinguishes between teva (nature) and hergel (habit). The idea is to reshape your nature through habituation: getting rid of features that prevent you from attaining your goal and acquiring features that help." I suggest that the only thing Nietzsche would disagree with is the goal, which for the Alter Rebbe is of course avodat ha-Shem (serving God). "Being an Übermensch sounds stressful," Isaac says. "Nietzsche," I counter, "might be critical of you if you allow family and community ties to hold you back from realizing yourselves. To be free for him also means to be free from social attachments." "But isn't there a problem?" Isaac asks sharply. "Nietzsche's excellence is always about outdoing others; doesn't that create dependence on those outdone?" Miriam finds Nietzsche's praise of solitude implausible. She sides with the tradition from Plato to Spinoza that claims that one cannot live, let alone live well, without living with others. "And why is he so anxious about the weak? The weak for Nietzsche always seem to be out to trap the strong. But can't helping the weak also be a sign of strength?" We go back to Maimonides: as a brilliant philosopher, legal scholar, doctor, and community leader he sounds like a Nietzschean Übermensch. He may even have had as much contempt for the masses as Nietzsche did, but he spent most of his life trying to raise the Jewish community to a higher intellectual and moral level. At our last meeting we discuss Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence. "If Nietzsche is right, we'll be having this exact same discussion again and again and again," I say. Like me they are not convinced by the thesis, but fascinated by the thought experiment Nietzsche lays out in The Gay Science: Imagine a divine messenger who reveals to you that this life, as you now live it and as you lived it in the past, you will have to live again and another infinite times; and there will be nothing new, but every pain and every pleasure, every thought and every sigh, and every unspeakable smallness and greatness of your life will come back, in the same sequence and order. What would you do—"gnaw your teeth and curse him," or say "you are a god, I've never heard anything more divine!"? ABOUT THE AUTHOR Carlos Fraenkel is professor of philosophy and Jewish studies at McGill University. His most recent book is Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza (Cambridge).

Alain Badiou

2012-07-09T09:21:00.000-03:00

Alain Badiou: a life in writing 'So many people now don't know the joy of love. They know sexual pleasure, but we all know what Lacan said about sexual pleasure' Share 4380 Email Stuart Jeffries guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 May 2012 22.55 BST Comments (74) Alain Badiou: 'for love to last, one has to reinvent oneself.' Photograph: Eric Fougère/VIP Images/Corbis Love, says France's greatest living philosopher, "is not a contract between two narcissists. It's more than that. It's a construction that compels the participants to go beyond narcissism. In order that love lasts one has to reinvent oneself." Alain Badiou, venerable Maoist, 75-year-old soixante-huitard, vituperative excoriator of Sarkozy and Hollande and such a controversial figure in France that when he was profiled in Marianne magazine they used the headline "Badiou: is the star of philosophy a bastard?", smiles at me sweetly across the living room of his Paris flat. "Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it's not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this!" In his new book, Badiou writes about his love life. "I have only once in my life given up on a love. It was my first love, and then gradually I became so aware this step had been a mistake I tried to recover that initial love, late, very late – the death of the loved one was approaching – but with a unique intensity and feeling of necessity." That abandonment and attempt at recovery marked all the philosopher's subsequent love affairs. "There have been dramas and heart-wrenching and doubts, but I have never again abandoned a love. And I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always." But isn't such laborious commitment a pointless fuss in this age of ready pleasures and easily disposable lovers? "No! I insist on this – that solving the existential problems of love is life's great joy," he says and then looks across the coffee table at his translator, Isabelle Vodoz, with a big, half-ironic grin. "There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise," he adds, popping a biscuit in his mouth and giggling. She giggles, too. "I am not only his translator," she tells me later. Below this sixth-floor apartment, an RER train screeches along the rails out of Denfert-Rochereau station. I think about the distinction Badiou describes in In Praise of Love. "While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist[ic] manner, on particular objects, like breasts, buttocks and cock," writes Badiou, "love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life that is consequently disrupted and re-fashioned." In other words love is, in many respects, the opposite of sex. Love, for Badiou, is what follows a deranging chance eruption in one's life. He puts it philosophically: "The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny and that's why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright." Love's work consists in conquering that fright. Badiou cites Mallarmé, who saw poetry as "chance defeated word by word". A loving relationship is similar. "In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure," writes Badiou. But this encomium to creative fidelity surely shows Badiou to be a man out of his time. "In Paris now half of couples don't stay together more than five years," he says. "I think it's sad because I don't think many of these people know the joy of love. They know sexual pleasure – but we all know what Lacan said about sexual pleasure." Indeed. Jacques Lacan argued that sexual relationships don't exist. (Badiou will shortly publish a book of conversations between Lacan and his biographer, Elisabeth Roudinesco.) What is real is narcissistic, Lacan suggested, what binds imaginary. "To an extent, I agree with him. If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it's narcissistic. You don't connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them." But wasn't the rampant hedonism unleashed during Paris's May 1968 événements, in which Badiou participated, all about libidinal liberation from social constraint? How can he, of all people, hymn bourgeois notions such as commitment and conjugal felicity? "Well, I absolutely agree that sex needs to be freed from morality. I'm not going to speak against the freedom to experiment sexually like some old arse" – "un vieux connard" – "but when you liberate sexuality, you don't solve the problems of love. That's why I propose a new philosophy of love, wherein you can't avoid problems or working to solve them." But, he argues, avoiding love's problems is just what we do in our risk-averse, commitment-phobic society. Badiou was struck by publicity slogans for French online dating site Méetic such as "Get perfect love without suffering" or "Be in love without falling in love". "For me these posters destroy the poetry of existence. They try to suppress the adventure of love. Their idea is you calculate who has the same tastes, the same fantasies, the same holidays, wants the same number of children. Méetic try to go back to organised marriages – not by parents but by the lovers themselves." Aren't they meeting a demand? "Sure. Everybody wants a contract that guarantees them against risk. Love isn't like that. You can't buy a lover. Sex, yes, but not a lover." For Badiou, love is becoming a consumer product like everything else. The French anti-globalisation campaigner José Bové once wrote a book entitled Le Monde n'est pas une Marchandise (The World Isn't a Commodity). Badiou's book is, in a sense, its sequel and could have been entitled L'Amour n'est pas une Marchandise non plus (Love Isn't a Commodity Either). Surely that makes him an old romantic? "I think that romanticism is a reaction against classicism. Romanticism exalted love against classical arranged marriages – hence l'amour fou, antisocial love. In that sense I'm neither romantic nor classic. My approach is that love is both an encounter and a construction. You have to resolve the problems in love – live together or not, to have a child or not, what one does in the evening." This new book on love is an application of Badiou's singular philosophy of the subject and his outré conception of truth set out in incredibly forbidding books steeped in mathematics and deploying Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, such as Theory of the Subject, Being and Event and Logics of Worlds. These books have led him to be hailed as a great philosopher. "A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us," Slavoj Žižek has written. Badiou's philosophy of the subject is an extrapolation of Sartre's existentialist slogan "Existence precedes essence" and incorporates a communist hypothesis that Althusser might have liked. It's also a rebuke to postwar and often postmodern French philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Foucault with whom he argued and all of whom he has outlived. What is a subject for Badiou? "Simone de Beauvoir wrote that you are not born a woman, you become one. I would say you are not a subject or human being, you become one. You become a subject to the extent to which you can respond to events. For me personally, I responded to the events of '68, I accepted my romantic destiny, became interested in mathematics – all these chance events made me what I am." How does truth come into all this? "You discover truth in your response to the event. Truth is a construction after the event. The example of love is the clearest. It starts with an encounter that's not calculable but afterwards you realise what it was. The same with science: you discover something unexpected – mountains on the moon, say – and afterwards there is mathematical work to give it sense. That is a process of truth because in that subjective experience there is a certain universal value. It is a truth procedure because it leads from subjective experience and chance to universal value." Badiou's very odd, post-existentialist, heretically Marxist and defiantly anti-parliamentary conception of politics has a similar trajectory. "Real politics is that which gives enthusiasm," he says. "Love and politics are the two great figures of social engagement. Politics is enthusiasm with a collective; with love, two people. So love is the minimal form of communism." He defines his "real politics" in opposition to what he calls "parliamentary cretinism". His politics starts with subjective experience, involves a truth procedure and ends, fingers crossed, in a communist society. Why? "It's necessary to invent a politics that is not identical with power. Real politics is to engage to resolve problems within a collective with enthusiasm. It's not simply to delegate problems to the professionals. Love is like politics in that it's not a professional affair. There are no professionals in love, and none in real politics." Badiou hasn't voted since 1968, a habit he didn't break in France's recent presidential election. But he says he is writing a book about politics, a sequel to his 2007 succès de scandale De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (The Meaning of Sarkozy), in which he notoriously called the last French president "rat man" for playing on public concerns about crime and immigration. Earlier this month he wrote a marvellously vituperative column for Le Monde that has been trending across the francophone world. Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, he maintained, weren't the only politicians responsible for "the rise of rampant fascism" in France. He argued that there was a Socialist party tradition of colluding with right-wing racism – from Mitterrand through Jospin and, no doubt, into Hollande's first term. Ingeniously, Badiou suggested that mainstream politicians were disappointed in the French people for having a racist sensibility for which they, the "parliamentary cretins" (aided by some fellow intellectuals whom Badiou excoriated), were actually responsible for creating. "It is this stubborn encouragement of the state that shapes the ugly racialist opinion and reaction, and not vice versa … In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed." The article nicely conveys his sense that democracy as currently practised in France is a charade inimical to true rule of the people. Badiou's far-left politics were burnished in the late 60s. In 1969, he joined the Maoist Union des Communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFml), enthused by Mao's Cultural Revolution that had begun three years earlier. Just as he has been faithful to all but one of his lovers, he has remained true to Maoism. Marianne magazine called him a "fossil of the 60s and 70s", but Badiou is unrepentant. He still holds that the Cultural Revolution was inspirational, as deranging and fertile for him as falling in love – despite the deaths, rapes, tortures, mass displacements and infringements of human rights with which it has been associated. When I ask him why, Badiou explains that the success of Lenin's disciplined Bolshevik party in the 1917 October Revolution spawned a series of other workers' revolutions, notably in China in 1949. "One soon saw that this instrument that was capable of achieving victory was not very capable of knowing what to do with its victory." Maoist bureaucracy was corrupt and self-serving, party activists were bourgeois and anti-socialist, and the communist revolution under threat. "So the Cultural Revolution was important because it was the last attempt within that history to modify that in a revolutionary manner. That's to say they made an attack on the communist state itself to revolutionise communism. It was a failure but many interesting events are failures." He cites the Paris Commune and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht's failed German revolution among such interesting failures. In his 2010 book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou wrote about the importance of failure for like-minded communists (many of whom gathered with him and Žižek at Birkbeck College, London in 2009 for a conference called On the Idea of Communism). "Any failure," he writes, "is a lesson which, ultimately, can be incorporated into the positive universality of the construction of a truth." Which means that Badiou at least has not lost faith in communism. "The old Marxist idea of creating an international society is truly the order of the day now," he says. "Today things are much more international than they have ever been – commodities and people are much more international than before." So the time is more ripe than ever for international workers' revolution? "I wouldn't say that. Certainly at the world level there can be more hope than hitherto. We're climbing a very big ladder." Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1937. His mother was a professor of philosophy, his father a maths professor and socialist mayor of Toulouse from 1944-58. His philosophical training began in 1950s Paris. He quickly became a Sartrean, devoted to the paradoxical philosophy that, he says, involved "a complicated synthesis between a very determinist Marxist theory of history and an anti-determinist philosophy of conscience". In a new book of essays entitled The Adventure of French Philosophy, Badiou argues that between the appearance of Sartre's Being and Nothingness in 1943 and the publication of Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy? in 1991, French philosophy enjoyed a golden age akin to classical Greece or Enlightenment Germany. Badiou's great fortune was to be part of that adventure. Like wine and cheese, French philosophy should, he says, be considered part of France's glory. "I tell our ambassadors you have with us philosophers the greatest export product." He speaks fondly of his times at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis which, founded in the late 60s, fast became a bastion of countercultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with his fellow professors Deleuze and Lyotard, even though he considered them traitors to the communist cause. "These men were my rivals and my neighbours, people whom I admired and differed profoundly from." But why, if he's right, did France have this postwar adventure, this dizzying explosion of intellectual life? "I think because of the political catastrophe in France – Pétain and the disaster of collaboration. That resulted in a philosophy that had a duty to respond to those disgraces, to propose a different way. What's more, there is a French model of being a philosopher which isn't enclosed in the academy as in England – a philosopher who is an intellectual interested in all the things in their age. Such were Diderot, Rousseau and above all Pascal." He credits Sartre with revivifying that French model of what a philosopher could be. "All my eminent colleagues were profs because they had to live, but that wasn't their vocation – they wanted to be politically engaged public intellectuals and often artists, like Sartre. Me, too." Badiou, like a mini-Sartre, is not just a publicly engaged philosopher, but a dramatist and novelist. Unlike Sartre, he has appeared in a Jean-Luc Godard film - as a philosopher lecturer on a luxury cruise ship in 2010's Film Socialisme. His says his overwhelming ambition has been to change the relationship between workers and intellectuals. "For me what was especially important from May 1968 to 1980 was that we created new political forms of organisations linking intellectuals and workers. Those links helped me reinvent myself as a human subject. One could say that attempt failed, but I keep dazzling memories of that time." Badiou's eyes gleam as if he's recalling an old love affair he can never forget, still less disown. Perhaps politics and love are not, if you're a French Maoist, so very different. Badiou chuckles bitterly. "France always exists through its exceptions. There are temporary exceptions that aren't representative of an overwhelmingly reactionary country but are what make it less disgusting than it would be without them. I mean exceptions like 1789, 1848, 1871, the resistance, French philosophy after the war. They are the underside to the reactionary tradition of Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, Pétain, Sarkozy." And you're one of those exceptions? "Why not? Certainly philosophy from Sartre to Deleuze and me has made France better than it would otherwise have been."

Vila-Matas

2012-04-19T19:08:00.005-03:00

From Vila-Matas' Chet Baker piensa en su arte Riverrun. Cuando hablo a solas me gusta especialmente farfullar esa palabra, quizás porque con ella no pierdo la noción de encierro, de reclusión. Riverrun me suena a retiro, a meditación, pero también a curso de las cosas, a río de la vida, a río que me está conectando con el universo entero, como si la biblioteca de 21 libros que desde Madrid he trasladado a este cuarto turinés aspirara a ser el mundo. Acabo de pasar revista a mis libros para asegurarme de que no son 32, esa cifra que me remite a una hora para mí obsesiva y, sobre todo, peligrosa, las 3:20. De haber transportado hasta aquí, sin darme cuenta, una biblioteca de 32 libros, ahora andaría inquieto pensando que estaba ante una especie de broma pesada del destino. Pero son 21, cifra alada que multiplicada por dos da el 42, el número de días que permaneció encerrado en su habitación, aquí en Turín, el autor de Viaje alrededor de mi cuarto. Es sólo una casualidad que esta biblioteca portátil alcance exactamente la mitad del número de días que de Maistre tardó en escribir su libro. No lo es que vuelvan ahora a sonar los acordes tenebrosos de Bela Lugosi´s Dead, interpretados en esta ocasión por Tipperary Club. Y no lo es porque he dispuesto en mi iPod una sucesión muy pensada de versiones distintas de la canción. Es completamente casual, en cambio, que mi vida en estos momentos parezca transcurrir entre el conde Drácula y el conde de Maistre. from Chet Baker piensa en su arte. (On Vila-Mata's website)

Then and again the same situation, for so many years....

2011-12-16T17:46:00.003-02:00

Pray tell if the current crisis is all about humankind’s digressions and subsequent actions on things utterly beyond their grasp. One should not go to the oracles such as Bill Gross at Pimco, or peruse the musings of Krugman, boring as that sun shining in the green catholic abodes of a Bayerisch quasi-crescent laughing it all the way.

We may as well go to the heart of Woody Allen, Larry David, and Joseph Heller. The latter on a minor key – nonetheless telling it all… No one should be taking “seriously” the current state of affairs. Let’s then riff off an internet description, alas quite apt I might add, of “Good as Gold”, Heller’s novel. We have the metal, the man, the archetypes and stereotypes.

“…Bruce Gold, a Jewish, middle-aged university English professor and author of many unread, seminal articles in small journals, residing in Manhattan, is offered the chance for success, fame and fortune in Washington D.C. as the country's first ever Jewish Secretary of State. But he must face the consequences of this, such as divorcing his wife and alienating his family, the thought of which energizes him and makes him cringe at the same time. Furthermore, he's faced with the task of writing about the Jewish experience in America, but isn't sure he's lived it and thus has to figure out what it is, not knowing that he was invariably going to describe his own life….”

Italy is going down, Greece already lost the match. Monty Python had them wining against quite a German squad when Archimedes screamed “eureka” and scored the winning goal. PIGGS on the wing...

Eric Fry reminds us that “…Nearly ten years after the war ended, the British were still rationing sugar and meat.” So how long until we come out the current misery?

“If ideas could file for bankruptcy,” James Grant muses in the latest edition of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, “the modern model of money and banking would have beaten MF Global Holdings to the courthouse. The concept of leveraged finance in a world of paper money and socialized risk deserves rehabilitation under an intellectual Chapter 11.”

Now you see, these people are like gold, good as gold, or… Goldman…

Maurice Roche finished his book on the legendary institution with a different viewpoint. It is not even available in English yet. He is the UK correspondent for Le Monde and starts his saga with Goldman advising the neo-Platonists, where representation, so it seems, passes for the actual form. What he pointed out is that Goldman Sachs also hedged the chicken and potato out of the pan. They were not betting very much on their own ideas for the pan-Hellenic feta lovers.

The machinery needed some oil, but not enough olives to grease the wheels – and/or hands.

We start missing Cockburn, Trotsky and the permanent revolution, as we know there must be casualties.

Back to Eric Fry: In general, the central banks are borrowing and/or printing money to buy “distressed assets.” By removing these distressed assets from the marketplace, the central banks hope to clear away some of the rot in order to “stabilize” the financial system and, by extension, the value of the currencies they print.

“But since central banks are functionally outlawing bankruptcy for every large institution and government in the Western world — along with a few of those in the Eastern world, the rot remains...and it’s spreading. The rot is not only undermining economic activity, it is also undermining the entire global monetary system.

“And the worst of it is that these multi-trillion-dollar interventions do not remove the rot from the financial system; they merely relocate it from the private sector to the public sector.

(Are we kidding? Or is Roubini a happy St. Francis?)

The European Central Bank (ECB), for example, holds sub-AAA assets equal to 14 times its equity. Large portions of those sub-AAA assets are the very sub-AAA government bonds of Greece, Portugal, Italy and Ireland. If these assets, in the aggregate, were to lose 7% of their value, the ECB’s equity would be zero. (For perspective, the government bonds of Greece, Portugal, Italy and Ireland have already lost 30% to 60% of their values).

If Dante would tumble over the gates of delyrium and steps to hell…

Meanwhile, Italy too has been forced to get rid of its popular, but difficult to control, elected leader — Silvio Berlusconi. It has put in a company man. Yes, a company man. What company? Goldman Sachs, of course. The new fellow, Mario Monti is an ex-Goldman guy. And so is the new fellow at the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi. Monti was also an EU commissioner. Draghi ran the Bank of Italy as the nation built up one of the world’s biggest piles of debt. Then, when Italy’s cost of borrowing shot over 7%, in came Monti and Draghi.

(Berlusconi’s media propagated the anti-Goldman sentiment while he is back singing in cruises or in a bathroom with fantastic acoustics… But no one will hear…)

So how does Bill Bonner think we can match the yang with the thing?

“…Tax evasion is the only thing that keeps these economies going. People prevent their government from squandering their money. They spend it themselves. But the new Goldman guys won’t like it. They’ll want to get their hands on as much of that ‘black money’ as possible. And more safety net…

“…So far, they seem to be making great progress towards their objectives. They stuff the world with debt. It blows up. Then, they push out democratically-elected leaders...gain new power and authority...and take charge of the rescue.

You know the plot? Or the Pol Pot?

We do...

Mar Sem Fim - Klink

2011-11-04T10:59:00.000-02:00

“Um homem precisa viajar. Por sua conta, não por meio de histórias, imagens, livros ou tv. Precisa viajar por si, com seus olhos e pés, para entender o que é seu. Para um dia plantar as suas próprias árvores e dar-lhes amor. Conhecer o frio para desfrutar do calor. E o oposto. Sentir a distância e o desabrigo, para estar bem sob o próprio teto. Um homem precisa viajar para lugares que não conhece para quebrar essa arrogância que nos faz ver o mundo como o imaginamos e não simplesmente como é ou pode ser; que nos faz professores e doutores do que não vimos, quando deveríamos ser alunos e, simplesmente, ir ver. (...) Pura verdade, o mundo na tv é lindo, mas serve para pouca coisa. É preciso questionar o que se aprende. É preciso ir tocá-lo.”

J. Cunha - FSP

2011-11-03T10:06:00.000-02:00

"...CASA DE VIDRO

Em "A Insustentável Leveza do Ser" (Cia. das Letras), o tcheco Milan Kundera trabalha esse difícil equilíbrio a partir de dois amantes com ideias opostas sobre o que seria "viver na verdade".

Para a personagem Sabina, só existe verdade na privacidade, quando não se é observado. "Ter um público, pensar num público, é viver na mentira. (...) Quem perde sua intimidade perde tudo (...) e quem renuncia voluntariamente a ela é um monstro", diz Sabina.

Ela não foi apresentada às redes sociais, esse reduto de "monstros".

Já seu amante acha que viver na verdade é abolir a barreira entre público e privado. É morar numa casa de vidro onde todos sabem de tudo.

Construir uma com paredes meio finas e algumas gavetas trancadas é o desafio..."

Guillaume Le Blanc

2011-10-28T10:32:00.001-02:00

Mais louco é quem me diz
Por Carla Rodrigues | Para o Valor, do Rio

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"A Extração da Pedra da Loucura", de Bosch: pensamento de Foucault está sendo ameaçado por argumentos científicos que buscam configurar a loucura como um defeito no cérebro, diz Le Blanc

O filósofo francês Guillaume Le Blanc nasceu em 1966, cinco anos após Michel Foucault ter publicado "História da Loucura", livro cuja importância tem merecido comemorações e homenagens pelo seu caráter revolucionário. Foi a partir de Foucault que se modificou a maneira como a sociedade encara o louco, o estranho e todos aqueles que não podem enquadrados nas categorias de normalidade. Dedicar-se a estudar Foucault foi, para Le Blanc, perseguir o caminho do questionamento das estruturas de poder que promovem a classificação das vidas comuns em perigosas, submetidas, portanto, a estratégias de dominação que hoje, em um contexto de mudança nas formas de tratamento, está em franco processo de deslocamento.

Com Foucault, Le Blanc discute também as novas formas de normatização da vida, submetidas às razões médicas e aos interesses da indústria farmacêutica. "Temos que inventar novas formas de subjetividade que não se deixem capturar pelas razões médicas", defende.

Le Blanc é professor da Universidade Michel de Montaigne, em Bordeaux, onde também mantém um grupo de pesquisa sobre medicina e suas relações com a vida social. Na próxima semana, participará em São Paulo do VII Colóquio Michel Foucault, promovido pela Pontifícia Universidade Católica (PUC-SP) em comemoração dos 50 anos do livro de Foucault.

Autor de livros consagrados a estudar essas figuras de precariedade que inspiraram a obra de Foucault ("Vidas Ordinárias, Vidas Precárias", 2007; "Dentro/fora - A Condição do Estrangeiro", 2010; "O Que fazer da Nossa Vulnerabilidade", 2011), Le Blanc acha que a força do pensamento de Foucault está sendo ameaçada pelos argumentos científicos que buscam configurar a loucura como um defeito em uma parte do cérebro. "É um risco grande", diz ele nesta entrevista.

"Temos que inventar novas formas de subjetividade que não se deixem 'medicalizar' e façam uma crítica das razões médicas"

Valor: Qual é a atualidade de "História da Loucura", 50 anos depois?

Guillaume Le Blanc: As coisas mudaram depois do livro de Foucault. O sistema manicominial, criticado por Foucault nos anos 1960, já não parece capaz de conter os selvagens de hoje. O que é a loucura atualmente? É o clamor inquieto de um grupo de sem-teto que precisa ser abrigado em dispositivos de cuidados sociais? É o silêncio do prisioneiro em sua cela? É a rua, essa é a prisão? O medo do louco é reavivado a partir de seus supostos perigos e o manicômio não parece ser capaz de responder plenamente a esse medo. O que se assiste agora é a uma multiplicação de dispositivos de controle, nos quais a loucura parece se disseminar em um grande número de estruturas, promovendo novas confusões entre o louco, o pobre e o criminoso.

Valor: O livro de Foucault marca o início de um movimento antipsiquiátrico para mostrar que o conceito de loucura é uma construção. O senhor acredita que esse movimento conseguiu interrogar os manicômios e suas condições?

Le Blanc: Houve de fato uma associação muito rápida entre Foucault e a antipsiquiatria. Mas nem o gesto de [Philippe] Pinel de liberar os loucos nem o gesto antipsiquiátrico de tirar os loucos dos manicômios seriam suficientes, para Foucault, como estratégia de anular as formas de saber e de poder que construíram a loucura e seus dispositivos terapêuticos e sociais. O trabalho de Foucault se inscreve numa história da contestação das linhas divisórias entre o normal e o patológico. Ele questionou o tipo de separação que nossas culturas ocidentais modernas produziram entre loucura e razão. Desde o seu primeiro prefácio, ele argumenta que seria preciso fazer uma "história dos limites, dos gestos obscuros, necessariamente esquecidos ou ocultos, com os quais uma cultura rejeita qualquer coisa que lhe seja exterior". Parte da crise atual do hospital psiquiátrico também se explica pela retomada dos discursos da biologia do cérebro e do afastamento da psiquiatria em relação à psicanálise. A tarefa que me parece urgente é pensar a disciplina numa situação de crise da disciplina. Trata-se de governar os indisciplinados? Se é assim, a disciplina tende a se expandir para estruturas sociais anônimas, como a rua, ou mais arcaicas, como a prisão.

Valor: Quais são as consequências, ainda hoje, de pensar a loucura como construção histórica e cultural?

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Guillaume Le Blanc: "A psicanálise deve voltar a ser uma arma de crítica social. As pessoas não querem mais ter a cabeça governada por novos saberes ou novas formas de polícia"

Le Blanc: Foucault nos permitiu compreender que antes de tudo há um indivíduo que incomoda, alguém com quem não se sabe o que fazer e abala nosso ideal de humanidade. Esse potencial do pensamento de Foucault está sendo ameaçado pelas novas tentativas, todas muito científicas, de recolocar a loucura dentro de uma parte do cérebro e assim renaturalizar o louco como esse indivíduo cujo cérebro está desajustado. O risco, hoje, é de "biologizar" de novo o louco e assim perder os seus contornos sociológicos e antropológicos. É um risco grande. A loucura instalada numa área do cérebro novamente justifica a circunscrição do louco como o anormal.

Valor: Tomando como referência o grande número de diagnósticos de depressão, síndrome do pânico e transtorno de ansiedade, o senhor acha que escrever uma história da loucura, hoje, seria interrogar os discursos médicos sobre essas doenças?

Le Blanc: É uma questão muito importante. Estudando a história da formação do saber em relação à história da formação dos poderes, encontraremos um domínio no qual as fronteiras entre o normal e o patológico são particularmente frágeis. Trata-se de pensar sobre as implicações sociais e éticas das análises históricas numa proporção que Foucault talvez não tenha podido explicitar totalmente. Um exemplo: a construção da criança como sujeito potencialmente patológico, hiperativo, e a conexão desses saberes sobre a hiperatividade com o domínio muito poderoso da indústria farmacêutica e o uso da ritalina. Quando a criança é declarada hiperativa, o diagnóstico dado pelo médico é acompanhado de uma prescrição farmacêutica sem precedentes, na qual o alvo é uma população inteira de sujeitos. O que fazemos diante desse poder e desse saber? Queremos ser governados como esses pais que se tornam intermediários do poder farmacêutico e garantem a "medicalização" do poder familiar? Não se trataria de organizar outras narrativas da vida infantil, outros modos de educação que teriam a tarefa de rejeitar essa "medicalização" excessiva sobre nossa vida? Temos que inventar novas formas de subjetividade que não se deixem "medicalizar" e façam uma crítica das razões médicas.

Valor: Quais são as consequências políticas do reconhecimento de que a distinção entre o normal e o patológico é uma forma de enquadrar aquele que aparece como o estranho, o Outro. O que há de profundamente ético no livro de Foucault é a percepção de que o Outro, o estranho, o estrangeiro, só pode ser definido por um discurso?

Le Blanc: Sou um estudioso das figuras sociais da alteridade, sobre as quais escrevi em meus livros. Observo que a alteridade não é uma figura neutra a ser simplesmente reconhecida. O outro é, antes de tudo, aquele que é tornado outro por uma comunidade de sujeitos que se supõe ao lado da norma. O precário tende a se tornar outro como parte de um trabalho de integração que precisa apontar para o que está fora do grupo. O estrangeiro é o sujeito que o grupo considera não fazer parte da nação, ele é usado como instrumento de constituição do grupo. É preciso compreender que o fato de apontar para uma determinada vida como a que representa o outro é uma forma de recusar a sua alteridade, a sua vulnerabilidade. O que aconteceria se nós vivêssemos com a percepção de que somos também precários, estrangeiros, vulneráveis? Apenas com uma atitude ética de não violência que reconhece a violência das nossas exclusões poderíamos assumir uma alteridade que não seria sinônimo de injúria, mas o reconhecimento da pluralidade de formas de vida.

Valor: "História da Loucura" foi um livro homenageado ao longo de todo o século XX. No congresso de comemoração do 30º aniversário de sua publicação, uma grande controvérsia em torno do trabalho de Foucault foi protagonizada pelo filósofo Jacques Derrida, ao afirmar que o trabalho de Foucault não poderia ter sido escrito antes da invenção da psicanálise e da formulação freudiana do conceito de inconsciente. Derrida propunha, então, fazer justiça a Sigmund Freud. Em que medida as críticas de Derrida eram pertinentes?

Le Blanc: Acredito que teremos que ler de outra forma os pensadores dos anos 70, como Foucault, Derrida e todos aqueles que parecem ter participado de uma prática filosófica como contracultura, como uma tentativa de não ser totalmente governado pelas normas dominantes. A psicanálise foi um discurso hegemônico nos anos 70, lugar que não ocupa mais hoje, diante do poder do paradigma naturalista nas ciências da psiquê. Ser justo com Freud, segundo a célebre formulação de Derrida, significa que a psicanálise deve ser questionada também como um dispositivo, como Foucault demonstrou em "As Palavras e as Coisas". Mas isso supõe que a psicanálise faça justiça a Foucault, aceitando questionar os pertencimentos simbólicos que ela põe de maneira excessiva nos sujeitos, com um discurso de ordem ou de lei particularmente insuportável. A filosofia de Judith Butler se constitui numa boa maneira de fazer justiça, ao mesmo tempo, a Foucault e a Freud. A psicanálise deve voltar a ser uma arma de crítica social. As pessoas não querem mais ter a cabeça governada por novos saberes ou novas formas de polícia.

Valor: Já que o senhor mencionou a filósofa americana Judith Butler, muito bem recebida na França, onde muitos de seus livros são traduzidos: acredita que a atualidade do pensamento dela é justamente a sua capacidade de criticar os limites de pensadores franceses dos anos 70? É curioso, ou pelo menos irônico, que essa crítica venha dos Estados Unidos?

Le Blanc: O primeiro livro de Judith Butler traduzido na França foi "A Vida Psíquica do Poder", no qual ela se inspirou em Foucault e em Derrida. Ela propõe um diálogo com a psicanálise de Jacques Lacan e de Freud, fazendo cruzamentos de leitura inéditos na França. Para mim, ela é o relançamento de uma crítica social ao fazer uma análise das produções de si dentro das normas, especialmente nas normas de gênero. A originalidade do seu pensamento está no fato de ela operar uma desconstrução não por uma libertação dessas normas, mas por uma forma de subversão que se elabora no próprio ato de atender a essas normas. As identidades, assim, não precedem o exercício da norma, mas é esse exercício mesmo que acaba por criar as identidades. A repetição das normas está sempre acompanhada da possibilidade de subvertê-las. Existem nas universidades americanas, não nos departamentos de filosofia, mas nos de literatura e ciências políticas, novas maneiras de fazer filosofia que se inspiram no pensamento francês dos anos 70. Talvez seja outra América.

Elena Landau OESP

2011-10-28T10:30:00.000-02:00

Bola quadrada no campo enlameado

'Esporte no Brasil é o seguinte: a gerência é privada, mas os recursos são públicos. Assim fica fácil', diz economista Elena Landau

23 de outubro de 2011 | 3h 06

O Estado de S.Paulo – Seção ‘Aliás’

CHRISTIAN CARVALHO CRUZ

Botafoguense tem cada uma... Dia desses a economista e advogada carioca Elena Landau praticava caminhada e sentiu uma dor aguda no quadril. "Fisgada no ilíaco. Meu amigo, você sabe o que é uma fisgada no ilíaco?", ela destrincha, na maior das intimidades atléticas com o músculo acomodado nas cavidades ósseas das ancas. Com dificuldade para andar, foi afastada pelo departamento médico das cadeiras do Engenhão, de onde costuma ver as partidas do Botafogo quando o time joga no Rio. Trocou o estádio pela sala de casa. A visão direta do campo, pela intermediação da TV. Bem sem graça, ela achou. "Só que aí o Botafogo começou a subir na tabela e eu não quis arriscar: melhorei do ilíaco, mas não voltei pro estádio", conta.

O time ainda vai bem no Campeonato Brasileiro, com chance de ser campeão. Se isso tem a ver com a heterodoxia de arquibancada de Elena, não há como saber. Mas não deixa de ser curioso comparar. Integrante da linha de economistas da PUC-RJ que formaram a zaga do governo FHC, naqueles tempos ela era chamada de ortodoxa por comandar - "sem jogo de cintura", diriam os oposicionistas de então - o processo de privatização das empresas públicas. A plaquinha na porta do escritório ajudava nessa imagem: diretora de desestatização do Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social, o BNDES.

É de dentro da área, portanto, que Elena fala: "O projeto da Copa do Mundo no Brasil está errado de partida. É um evento privado, destinado a atender interesses privados, mas que conta com recursos públicos. Tem cidade que faria melhor uso do dinheiro do BNDES se construísse metrô e corredor de ônibus, porque não tem renda nem público suficiente para fazer um payback do investimento". Elena hoje trabalha como advogada numa grande banca no Rio e assessora o Instituto Teotônio Vilela, órgão de estudos ligado ao PSDB.

Numa semana rica em bolas quadradas rolando por campos enlameados - acusações contra o ministro do Esporte, Orlando Silva, ONGs de fachada, queda de braço entre o governo e a Fifa por meias-entradas e venda de cerveja nos estádios da Copa - o Aliás convocou Elena para comentar o jogo, mas ela avisou: "Houve um tempo em que eu acreditava que a gestão do esporte brasileiro podia mudar. Montei uma consultoria esportiva e até trabalhei no Atlético Mineiro e no Botafogo". Diz que desistiu por cansaço. Deu cãibra na paciência, estiramento no desencanto. Sentiu-se vencida pelo jogo travado que se disputa no setor e, apesar de conhecer bem a cancha, agora prefere atuar como uma torcedora especializada, por assim dizer. "Hoje em dia os meus comentários sobre esporte são de pessoa física." A eles, pois.

Esporte é questão de Estado?

Depende. O esporte ligado a educação, sociabilidade, cidadania e formação do indivíduo, como agente transformador de vidas, este é questão de Estado. Mas Copa do Mundo certamente não é. Trata-se de um evento privado. Como um show do U2 ou do Justin Bieber. Uma Copa só seria assunto de Estado se usada para alavancar uma transformação do espaço urbano. E, pelo que estamos vendo atualmente e também pela experiência dos Jogos Pan-Americanos de 2007 no Rio, sabemos que não é esse o caso. O Pan de 2007 não revitalizou nada, não melhorou a cidade. Tem o estádio do Engenhão, que é onde joga o meu Botafogo e é até um bom estádio. Mas e o entorno? Aquilo é um abandono só, não há sequer transporte público decente para chegar lá. Acho importante separar esses conceitos entre público e privado para entender as causas da precariedade do esporte no Brasil.

Terceirizar o esporte para ONGs seria uma dessas causas?

O Brasil conseguiu desmoralizar a utilização das ONGs, que conceitualmente têm valor. Mas houve um exagero nessa terceirização do esporte. No fundo, as ONGs de esporte fazem hoje o que a escola pública fazia antigamente, mas deixou de fazer por causa do abandono e da decadência do ensino público, decadência física, inclusive. Há colégios que não têm quadra de esportes e precisam fazer convênio com academia de ginástica para ter aula de educação física. Para resumir, eu diria que o Estado brasileiro deixou de cumprir seu papel. Se achamos que o esporte é suficientemente relevante a ponto de ter um ministério específico, precisamos definir uma política esportiva clara para o País. Mas ministério no Brasil serve para assegurar governabilidade, preencher cotas dos partidos da coalizão.

Nada se salva em termos de política esportiva por aqui?

Em 2016 vamos sediar uma Olimpíada no Rio. Ok. Mas queremos desenvolver seriamente quantas modalidades olímpicas até lá? Três? Trinta? Temos aptidão para todas elas? Vamos investir só nas quais já somos bons ou também nas quais precisamos melhorar? O Brasil nem sequer sabe responder a essas perguntas. O projeto do Ministério do Esporte para a Olimpíada no Rio em 2016 é só fazer a Olimpíada no Rio em 2016. É um projeto de obras, não um projeto esportivo. A Austrália, quando sediou os Jogos em 2000, criou um programa para a natação que dá frutos até hoje. Eles não queriam passar o vexame de não ganhar medalha dentro de casa. No Brasil impera a mentalidade da escavadeira: "Oba, vamos sediar uma Olimpíada porque assim podemos usar o orçamento pra fazer obra. Se ficarmos em último lugar no quadro de medalhas, não tem problema". É vergonhoso ver os ginastas brasileiros, que são uns heróis, talentosíssimos, mendigando patrocínio. E ao mesmo tempo ver uma ONG levando dinheiro do governo para comprar camiseta. Que diabo o governo tem que comprar camiseta pra ONG?! Por outro lado, não acho que ONG deva formar atletas olímpicos. Como se forma um atleta de competição, eu não sei. O Brasil vive de modismos, de ídolos momentâneos, como a seleção de vôlei do Bernardinho, o Gustavo Kuerten no tênis, anos atrás.

Mas por que nunca aproveitamos essas modas para criar uma política esportiva consistente?

O problema é que o Brasil não tem uma filosofia de trabalho nesse sentido, não segue nenhum dos dois modelos básicos de programas esportivos que conhecemos: o de participação maciça do Estado no desenvolvimento de atletas, como em Cuba ou na China, e o de formação nas escolas e universidades, como nos Estados Unidos. Aqui não temos nem um nem outro. Estamos perdidos no meio do caminho. Apesar de dizerem que nós temos a participação do Estado nos esportes, o fato é que o Brasil privatizou - e privatizou mal - os esportes. Entregou sem critério nenhum para federações e confederações, que não passam de feudos políticos. Então, quem cuida do esporte brasileiro? As ONGs, micro-organismos pulverizados e sem uma política unificada e organizada, ou as federações e confederações. Ou seja, quando é conveniente, o esporte é público, e aí pede dinheiro ao governo para os programas das ONGs, e quando não é conveniente, quando tem que prestar contas, ser transparente, reclama-se da interferência do governo em assunto privado. Eu sou a última pessoa a ser contra privatização de alguma coisa, mas vejo claramente uma apropriação indevida do esporte brasileiro pelo setor privado. Nosso modelo é o seguinte: a gerência é privada, mas os recursos são públicos. Assim fica fácil.

Qualquer semelhança com a Copa de 2014 é mera coincidência?

A Copa do Mundo é um evento da Fifa. Não é de governo de país nenhum e ninguém obriga um governo a se oferecer para sediá-la. Quem tem vontade de receber uma Copa se candidata porque quer. E desde o começo conhece as regras estabelecidas pelo dono do negócio, no caso, a Fifa. Então não vale agora, no final do segundo tempo, vir discutir se o Brasil está vendendo sua soberania ao ceder a pressões da Fifa para mudar esta e aquela legislação interna. Isso é uma bravata, uma coisa nacionalista, ufanismo bobo. Quando apresentou sua candidatura, o Brasil sabia perfeitamente onde estava se metendo. E aí fica discutindo a filigrana da meia-entrada e da venda de bebida dentro dos estádios. Aliás, deveriam aproveitar o momento para liberar de vez a venda de bebida. Isso é uma hipocrisia. Bebe-se tranquilamente nas barraquinhas em torno do estádio. E até parece que as torcidas organizadas deixam de brigar porque não podem mais beber. É simples resolver a questão da violência. O cidadão arrumou encrenca? Que ele seja retirado, fichado e impedido de voltar. A Inglaterra fez isso e funcionou...

Você falava que o Brasil conhecia as regras do jogo quando apresentou a candidatura.

Por causa do nosso histórico futebolístico, nós até gostaríamos de acreditar que para a Fifa é uma honra fazer uma copa no Brasil, o "país do futebol". Mas a Fifa, obviamente, não poderia estar ligando menos pra isso. O que ela quer é ganhar o dinheiro dela e acabou. Ela chega, não coloca um tostão, ganha bilhões e vai embora. Isso não é novidade. O projeto da Copa no Brasil está errado desde a partida, porque foi feito pela CBF, também uma empresa privada, a fim de preservar seus feudos políticos regionais. É um projeto sem sentido. O governo brasileiro entra com dinheiro público - dinheiro do meu, do seu, do nosso imposto - em um projeto privado destinado a atender somente a interesses privados. Aí vem o BNDES e financia estádios em locais que jamais terão público suficiente para fazer um payback do investimento. Jamais. Isso é dinheiro a fundo perdido. Nem o estádio do Corinthians vai dar retorno. Teria se o clube colocasse 60 mil pessoas lá dentro em todos os jogos. Mas vemos pelo Campeonato Brasileiro que a média de público do Corinthians, que tem a maior torcida do Brasil (os flamenguistas que me desculpem), mal chega à metade disso. Se o setor privado tivesse se interessado pela construção dos estádios, o BNDES poderia financiar a transformação urbana das cidades. Eu não vou citar quais, para não melindrar prefeitos e governadores, mas tem cidade aí que certamente faria melhor uso do dinheiro do BNDES se construísse metrô e corredor de ônibus.

Por que o setor privado não se interessou pelos estádios?

Por que eles não vão dar dinheiro. Fizeram algum estudo econômico sério nas sedes da Copa? Desconheço. Vamos ter estádio digno de país com renda per capita de US$ 10 mil encravados em cidade com renda per capita que é um quinto disso. Como é que a iniciativa privada vai se interessar por algo assim? Mas o problema maior é mais antigo, vem antes da Copa. Nós devíamos estar nos perguntando por que o Brasil, com toda sua força de pentacampeão do mundo e gerador de craques, não tem estádios com nível internacional até hoje. A resposta é simples: porque não tem público, a média de público é deprimente, e não tem público porque o futebol brasileiro não é feito para atender o público. Quem programa um jogo de futebol para as 10 da noite de quarta-feira não está interessado na receita gerada pelo público. Mas deveria estar, porque um tipo de geração de receita não exclui o outro. Na Europa adotam um modelo de receita tripla: tem a parte da televisão, a do público pagante e a do marketing dos clubes. Só que lá, quando você vai assistir a um jogo de futebol, o estádio é limpo, confortável, seguro, tem transporte público na porta, comida de qualidade, lojas, lugar marcado, horário decente para que o jogo seja um programa familiar e um calendário imexível. Não tem esse negócio de adiar jogo porque vai haver um amistoso inútil da seleção contra o Gabão só para satisfazer interesse de patrocinador da federação. Desse modo, o público é garantido; e público garantido faz brilhar os olhos do setor privado. Mas o que temos no Brasil? Se a CBF não faz nada direito no futebol interno, como é que podemos esperar que ela possa fazer uma Copa direito?

Você estatizaria a CBF?

Eu preferiria que não fosse privada. Ao contrário do que se fez no setor elétrico, por exemplo, em que a exploração do serviço foi concedida mediante licitação, nunca houve uma licitação que desse à CBF o direito e o monopólio de representar o futebol brasileiro. Mas não tem como mudar. Não há elemento jurídico para isso. Me incomoda que a CBF não esteja preocupada com o futebol brasileiro. Não vejo problema que ela ganhe dinheiro, desde que licitamente, mas acho mal resolvido o uso que ela faz dos símbolos da Nação. A CBF não tem dinheiro público, não tem subvenção, só que usa o verde-amarelo da nossa Bandeira, canta o Hino Nacional... Quem a elegeu para fazer isso por nós e quanto ela paga ao governo para usar esses símbolos? Então, eu preferiria que ela não fosse privada. Nós brasileiros damos muito mais à CBF do que a CBF dá para nós. O futebol brasileiro não amedronta mais adversário nenhum. Jogamos de igual para igual com a Costa Rica. E eu tenho certeza que a decadência está diretamente relacionada a essa administração da CBF.

A Fifa alega que pode ter prejuízo de R$ 1,8 bilhão se não houver as adequações que ela espera na Lei Geral da Copa.

Prejuízo?! Como é que ela pode ter prejuízo num negócio em que não está gastando nada? Não estou entendendo essa conta. A Fifa deve estar procurando uma desculpa, pensando se vale a pena fazer a Copa no Brasil ou não. Mas ela não vai levar o evento para outro país. A relação entre Fifa e CBF é muito forte. A Fifa só tira a Copa do Brasil se o Ricardo Teixeira (presidente da CBF) quiser, não tem nada a ver com o governo brasileiro.

Qual a sua avaliação sobre as denúncias de corrupção contra o ministro do Esporte, Orlando Silva, e o impacto delas na organização da Copa?

Me parece que desde o início da gestão a presidente Dilma Rousseff tinha a ideia de contar com alguém de fora do ministério para tocar a Copa. É um evento específico, não precisava misturar com o dia a dia do ministério. Mas isso não vingou. O fato de a presidente assumir o controle da Copa mostrou a importância que o governo brasileiro está dando ao evento, o que é muito bom. Dá mais moral para o cronograma, para a execução das obras. Agora os envolvidos terão de despachar diretamente com a presidente da República, e ela já tem essa imagem de gestora determinada, incisiva. Talvez seja uma boa oportunidade de colocar alguém no ministério com perfil estritamente técnico, para que a pasta deixe de ser só essa simples repassadora de verba para ONGs.

ELENA LANDAU é economista, advogada, ex-diretora do BNDES, ex-consultora em Gestão Esportiva e botafoguense

Tenses

2011-10-14T09:18:00.000-03:00

Simple Forms
Present Tense
Present tense expresses an unchanging, repeated, or reoccurring action or situation that exists only now. It can also represent a widespread truth.

Example
Meaning

The mountains are tall and white. Unchanging action
Every year, the school council elects new members. Recurring action
Pb is the chemical symbol for lead. Widespread truth

Past Tense
Past tense expresses an action or situation that was started and finished in the past. Most past tense verbs end in -ed. The irregular verbs have special past tense forms which must be memorized.

Example
Form

W.W.II ended in 1945. Regular -ed past
Ernest Hemmingway wrote "The Old Man and the Sea." Irregular form

Future Tense
Future tense expresses an action or situation that will occur in the future. This tense is formed by using will/shall with the simple form of the verb.

The speaker of the House will finish her term in May of 1998.
The future tense can also be expressed by using am, is, or are with going to.

The surgeon is going to perform the first bypass in Minnesota.
We can also use the present tense form with an adverb or adverbial phrase to show future time.

The president speaks tomorrow. (Tomorrow is a future time adverb.)

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Progressive Forms
Present Progressive Tense
Present progressive tense describes an ongoing action that is happening at the same time the statement is written. This tense is formed by using am/is/are with the verb form ending in -ing.

The sociologist is examining the effects that racial discrimination has on society.
Past Progressive Tense
Past progressive tense describes a past action which was happening when another action occurred. This tense is formed by using was/were with the verb form ending in -ing.

The explorer was explaining the lastest discovery in Egypt when protests began on the streets.
Future Progressive Tense
Future progressive tense describes an ongoing or continuous action that will take place in the future. This tense is formed by using will be or shall be with the verb form ending in -ing.

Dr. Jones will be presenting ongoing research on sexist language next week.

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Perfect Forms
Present Perfect Tense
Present perfect tense describes an action that happened at an indefinite time in the past or that began in the past and continues in the present.This tense is formed by using has/have with the past participle of the verb. Most past participles end in -ed. Irregular verbs have special past participles that must be memorized.

Example
Meaning

The researchers have traveled to many countries in order to collect more significant data. At an indefinite time
Women have voted in presidential elections since 1921. Continues in the present

Past Perfect Tense
Past perfect tense describes an action that took place in the past before another past action. This tense is formed by using had with the past participle of the verb.

By the time the troops arrived, the war had ended.
Future Perfect Tense
Future perfect tense describes an action that will occur in the future before some other action. This tense is formed by using will have with the past participle of the verb.

By the time the troops arrive, the combat group will have spent several weeks waiting.

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Perfect Progressive Forms
Present Perfect Progressive
Present perfect progressive tense describes an action that began in the past, continues in the present, and may continue into the future. This tense is formed by using has/have been and the present participle of the verb (the verb form ending in -ing).

The CEO has been considering a transfer to the state of Texas where profits would be larger.
Past Perfect Progressive
Past perfect progressive tense describes a past, ongoing action that was completed before some other past action. This tense is formed by using had been and the present perfect of the verb (the verb form ending in -ing).

Before the budget cuts, the students had been participating in many extracurricular activities.
Future Perfect Progressive
Future perfect progressive tense describes a future, ongoing action that will occur before some specified future time. This tense is formed by using will have been and the present participle of the verb (the verb form ending in -ing).

By the year 2020, linguists will have been studying and defining the Indo-European language family for more than 200 years.

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Robert Levine

2011-10-03T08:36:00.000-03:00

'Chegou o momento do contra-ataque da indústria da cultura'
PUBLICIDADE

NELSON DE SÁ
ARTICULISTA DA FOLHA

Robert Levine foi editor da revista "Billboard", que cobre música, e antes trabalhou na "Wired", que cobre tecnologia. Acreditava que a indústria fonográfica e os produtores de conteúdo em geral deveriam abrir seus produtos, gratuitamente, na internet. Até notar, aos poucos, que as empresas de tecnologia cresciam lucrando com os mesmos produtos, mas resistiam a pagar por eles.
Passou a "seguir o dinheiro" e levantou que as instituições que defendem abrir tudo na internet são financiadas pelas mesmas empresas de tecnologia. Que o Creative Commons recebeu US$ 1,5 milhões do Google em 2008 e mais US$ 500 mil em 2009.
O resultado é o livro "Free Ride", carona grátis, que faz ao longo de 320 páginas um relato detalhado de "como a internet está destruindo a indústria da cultura" e sugere "como contra-atacar". O livro foi lançado no Reino Unido há dois meses, com elogios do "Financial Times" e restrições do "Independent", e sai nos EUA no próximo dia 25.
Questionado, Levine diz que evitou tratar de revistas por ser sua área de atuação, tendo passado pelas redações de "New York", "Wired" e "Billboard", além de contribuir com outras.
Relata que algumas pessoas o criticaram, após lançar o livro, como "amigo da indústria fonográfica", mas nega e afirma que "as gravadoras não diriam isso", pois escreveu negativamente sobre elas, em reportagens e artigos: "Ninguém na indústria fonográfica diria que fui bonzinho."
Garante que não recebe dinheiro para dar palestras para empresas, "como fazem muitos jornalistas hoje". E afirma: "Veja, meu conflito mais óbvio é que eu ganho a vida escrevendo. É o conflito real: eu ganho a vida com copyright. Eu tenho um contrato de livro."
No caso, com Bodley Head, no Reino Unido, e Doubleday, nos EUA, selos da Random House, a maior editora de livros do mundo, parte do grupo alemão Bertelsmann.
Abaixo, trechos da entrevista realizada por telefone:
*
Folha - Você escreve que o conflito em torno da internet não é entre ativistas e empresas de mídia, mas econômico, entre empresas de tecnologia e empresas de mídia, de conteúdo.
Robert Levine - Era o ponto principal que eu queria abordar. As pessoas veem essas questões em termos de bem e mal. Quando você tem empresas, elas tendem a agir segundo seus interesses econômicos, a fazer o que dá dinheiro. Na internet, você está falando de grandes provedores, Verizon, At&T, e de Google, Facebook. Mas os ativistas ainda falam, por exemplo, em blogs: "Somos nós contra as grandes empresas de mídia". Mas a indústria fonográfica já não é tão grande, se comparada ao Google, e é pequenina, se comparada às teles. As pessoas dizem: "A indústria fonográfica manda em Washington". E ela não é nada comparada ao Google, às empresas de tecnologia.
Folha - Qual foi seu ponto de partida?
Levine - Eu trabalhei na "Wired", tempos atrás, e acreditava que as gravadoras eram antiquadas, atrapalhavam o progresso. Com o tempo, pensei: "Espera aí, muitas dessas empresas de internet não querem pagar por conteúdo". O Napster ainda tinha um plano para pagar por conteúdo. Não era bom, mas era um plano. Glogster, não. Limewire, não. A ideia sempre foi fazer um livro crítico, mas nem tanto quando acabou sendo. Descobri que havia todo esse dinheiro que os ativistas recebiam. Temos uma frase no jornalismo americano, "siga o dinheiro", não tenho certeza da origem, mas apareceu em Watergate.
Folha - A origem foi o roteirista do filme [William Goldman].
Levine - Exato, "Todos os Homens do Presidente". Ok, você conhece a sua cultura pop. (risos) Para mim, é o que você faz, como jornalista: você segue o dinheiro. E eu examinei o Creative Commons e [seu fundador] Lawrence Lessig, o Center for Internet and Society, da Universidade Stanford, a New America Foundation. Muita gente me disse, "eles são legais, boas pessoas". Provavelmente são, não penso que ninguém seja o mal. O mal é matar alguém, não infringir copyright. Mas eles são enviesados.
Folha - Parte do financiamento dessas instituições vem das empresas de tecnologia.
Levine - Muito do financiamento vem. E o que é interessante é que as pessoas não sabem. Se você ler os jornais, não há qualquer menção. Como é que esses ativistas recebem todo esse dinheiro do Google e ninguém diz nada? Trabalhei seis meses no levantamento da proposta para o livro. Mais e mais eu me surpreendia. Comecei a pensar: "É um conflito de negócios: Quem vai controlar a distribuição de música é a Warner ou o Google?". Não penso que as gravadoras sejam o bem ou que o Google seja o mal, porque sou um jornalista de negócios. Mas creio que alguns desses ativistas... Dias atrás, almocei com um, aqui em Berlim, e ele não sabia de onde vinha o dinheiro do Creative Commons. Não é estranho?
Folha - Aqui no Brasil, talvez Gilberto Gil também não saiba.
Levine - É curioso que você cite o Brasil, porque havia dois países que eu queria visitar, para o livro, mas não pude, porque não tinha o dinheiro: Brasil e Nigéria. Sou um "nerd" de música, comecei como jornalista musical. Brasil e Nigéria tiveram grandes cenas musicais nos anos 60 e 70. Tropicália, Gil, Caetano Veloso, Os Mutantes. Na Nigéria, Fela Kuti, Tony Allen, o Afrobeat. A maioria foi bancada por grandes gravadoras. Gil estava na Philips.
Folha - Uma grande gravadora na época.
Levine - Que depois virou parte da Polygram, que agora é parte da Universal. Mas hoje as pessoas falam: "No Brasil existe essa grande cena tecnobrega, que não precisa de gravadoras". Sim, mas ela não gera qualquer recurso de exportação para o Brasil. Todos aqueles discos de Gil geraram recursos para a economia. Por isso eu queria ir, porque vocês têm essa imagem de que o mundo em desenvolvimento deve ser contrário ao copyright. E eu não acredito que ela seja correta.
Folha - Gil e outros artistas, como Radiohead, tentam incorporar a distribuição grátis via internet. Como você essas tentativas de construir pontes?
Levine - O que o Radiohead fez foi realmente esperto. Eles conseguiram mais dinheiro ainda com aquele álbum, o que deram de graça. Deixaram você pagar o que queria, conseguiram muito dinheiro e promoveram sua turnê. Foi realmente inteligente. Por outro lado, o Radiohead pôde fazer porque já era famoso. E já era famoso porque, por um lado, na minha opinião, é uma das bandas mais talentosas que há, mas também porque teve muita promoção da EMI.
Folha - Para começar.
Levine - No começo. Você tem muitos artistas talentosos que ninguém conhece. A EMI gastou muito dinheiro falando ao mundo sobre o Radiohead. Imagino que a Philips tenha gasto muito dinheiro para falar ao mundo sobre Gil. Tenho vários daqueles discos, mas não conheço tanto a história. Mas ele estava na TV brasileira. Então, quando se torna conhecido, você não precisa de uma gravadora, mas quem será o Gilberto Gil de amanhã?
Folha - O livro aborda também imprensa e TV. Diz que tiveram duas formas de tratar a internet, no início; a primeira seguindo a opinião geral e abrindo quase tudo na internet, caso do "New York Times", e a segunda mantendo o conteúdo fechado, caso do "Financial Times", o que fez toda a diferença. E daqui para a frente?
Levine - A indústria de jornais nos EUA e no Reino Unido sempre foi ligada à publicidade. Dez anos atrás, a divisão tradicional era de 85% de recursos oriundos da publicidade e 15% da venda de exemplares. Se você examinar os EUA, a proporção do PIB que vai para publicidade não mudou muito desde 1995. O PIB sobe e desce, mas o percentual se mantém. Você tinha, digamos, essa torta que sustentava jornais, TV, revistas. Agora você corta essa torta pela metade. Google e Facebook ficam com uma metade. Todos os jornais e todas as TVs estão disputando a outra. Eles têm de vender o conteúdo, não têm alternativa. Não sei se vender o conteúdo vai funcionar, mas sei que distribuí-lo de graça na internet não vai. Não para um jornal ambicioso, que gasta muito dinheiro com seu conteúdo. "New York Times", "Wall Street Journal", "Zeit", "Le Monde", alguns poucos em cada país. Não são todos que querem cobrir guerras, esse tipo de jornalismo, mas, se quer ser um grande jornal, tem que cobrar.
Folha - Vale também para os emergentes?
Levine - Pode ser diferente no Brasil ou na Índia, porque suas economias estão se expandindo. Não sei muito do Brasil, mas quando uma economia cresce mais rápido, você tem mais pessoas na classe média e mais gastos, internamente. E, quando você tem mais gastos internamente, aí a publicidade realmente decola. Mas é muito difícil fazer previsões sobre o Brasil, porque é um país tão grande, com tantas diferenças, São Paulo e Manaus são quase mundos diferentes. Mas, num país desenvolvido, você tem que vender as notícias. E acredito que as pessoas vão comprar. Eu pago US$ 23 por mês pelo "New York Times". Se mudarem amanhã para US$ 33, continuaria pagando. As pessoas são muito sensíveis à conveniência ao pagar, elas querem que seja fácil, mas não creio que se importem tanto com o custo. A maioria dos americanos paga US$ 60 por mês pela TV a cabo. E a maior parte da programação é muito ruim.
Folha - Centenas de canais, nada para ver.
Levine - US$ 60 pelo cabo ou US$ 30 pelo "NYT"? Para mim, US$ 30 pelo "NYT". Nos EUA, o iTunes aumentou o preço das músicas de US$ 1 para US$ 1,29. E vendeu 13% menos músicas, mas obteve 20% mais de dinheiro. Se você está no negócio para ter, é realmente inteligente.
Folha - Por que você escreveu sobre direitos de músicas, jornais, filmes, e não sobre patentes de forma geral?
Levine - Uma das razões é que patente é uma questão de vida ou morte. Se você precisa muito de um remédio e não pode pagar, você pode furtá-lo. E eu não posso dizer que seja uma coisa ruim você estar furtando remédio. Mas se você furtar um álbum do Led Zeppelin...
Folha - Não é a salvação da vida de ninguém, necessariamente.
Levine - Espera aí, para mim é. (risos) Mas eu cresci em Connecticut, não havia nada para fazer. Mas são coisas diferentes. Você pode dizer que o governo da Índia ou do Brasil ou da Nigéria tem uma motivação política legítima. Você tem o direito de expropriar propriedade intelectual americana se vai salvar vidas? A resposta é talvez. Mas você têm o direito de expropriar "Gossip Girl"? "Desperate Housewives"? Aí é algo difícil de defender. Se você examinar o que acontece na Organização Mundial de Propriedade Intelectual, na ONU, muitas pessoas do Creative Commons e do Google confundem as duas questões, copyright e patentes. Para mim, são muito diferentes, porque o que está em jogo é muito diferente. Não penso que furtar uma música do Led Zeppelin seja uma coisa horrível, embora me pareça, de fato, desnecessário.
*
Folha - No fim do livro, você fala dos diferentes caminhos possíveis daqui para a frente. Um deles seria o esforço crescente, na Europa continental, para combater a pirataria na cultura. É uma saída?
Levine - Sim. As divergências legais que estão sendo debatidas hoje são muito pequenas. Ninguém diz que baixar algo pelo qual você não pagou seja correto. Ninguém diz que postar um filme na internet é correto. Tudo o que estão discutindo é quem deve responder legalmente pelo ato. O YouTube diz: "Vocês não podem nos processar, têm de processar os indivíduos". Mesmo se for difícil garantir o respeito às leis, é importante delimitar, com leis que digam "ei, isso é errado". Só deixar o sinal já é importante.
Folha - O Google tem um lema, hoje pouco lembrado, "don't be evil", não seja mau. Mas agora, com o Google tão grande, com o Facebook tão grande, a imagem do bem está mudando?
Levine - Ah, sim.
Folha - No livro, você cita que [o editor] Chris Anderson proclamou, na "Wired", que "a web está morta", porque está se fechando, com dispositivos como Xbox Live e App Store. Os malvados se tornaram as grandes empresas de tecnologia? Elas são o novo alvo?
Levine - Sim, mas me permita dar algum contexto. Sempre houve dois lados na indústria do entretenimento: o produto e a plataforma. Hoje, o Google controla a plataforma. Também os provedores de serviços de internet, as teles, são uma plataforma. Apple e Amazon têm plataformas fechadas. E parte do problema é: quem tem o poder, o produto ou a plataforma? Na indústria tradicional de mídia, o produto tem muito poder. Se estou tentando fazer você comprar TV paga, você vai querer o canal com os melhores programas. Se tenho um cinema, preciso de bons filmes. Com a internet, você não precisa pagar nada, está tudo lá. Então a questão é como fazer a plataforma pagar pelo produto. Quando Chris diz que "a web está morta", uma das coisas de que está falando, penso eu, é que muitos dos criadores de conteúdo não gostam da internet, porque é uma forma muito ruim de vender coisas. A internet foi criada por cientistas que queriam compartilhar informação acadêmica. Para isso, ela é extraordinária. Mas não estamos mais usando a internet para compartilhar pesquisa acadêmica. Estamos usando para serviços bancários, para tudo.
Folha - Para mídia.
Levine - Mas a internet só é boa para compartilhar informação. Se você quer vender informação, ela não é, na verdade, um sistema bem estruturado. Daí a pergunta: Que passos podemos tomar para mudar o sistema? A Apple tem um sistema muito bom para vender coisas. O Xbox tem um sistema muito bom para vender coisas. Você pode achar os videogames idiotas, mas tecnicamente é um sistema muito bom. Mas o Google diz: "Espera aí, você não pode fazer mudanças, é imoral". Eu não penso que seja imoral. É ruim para os negócios do Google, porque, quanto mais informação vai para a internet, mais o Google lucra. É ótimo para eles. Mas, se você quer lucrar também, alguém tem que comprar sua informação. Temos que estruturar um sistema ou regular um sistema para mais gente.
Folha - Regular como?
Levine - Me desculpe se soa pretensioso, mas eu acho que a pergunta é: "Quem está no comando?". Os políticos regulam a plataforma ou as plataformas regulam os políticos? Eu não votei no Google. Eu vou e volto quanto ao governo americano, mas no ano que vem posso votar novamente. Provavelmente votarei em Obama outra vez, mas eu posso votar e você pode votar em não sei quantos anos. Você não pode votar no Google ou na Apple.
Folha - Eles estão lá e ponto.
Levine - Eles simplesmente estão lá. Uma das coisas de que eu gosto sobre a Europa é que, quando os EUA não regularam a Microsoft, a Europa o fez. Quando os EUA não regularam a Intel, a Europa o fez. Não acredito que os EUA vão regular o Gooogle. Porque eles são muito próximos de Obama.
*Folha - Google e outras empresas de tecnologia têm feito encontros e jantares com Washington ultimamente.
Levine - O Google doa muito dinheiro para Obama. Eric Schmidt [executivo do Google] foi um sério candidato a secretário do Comércio. Como você pode ter um secretário do Comércio que pensa que tudo deve ser grátis? É um pouco estranho.
Folha - Além de Chris Anderson, Tim Berners-Lee, o inventor da web, escreveu que a internet está em perigo por causa de "ilhas" como o iTunes.
Levine - Mas aí eu tenho de perguntar se está em perigo ou se está evoluindo. Não quero voltar a comprar fitas cassete e discos de vinil. As coisas avançam e mudam. Podemos comprar música no iTunes, no Spotify, mas compramos on-line. Isso não vai voltar atrás. A indústria fonográfica tem de se adaptar, as editoras de livros têm de se adaptar. E adivinhe? Também Tim Berners-Lee tem de se adaptar. Por que todas as pessoas que defendem o progresso tecnológico querem que a internet se mantenha exatamente como era em 1995? Tim Berners-Lee e Lawrence Lessig e todos esses caras querem que a internet continue exatamente igual. A internet vai crescer, amadurecer.
Folha - Mas Berners-Lee criou a web, ele não deveria ser ouvido?
Levine - Ele é um cientista, muito inteligente. Mas eu não quero um cientista decidindo como a sociedade deve funcionar. Para isso, ele não é qualificado. E deveria calar a boca. Aliás, eu não sou qualificado também. Isso precisa ser uma conversa política. Os chamados valores "geek" [dos aficcionados de tecnologia] na verdade não têm muito apoio entre as pessoas. Poucos parecem concordar com Tim Berners-Lee. Então, quem se importa com o que ele diz? É um gênio, mas só porque é um gênio da ciência da computação... Ter professores muito inteligentes decidindo como a sociedade funciona nos deu algumas das piores economia do século 20. Se você vai e pede, "estruture uma sociedade", você termina com a União Soviética.

Viegas

2011-09-27T19:27:00.000-03:00

Ponto de Vista

Incertezas

A busca do saber por necessidade profissional favorece o aprendizado, é o que confirmam os pedagogos. No mundo chamado pós-moderno, haveria muita gente dedicada à aquisição de conhecimentos somente pelo prazer de ampliar os horizontes de sua cultura? Há os que pesquisam para passar o tempo, o que implica na existência de pessoas à quais cansa a contagem das horas. Dignos de inveja? Penoso é sem dúvida o estudo exigido apenas por imposição circunstancial, por mera obrigação.

Mas há alguns que procuram insaciavelmente o saber em busca do poder e ainda para dominar os semelhantes ou talvez para acabar com as doenças e até mesmo com a morte. E a massa de curiosos, querendo saber o que acontece depois do sepultamento ou cremação dos corpos, alimenta crenças e teorias, além de alentar o ânimo e o bolso de bruxos, haríolos e de todos que se arrogam o privilégio de possuírem faculdades divinatórias. E tais compulsivos incansáveis estão sujeitos a crises de ansiedade e de angústias perante inevitáveis desencantos e desamparos. E nem se dão conta de que com frequência terminam se transformando em cansativos que alugam os ouvidos alheios para chorar suas pitangas. São pessoas que não aceitam as balizas peculiares ao tipo de conhecimento próprio do ser racional.

Refletindo recentemente sobre os limites da capacidade humana de saber, deparei-me com Manoel de Barros (*1916). Ele lembra: “A maior riqueza do homem é a sua incompletude. Nesse ponto sou abastado. Palavras que me aceitam como sou – eu não aceito...”. E o poeta cuiabano continua suas profundas indagações: “Tentei descobrir na alma alguma coisa mais profunda do que não saber nada sobre as coisas profundas. Consegui não descobrir.”

Mas o poeta não pendurou as chuteiras por causa da incompletude. Ao contrário, reage, tentando rasgar horizontes. E acrescenta: “Eu penso renovar o homem usando borboletas”.

De fato a vida continua em evolução e o futuro é imprevisível. E é poeticamente que Manoel de Barros irá se descrever nessa trajetória: “Quem anda no trilho é trem de ferro, sou água que corre entre pedras, liberdade caça jeito”.

E acha, com certeza.

LUIZ VIEGAS DE CARVALHO

10.IX.2011

Sore Europe NYRB

2011-09-23T17:49:00.000-03:00

Does the Euro Have a Future?

October 13, 2011 George Soros

The euro crisis is a direct consequence of the crash of 2008. When Lehman Brothers failed, the entire financial system started to collapse and had to be put on artificial life support. This took the form of substituting the sovereign credit of governments for the bank and other credit that had collapsed. At a memorable meeting of European finance ministers in November 2008, they guaranteed that no other financial institutions that are important to the workings of the financial system would be allowed to fail, and their example was followed by the United States.

Angela Merkel then declared that the guarantee should be exercised by each European state individually, not by the European Union or the eurozone acting as a whole. This sowed the seeds of the euro crisis because it revealed and activated a hidden weakness in the construction of the euro: the lack of a common treasury. The crisis itself erupted more than a year later, in 2010.

There is some similarity between the euro crisis and the subprime crisis that caused the crash of 2008. In each case a supposedly riskless asset—collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), based largely on mortgages, in 2008, and European government bonds now—lost some or all of their value.

Unfortunately the euro crisis is more intractable. In 2008 the US financial authorities that were needed to respond to the crisis were in place; at present in the eurozone one of these authorities, the common treasury, has yet to be brought into existence. This requires a political process involving a number of sovereign states. That is what has made the problem so severe. The political will to create a common European treasury was absent in the first place; and since the time when the euro was created the political cohesion of the European Union has greatly deteriorated. As a result there is no clearly visible solution to the euro crisis. In its absence the authorities have been trying to buy time.

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In an ordinary financial crisis this tactic works: with the passage of time the panic subsides and confidence returns. But in this case time has been working against the authorities. Since the political will is missing, the problems continue to grow larger while the politics are also becoming more poisonous.

It takes a crisis to make the politically impossible possible. Under the pressure of a financial crisis the authorities take whatever steps are necessary to hold the system together, but they only do the minimum and that is soon perceived by the financial markets as inadequate. That is how one crisis leads to another. So Europe is condemned to a seemingly unending series of crises. Measures that would have worked if they had been adopted earlier turn out to be inadequate by the time they become politically possible. This is the key to understanding the euro crisis.

Where are we now in this process? The outlines of the missing ingredient, namely a common treasury, are beginning to emerge. They are to be found in the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF)—agreed on by twenty-seven member states of the EU in May 2010—and its successor, after 2013, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). But the EFSF is not adequately capitalized and its functions are not adequately defined. It is supposed to provide a safety net for the eurozone as a whole, but in practice it has been tailored to finance the rescue packages for three small countries: Greece, Portugal, and Ireland; it is not large enough to support bigger countries like Spain or Italy. Nor was it originally meant to deal with the problems of the banking system, although its scope has subsequently been extended to include banks as well as sovereign states. Its biggest shortcoming is that it is purely a fund-raising mechanism; the authority to spend the money is left with the governments of the member countries. This renders the EFSF useless in responding to a crisis; it has to await instructions from the member countries.

The situation has been further aggravated by the recent decision of the German Constitutional Court. While the court found that the EFSF is constitutional, it prohibited any future guarantees benefiting additional states without the prior approval of the budget committee of the Bundestag. This will greatly constrain the discretionary powers of the German government in confronting future crises.

The seeds of the next crisis have already been sown by the way the authorities responded to the last crisis. They accepted the principle that countries receiving assistance should not have to pay punitive interest rates and they set up the EFSF as a fund-raising mechanism for this purpose. Had this principle been accepted in the first place, the Greek crisis would not have grown so severe. As it is, the contagion—in the form of increasing inability to pay sovereign and other debt—has spread to Spain and Italy, but those countries are not allowed to borrow at the lower, concessional rates extended to Greece. This has set them on a course that will eventually land them in the same predicament as Greece. In the case of Greece, the debt burden has clearly become unsustainable. Bondholders have been offered a “voluntary” restructuring by which they would accept lower interest rates and delayed or decreased repayments; but no other arrangements have been made for a possible default or for defection from the eurozone.

These two deficiencies—no concessional rates for Italy or Spain and no preparation for a possible default and defection from the eurozone by Greece—have cast a heavy shadow of doubt both on the government bonds of other deficit countries and on the banking system of the eurozone, which is loaded with those bonds. As a stopgap measure the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped into the breach by buying Spanish and Italian bonds in the market. But that is not a viable solution. The ECB had done the same thing for Greece, but that did not stop the Greek debt from becoming unsustainable. If Italy, with its debt at 108 percent of GDP and growth of less than 1 percent, had to pay risk premiums of 3 percent or more to borrow money, its debt would also become unsustainable.

The ECB’s earlier decision to buy Greek bonds had been highly controversial; Axel Weber, the ECB’s German board member, resigned from the board in protest. The intervention did blur the line between monetary and fiscal policy, but a central bank is supposed to do whatever is necessary to preserve the financial system. That is particularly true in the absence of a fiscal authority. Subsequently, the controversy led the ECB to adamantly oppose a restructuring of Greek debt—by which, among other measures, the time for repayment would be extended—turning the ECB from a savior of the system into an obstructionist force. The ECB has prevailed: the EFSF took over the risk of possible insolvency of the Greek bonds from the ECB.

The resolution of this dispute has in turn made it easier for the ECB to embark on its current program to purchase Italian and Spanish bonds, which, unlike those of Greece, are not about to default. Still, the decision has encountered the same internal opposition from Germany as the earlier intervention in Greek bonds. Jürgen Stark, the chief economist of the ECB, resigned on September 9. In any case the current intervention has to be limited in scope because the capacity of the EFSF to extend help is virtually exhausted by the rescue operations already in progress in Greece, Portugal, and Ireland.

In the meantime the Greek government is having increasing difficulties in meeting the conditions imposed by the assistance program. The troika supervising the program—the EU, the IMF, and the ECB—is not satisfied; Greek banks did not fully subscribe to the latest treasury bill auction; and the Greek government is running out of funds.

In these circumstances an orderly default and temporary withdrawal from the eurozone may be preferable to a drawn-out agony. But no preparations have been made. A disorderly default could precipitate a meltdown similar to the one that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, but this time one of the authorities that would be needed to contain it is missing.

No wonder that the financial markets have taken fright. Risk premiums that must be paid to buy government bonds have increased, stocks have plummeted, led by bank stocks, and recently even the euro has broken out of its trading range on the downside. The volatility of markets is reminiscent of the crash of 2008.

The authorities are doing what they can to forestall an immediate breakdown. The Greeks are meeting the troika’s demands so as to receive the next installment of the rescue package. The ECB is allowing banks to borrow dollars for up to three months instead of just one week, as has been the case. The Bundestag is expected to pass legislation establishing the EFSF. These steps will delay the climax from September to December.

Unfortunately, the capacity of the financial authorities to take additional measures has been severely restricted by the recent ruling of the German Constitutional Court. It appears that the authorities have reached the end of the road with their policy of “kicking the can down the road.” Even if a catastrophe can be avoided, one thing is certain: the pressure to reduce deficits will push the eurozone into prolonged recession. This will have incalculable political consequences. The euro crisis could endanger the political cohesion of the European Union.

There is no escape from this gloomy scenario as long as the authorities persist in their current course. They could, however, change course. They could recognize that they have reached the end of the road and take a radically different approach. Instead of acquiescing in the absence of a solution and trying to buy time, they could look for a solution first and then find a path leading to it. The path that leads to a solution has to be found in Germany, which, as the EU’s largest and highest-rated creditor country, has been thrust into the position of deciding the future of Europe. That is the approach I propose to explore.

To resolve a crisis in which the impossible becomes possible it is necessary to think about the unthinkable. To start with, it is imperative to prepare for the possibility of default and defection from the eurozone in the case of Greece, Portugal, and perhaps Ireland. To prevent a financial meltdown, four sets of measures would have to be taken. First, bank deposits have to be protected. If a euro deposited in a Greek bank would be lost to the depositor, a euro deposited in an Italian bank would then be worth less than one in a German or Dutch bank and there would be a run on the banks of other deficit countries. Second, some banks in the defaulting countries have to be kept functioning in order to keep the economy from breaking down. Third, the European banking system would have to be recapitalized and put under European, as distinct from national, supervision. Fourth, the government bonds of the other deficit countries would have to be protected from contagion. The last two requirements would apply even if no country defaults.

All this would cost money. Under existing arrangements no more money is to be found and no new arrangements are allowed by the German Constitutional Court decision without the authorization of the Bundestag. There is no alternative but to give birth to the missing ingredient: a European treasury with the power to tax and therefore to borrow. This would require a new treaty, transforming the EFSF into a full-fledged treasury.

That would presuppose a radical change of heart, particularly in Germany. The German public still thinks that it has a choice about whether to support the euro or to abandon it. That is a mistake. The euro exists and the assets and liabilities of the financial system are so intermingled on the basis of a common currency that a breakdown of the euro would cause a meltdown beyond the capacity of the authorities to contain. The longer it takes for the German public to realize this, the heavier the price they and the rest of the world will have to pay.

The question is whether the German public can be convinced of this argument. Angela Merkel may not be able to persuade her own coalition, but she could rely on the opposition. Having resolved the euro crisis, she would have less to fear from the next elections.

The fact that arrangements are made for the possible default or defection of three small countries does not mean that those countries would be abandoned. On the contrary, the possibility of an orderly default—paid for by the other eurozone countries and the IMF—would offer Greece and Portugal policy choices. Moreover, it would end the vicious cycle now threatening all of the eurozone’s deficit countries whereby austerity weakens their growth prospects, leading investors to demand prohibitively high interest rates and thus forcing their governments to cut spending further.

Leaving the euro would make it easier for them to regain competitiveness; but if they are willing to make the necessary sacrifices they could also stay in. In both cases, the EFSF would protect bank deposits and the IMF would help to recapitalize the banking system. That would help these countries to escape from the trap in which they currently find themselves. It would be against the best interests of the European Union to allow these countries to collapse and drag down the global banking system with them.

It is not for me to spell out the details of the new treaty; that has to be decided by the member countries. But the discussions ought to start right away because even under extreme pressure they will take a long time to conclude. Once the principle of setting up a European Treasury is agreed upon, the European Council could authorize the ECB to step into the breach, indemnifying the ECB in advance against risks to its solvency. That is the only way to forestall a possible financial meltdown and another Great Depression.

—September 15, 2011

Beato com Obit de Amy

2011-07-29T10:26:00.000-03:00

AMY WINEHOUSE (1983-2011)

LIFE IS A LOSING GAME

“Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Pete Townsend (The Who), My Generation”
(TOWSEND, Pete, My Generation, in http://www.lyrics007.com/The%20Who%20Lyrics/My%20Generation%20Lyrics.html,
acessado em 26/07/2011).

«É melhor viver
dez anos a mil,
do que mil anos a dez»
(Lobão, Décadence avec Elegance,
in http://letras.terra.com.br/lobao/446178/,
acessado em 26/07/2011).

«É melhor morrer de vodka que de tédio»
(Vladímir Maiácovsky).

«ll n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux:
c'est le suicide.
Juger que la vie vaut ou ne vaut pas la peine d'être vécue,
c'est répondre à la question fondamentale de la philosophie.
Le reste, si le monde a trois dimensions,
si l'esprit a neuf ou douze catégories, vient ensuite.
Ce sont des jeux; il faut d'abord répondre.»

Camus, Albert, Le Mythe de Sisyphe,
Folio Essais Folio Essais # 11, Gallimard © 1942, pages 17 et 18, in http://www.philo5.com/Les%20philosophes%20Textes/Camus_AbsurdeEtRevolte.htm,
acessado em 26/07/2011).

“Ó Shariputra, aqui a forma é o vazio e o vazio é a forma; tudo que tem forma é exatamente o vazio e tudo que é vazio é exatamente a forma. Dessa maneira as sensações, as concepções, a discriminação e a consciência são também vazias e desprovidas de substância. Ó Sariputra, o vazio de todas as coisas não foi criado e não pode ser destruído e dessa maneira no vazio não há forma, não há sensações, não há discriminação e não há consciência. Não há olho, não há ouvido, não há nariz, não há língua, não há corpo e não há mente. Não há cor, não há som, não há cheiro, não há gosto, não há tato e não há fenômenos. Nada existe desde o reino da visão até o reino da consciência. Não há ignorância nem extinção da ignorância, não há sofrimento, não há causa do sofrimento, não há velhice, não há morte, não há extinção do sofrimento, da velhice ou da morte, não há sabedoria e iluminamento e nada há para ser ganho. Como nada há para ser ganho, o Bodhisatva vive em Prajna Paramita e não há obstáculos em seu coração, e sem obstáculos não há medo e muito além dos pensamentos ilusórios,e ele atinge o Nirvana”.

(Sutra do Coração da Grande Perfeição da Sabedoria (Índia, século 1. D.C.), acessado em http://www.sanghazen.com.br/sutras.pdf, página 49, acessado em 28/07/2011).

Amy Winehouse talvez nunca tenha lido Émile Cioran (De l´Inconvénient d´Etre Né, Éditions Gallimard, Collection Folio – Essais, 1973), mas sempre soube do enorme inconveniente que é ter nascido, e que a própria vida, e não só o amor (Love is a Losing Game, in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n35ffD9H6pA&feature=share e http://letras.terra.com.br/amy-winehouse/879972/traducao.html, acessados em 28/07/11), era uma mão errada no poker de tudo, que todos nós tiramos, um jogo perdido desde o início para todos, seja pelo tédio ou pela vodka e seus congêneres. Preferiu entregar-se a estes a perecer daquele, porque mortos já estamos quase todos, e só pela arte, sexo ou música ressuscitamos por alguns momentos, e os estupefacientes podem nos mostrar, ainda que a um preço altíssimo, como seria uma vida como a sonhamos, intensa e extasiante como um orgasmo eterno taoísta ou tântrico. Ou seja, tudo o que não é a existência da maior parte das pessoas, sóbria, burocrática e repetitiva como uma neurose intratável. Segundo o principal jornal holandês (“Amy Winehouse wist dat ze jong zou sterven", in http://www.telegraaf.nl/prive/10258804/__Amy_wist_van_vroege_dood__.html?fb_ref=art&fb_source=profile_oneline, acessado em 28/07/11), Amy previra sua associação ao Clube dos 27 de Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison et caterva, o dos que preferiram morrer enquanto, a vida ainda ardia como uma chama incontrolável que, em sua volúpia, tudo consumia, arte, música, corpos e tudo mais que era belo e celebração. Muito antes dos ídolos da década de 60 os poetas românticos do fin-de-siècle que morriam tuberculosos já estavam e eram, como eram todos os cantores da vida desmedida e desregrada, Baudelaire e seus companheiros nos Paraísos Artificiais da Paris por onde flanavam. Sua morte é também a morte da morte de Janis Joplin, também ela mulher, excessiva, bêbada e drogada, mas desbravadora, em uma época de contestação onde queimar sutiãs, ou não usá-los, ainda era novidade. Agora não há mais nada contra o quê se insurgir, mais resta a culpa e o blues de ser tão louca, ácida e mulher (“Amy Winehouse sang of a deeply feminine suffering”, in http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jul/26/amy-winehouse-lyrics , acessado em 28/07/2011), a forte e agridoce melancolia do amor intensamente físico e fácil. Em sua vida excessivamente intensa e curta, foi integralmente trágica como toda mulher, pois não podia se impedir de ser o que era (“You know I´m no Good”, in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr56knoA1rA&feature=share e http://letras.terra.com.br/amy-winehouse/879973/, acessados em 28/07/2011), e sabia que nenhuma reabilitação (“Rehab”, in http://letras.terra.com.br/amy-winehouse/858528/# , acessado em 28/07/2011) era possível, nem como todo amor do Pai. Preferiu partir de volta ao Negror do Nada de onde todos viemos e para onde retornaremos, Back to Black (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJAfLE39ZZ8&ob=av2n e http://letras.terra.com.br/amy-winehouse/932418/, acessados em 28/07/2011), com sua alma presa na foto dos mass media e seus irresistíveis rendimentos, ela que era tão suas canções que eram tão ela, nascida na terra que inventou a privacy só pelo prazer de violá-la a cada instante. Lembro de alguém que me contava de um grande poeta, alcóolatra, que depois que se curou, nunca mais escreveu um só poema que prestasse, e de outro que me contou de encontros com um mesmo jovem, esquizofrênico, um em um bar, animado e cheio de vida, e outro numa festa de família, um zumbi impregnado de medicação antipsicótica, antes do inevitável suicídio. Toda mulher quer um algoz prá chamar de seu, mas Amy, que teve todos os homens e mulheres que quis, preferiu se sacrificar por todos nós, mostrando como a vida pode ser foda ainda que insana, a nós que passaremos incólumes por uma existência perfeitamente banal e inútil, atravessando por 40 ou 80 anos o deserto da (in)existência sem sequer avistar, mesmo de longe, a Terra Prometida onde escorre o Leite o Mel, nós que não estaremos entre os muitos chamados nem entre os poucos escolhidos, que andaremos pelo Vale da Morte sem que ninguém nos conduza, depois de uma vida em que não teremos ganho nada, porque nada arriscamos. Esse é o impasse. Que talvez, entretanto, sequer exista, e nada haja para ser ganho, e tudo seja o instante em que nossos dedos apenas sentem a carta marcada do jogo da vida, sem saber que é vida, ou que é jogo.

Beato Salu de Volta

2011-07-25T14:32:00.000-03:00

DOIS ARTISTAS
NEGROS, POBRES, DEMENTES
―
RICOS, SANTOS:
ITAMAR ASSUMPÇÃO E ARTUR BISPO DO ROSÁRIO

– ITAMAR ASSUMPÇÃO

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

(THOMAS, Dylan, “In My Craft or Sullen Art”, in http://www.naic.edu/~gibson/poems/dthomas1.html, acessado em 22/07/2011).

Daquele Instante em Diante, documentário de Rogerio Velloso, da série Iconoclássicos do Itaú Cultural, sobre a vida e a obra de Itamar Assumpção, Beleléu vulgo Nego Dito ― entidade que esse filho de Xangô recebia nos palcos paulistanos ―, como Arrigo Barnabé, integrante da linha de frente da vanguarda paranaense que se estabeleceu na capital bandeirante, Isca de Polícia reformando os Rumos da MPBosta junto com Premeditando o Breque e outros. Escolheu viver a vida em estado de criação, misturando samba, reggae e atonalismo, teatro e canção, obsessivamente trabalhando seus arranjos, fugindo do star system e de seus esquemões, mas ao mesmo tempo agridoce, lamentando a fama que não veio e pela qual não conseguiu, não conseguimos não desejar, ainda assim quase um autista da estética, TOC do som, pesquisador musical inexaurível, Negritude Sênior, bom pater familias e marido exemplar de italianíssima do Paraná, caseiro e global, cotidiano e anarquia, ultrapop fundindo Marley e Miles, Schönberg e Ataulfo, no final quase um velho sacerdote rastafári, magérrimo por seu tumor, dreads grisalhos. Como teria digerido o rap carioca e o batido no seu liquidificador de toda a música, samba de break, rock de breque, funk jazz de reggae? Como permanecer sempre ligado em som, des-reconstruindo-se musicalmente, ser de verdade independente, sem deixar de lidar com a questão material ou, pior, o ego _ e os outros? Por que alguns são tão à frente de seu tempo, chegam antes da hora e saem tão antes de a festa ficar boa? Hoje teria sido tão mais fácil sua produção independente do que em seu tempo de vinil. Mas não, nada, nirgends mais o negão que um dia pulou da Penha para abalar Berlim, aonde quase foi antes de ir-se, e que ainda permanece como um bólido sempre na contramão, no front da resistência da canção, abrindo a força outros caminhos _ ainda que ninguém mais os percorra. Alternativa àqueloutra alternativa que um dia cansa e se oficializa, Pretobrás preferiu a cada vez sair pela tangente e fugir antes que para ele se abrisse o proscênio da glória pasteurizada da indústria cultural, persistindo “Em seu ofício ou arte taciturna”, música é aqui e agora ou não é nada, pura, ainda que imperceptível para as massas, ainda que a falta de reconhecimento doa como um câncer.

Vide http://www.pastilhascoloridas.com/2011/07/doc-itamar-assumpcao-daquele-instante.html; http://www.maissoma.com/2011/7/13/itamar-assumpcao-daquele-instante-em-diante-2011; http://cinema.uol.com.br/ultnot/2011/07/08/itamar-nao-foi-absorvido-pela-industria-como-os-mutantes-ou-tropicalistas-diz-diretor-de-daquele-instante-em-diante.jhtm; http://www.itamarassumpcao.com.br/; http://fortaleza.etc.br/o-que-fazer-geral/details/6208-cinema-daquele-instante-em-diante-documentario-itamar-assumpcao-em-um-documentario-sobre-sua-v.html; http://www.negodito.com/musica-confira-o-trailer-de-daquele-instante-em-diante-doc-sobre-itamar-assumpcao/, acessados em 22/07/2011.

- ARTUR BISPO DO ROSÁRIO

“Hoje executarei meus versos
na flauta de minhas próprias vértebras.”

(MAIACÓVSKY, Vladímir, “A Flauta-Vértebra”, in http://versofractal.blogspot.com/2011/05/flauta-vertebra-maiakovski.html,
acessado em 22/07/2011).

“Não faço isto para os homens, mas para Deus.”

(Artur Bispo do Rosário, in http://pt.shvoong.com/humanities/1768645-arthur-bispo-ros%C3%A1rio-biografia/, acessado em 22/07/2011)

“Wo Es war,
Soll Ich werden.”

(Sigmund Freud)

Toda riqueza está dentro nós, toda a arte, todo o sexo, todo o Deus, Do Todo e de Todas as Coisas, é o que mostra a mostra “Artur Bispo do Rosário – O Artista do Fio – Caixa Cultural”. Artur Bispo do Rosário, nordestino, preto, pobre, passou a maior parte da vida interno no que antes de chamava um hospital de alienados, a Colônia Juliano Moreira. Como, desprovido de todo suporte, produzir arte? Com o fio de seu, e de seu próprio uniforme de doido oficial, seu e dos outros internos, não diria companheiros de infortúnio porque além disso ser brega, loucura é que nem a morte, cada um tem a sua, e próprio dela ser uma coisa que nos torna únicos e torna a todos distantes. Dizem que o louco não vive no corpo, está fora dele, e responde mal aos sinais que os (cinco ?) sentidos lhe dão. Mas sua representação dos diversos objetos que via era ultra-realista, cafeteiras, arreios, chaleiras, sem distorções à la Bacon ou Lucien Freud, nem gordas nem magras, concretas, exatas, re-costurando objetos com fios azuis até fazer deles suas ORFA's (Objeto Recoberto por Fio Azul), como micro-maquetes de tudo o que há no mundo. A exposição suspende os ORFAs no ar por fios nada azuis, quase invisíveis: pensei nos nossos pensamentos que, quando certa vez, em meditação, profunda, na forma ensinada por George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (http://www.gurdjieff.org.br/mestre.htm, acessado em 22/07/2011), entendi que apenas passam pela mente que é como uma televisão permanentemente ligada, pela qual, porém, logo nada passa se não somos por hipnotizadas pelo que apenas passa, mas apenas pensamos no não-pensar. Parece que Bispo se impôs a missão de recriar toda as coisas existentes para que, no Dia do Juízo, desse a Nosso Senhor testemunho de Sua criação. Se pôde ou não cumprir sua promessa, nunca saberemos. Mas é fato que, ao tornar tangíveis as coisas que o pensamento representa, é como se o quisesse agarrar, ele que é tão fugidio e que invade a todos nós, e aos (mais) loucos, da forma mais terrível. (Re)Criando as coisas, Bispo se assemelhava ao Criador original, nomeando-as, inscrevendo-as no único mundo que parece real – o da matéria. Psicanálise do precário, sua arte ultrapovera foi, se não sua cachaça (ou seu Haldol), seu atarático ― homeopático ― de sua esquizofrenia estóica, seu remédio para aquilo que nos invade e que é em nosso lugar, aí mesmo onde deveríamos ser.

Vide http://guiadecidades.terra.com.br/pe/arte-e-cultura-exposicao-arthur-bispo-do-rosario-o-artista-do-fio-en-rio-de-janeiro; http://www.cultura.rj.gov.br/espaco-evento/caixa-cultural-unidade-almirante-barroso/artista-do-fio; http://saitica.blogspot.com/2010/07/artur-bispo-exposicao-no-margrs.html; http://pt.shvoong.com/humanities/1768645-arthur-bispo-ros%C3%A1rio-biografia/; http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=246328042060651; http://www.brasil247.com.br/pt/247/cultura/7147/Os-fios-azuis-do-Bispo-do-Ros%C3%A1rio.htm, acessados em 22/07/2011.

Bomb Magazine on Luke Butler

2011-06-13T11:37:00.002-03:00

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http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/5167

ART
The Body That Doesn't Belong To You Anymore
by Bhanu Kapil Jun 08, 2011
(Painting, Artists Draw)

Bhanu Kapil interviews Luke Butler, with ancillary notes on vertigo, citizenship, and Gerald Ford’s penis, in the fifth installment of BOMBlog’s reprints of [ 2nd Floor Projects ]’s editions.

Luke Butler, Leader of Men 38: Pergamon, 2008.

The Body That Doesn’t Belong To You Anymore: an interview with Luke Butler, with ancillary notes on vertigo, citizenship, and Gerald Ford’s penis.

Since 1974, when I first saw one, I’ve seen approximately eight. Well, somewhere between eight and twenty-four, including my stint as a volunteer in the geriatric ward of Mount Vernon Hospital in Northwood, Middlesex, when I was seventeen. My father wanted me to be a doctor and so, in an effort to bulk up my pre-med C.V., I spent most of late March 1985 swabbing the blackened remnants of diverse genitalia. It was the worst job in the place, but the nurses would share their chocolate digestive biscuits with me on tea break, which came at 10:30 sharp, and during which they told me stories I became addicted to, stories about anatomy, about an old person’s clothes being removed for the first time in years and what was underneath. It was horrible—though I could not, for the life of me, not listen. My heart would nearly burst and when I went back onto the ward, the two genders separated by a massive grey curtain, I felt relieved that it was me doing this work and not the nurses, who would tell a person to their face, glancing down between their legs: “Look at this. Disgusting.”

No, I think it’s best to begin with Gerald Ford’s penis, with the proviso that I was born in England to Indian parents and thus stared for a long time at Luke Butler’s “Leader of Men 37: Self Portrait”, a collage of President Nixon shaving without his underpants on, and thought that he, Nixon, was Ford, until I realized my terrible mistake. Gerald Ford is the one in the redwoods, toweling pine tar off his left foot as he stares at something on the forest floor. The trees above him accelerate into the sky. Here, in “Leader of Men 38: Wolverine Towel”, the casual public nudity of a figure no longer in existence combines with the convulsive effect of a speeding, vertical landscape to make you, automatically, cock your head.

Though I became accustomed to Gerald Ford’s dizzying genital prospect, I cannot say the same for President Nixon’s, with its side-view presentation, dark red hue, and its position in the image next to that iconic 1970s bathroom fixture, the bulky chrome tap. In considering the community of penises in Luke Butler’s archive of public servants, a sequence that includes a naked, coastal Vice President Agnew, whom I had never heard of in my life despite recently becoming a US citizen, I thought of them (the penises) as replicant, as somehow in alliance. It was at this point that I recognized the need for outside help and dialed the Immigrant Assimilation hotline. It was disconnected, and so I called Luke Butler’s cell instead.

Luke Butler Hi . . . Can you hear me? I’m in some kind of wind-tunnel. I’m trying to find a little shelter. Okay. That’s better. Hi!

Me Er . . . Is this the Gerald Ford Library?

Luke Butler Yes, it certainly is. Can I help you?

Me I hope so. Okay, I can talk in a normal voice. Luke. Luke Butler, I’ve been trying to write about the kind of figures you’re making in your art, the way so many of them are captured mid-grimace, or in a moment of imbalance or crisis, like Chekov pricking his fingers on the yellow flowers, or Captain Kirk collapsed and insentient on a pile of grey rocks. Or Gerald Ford wiping himself off with a towel while standing on one foot, and then the one where he’s slathered in shaving cream.

Luke Butler The shaving cream one? That’s President Nixon.

Me [Trying to sound as if had made casual mistake]. Right, right. Nixon. All this surplus energy, excessive nudity, men in power . . . . as if their bodies form the repository of a powerful, latent force that doesn’t go anywhere, it just loops back into the domain of the images, to make another one. Another President, or Vice President. Like these dead but living creatures that just keep coming. Like zombies.

Luke Butler Monsters . . .

Me Do you think of your work as monstrous?

Luke Butler Well, I think of a true monster as an unleashed natural force. Like a tsunami, which is an inextricable event. Did you get the image I sent you of the ocean, “The End”? I look at that and see a wave that lurches out of its natural firmament. I look at Nixon and Ford and I think what fascinated me about them is that they’ve got this tremendous ancestral power, but they’re somehow buried in our collective memory. We don’t think about them anymore. Especially Ford, who was actually, apparently, this modest, decent person. And then there’s Agnew. Agnew is Nixon’s first Vice President, who resigned over bribery/tax evasion. Nixon appoints Ford to replace him, and when Nixon steps down a year later over Watergate, Ford becomes the first and only man to hold both offices while being elected to neither. They were these average people who became emperors, these indelible figures, but at the same time are completely obscure. Like these ghosts, ghosts more than zombies I think, who have sort of collapsed inside our shared memory, and when you look at that it’s very strange. They’re so isolated . . . . like valueless, lonely, forlorn abandoned houses. And then the naked pictures . . . emphasize that loneliness. They’re like a toy that no one wants to play with anymore, and at the same time they’re this common American property. Their bodies don’t belong to them anymore.

Luke Butler, Leader of Men 37: Self Portrait, 2008.

Me And then there’s your work with outer space . . . . Captain Kirk splayed on an alien outcrop, surrounded by all that wet grey paint, which I love. I saw the photos from Jessica Silverman’s studio visit, for Whitehot magazine . . . and how your “characteristic grey background,” as she described it, drips and smears onto the wall, extending the abstract, unpopulated matter Kirk and his crew are wandering in. Define: grey paint.

Luke Butler Built-in obscurity.

Me I used to work in the KFC on Birmingham New Street. That’s separate. Back to you. Star Trek. Did I hear you say when you were a kid, you liked action figures?

Luke Butler Yes! Toys, action figures, all the tiny heroes . . . . My work really is about the people on the other side of monsters, the heroes—I both venerate them and see through their imperviousness, trying to make them at least partly small, like me!

Me Okay, then I’m still thinking again about the way you collate these contracted, yet explicit male bodies. The way you put the penis that is not their penis but is nevertheless a penis on the body. Luke Butler, what is the definition of a penis?

Luke Butler [Laughing in wind tunnel, but because of the wind it’s a completely supernatural sound, all crackled and echoey]. A penis has a blunt, natural, reproductive presence in our lives. And at the same time it’s a monster, it’s incredibly unwelcome. There is no more common or ordinary yet despised figure than the penis. As a male in this world, you’re surrounded by men and so, there are all these penises but you never see them. You don’t see them anywhere . . . and there’s so much loneliness connected to that. I’m fascinated by the illogical convention of the penis—this symbol of American sexuality—and yet, it’s such an unwanted thing. There’s no room for the image of the penis in our world. It’s like, as a male, “What am I supposed to be doing with this?” You can’t really put it on display. The only way your sexuality is safe is if it’s never touched. So, because, as an artist, I want divergence, it’s really funny and interesting to me, to see these rigid, masculine, static figures—these heroes—completely, naturally naked. It’s a way, also, of claiming and manipulating this history, which high school students don’t even know about, they can’t even recognize Nixon’s face . . .

Me That’s terrible—

Luke Butler And at the same time, there’s this unpredictable erection.

Me All this intensity. But for what? I’m looking at “Leaders of Men 37: Batman and Robin” and, specifically, I’m curious about Spiro Agnew’s erection. It’s more dominant than Nixon’s. There’s something about it that implies pleasure, coupling, though, like all the other leaders, Agnew’s face is totally blank. Why is his face blank?

Luke Butler Because he’s a ghost. In a way, these men really are like giants, or monsters, these ultra-masculine figures who were once so powerful and are now all but forgotten. It’s amazing to me how little anyone talks or thinks about them (in the Bush era it may be very comforting to imagine a day when he is no longer thought of). But they are like monsters to me in that they sit in our collective histories doing nothing, and to look back and find them and their stories can be very, very surprising. Ford especially, he has a very low profile, nobody but me ever talks about him. And they are naked—male nudity is still rather shocking in this culture, monstrous even—the penis is a terrible dragon! So why not have the old presidents lead us to it?

Luke Butler, Chekhov, 2008.

At this point in our conversation, the wind picked up and we said goodbye. If you are reading this, perhaps you are looking at Luke Butler’s collages, or did, earlier in the evening, or yesterday. Perhaps you, too, have become obsessed with Gerald Ford and notice that people mention him in conversation more frequently and randomly than before you encountered Luke Butler’s art. For example, I was recently sorting muddy scallions into cardboard boxes at Cresset Community Farm, a biodynamic farming cooperative on the high plains of Colorado. There could not be a simpler place, more gelled with brownish-silver clods of dirt. There, as I was passing the bundles of onions to a woman who had come up from Denver to barter physical labor for vegetables, I said, being a polite person originally from the United Kingdom: “So, that’s a long drive. Do you listen to books on tape in your car?” She said: “How did you guess?” And proceeded to narrate the contents of a book she was currently listening to, about the history of the CIA. She said: “But Gerald Ford . . . he wasn’t too bad, actually. He wasn’t too involved in all that stuff. He wasn’t like those other nasty men.” Me: “Do you think Gerald Ford was sexy?” Woman from Denver: “Oh my word. I turned nineteen the first year he was President. I thought he was so handsome.”

Ancillary Notes

1. In 1985, I met Arthur Scargill in a café in Euston. It was a working man’s café, totally rough, and me and Ann John, en route to our interviews at The Royal London Hospital, had ducked in for a runny egg breakfast with its accompaniment of chips and beans, which you do not get in the more vendor-based establishments north of the river. “Was that who I think it was?” “Yeah.” “Oh my god….” “I’m going back in.” “No!” “Yes.” What must Mr. Scargill, miner, activist, political leader, have thought of the Indian kid in a green blazer and knee-high grey socks telling him she “really, really” admired his work? On a napkin, he scrawled: “Working together towards a better future! Yours, Arthur. January 6th, 1985.” A napkin I still possess.

2. A ghost mutates through intensity, gathering enough energy to touch you through your thin blouse, or your leggings, or your scarf. A ghost damages the triptych of ancestors composed of descending, passive, and synthetic scraps. But what if the ghost is empty because it’s making a space for you? Vertigo is a symptom of profound attraction. An excess of desire. Once, after a long shift at KFC, during which we ran out of baked beans and the manager sent me across the Birmingham New Street plaza with a twenty pound note, to Marks and Spencer, for a family-size tin, I didn’t go back to the flat in Selby where my boyfriend lived. I went to the cinema in my red and white striped shirt and watched Au Revoir Les Enfants. A Londoner, I blinked in the rainy quiet darkness that had fallen by the time I left. I ducked into a bright room. There, I was picked up by a Muslim man with a thick Yorkshire accent, who bought me a Malibu and orange. I was conscious of having wasted my entire summer on a boyfriend. My parents thought I was interning as a trainee journalist on a regional broadsheet. I’d told the KFC manager my mother was dying, and that I had to take every weekend off to be with her in the hospital. On Saturday mornings, my boyfriend would drive us to the sea in his refurbished Nash Metropolitan. Once, he drove us to France. I drank coffee on the ferry, staring into the blazing pink sun while he slept, his head on my lap. But that night, a Thursday night, I ended up in a graveyard with the man from the bar, and his friend, who had arrived as we were leaving. A ghost is a duplicate, a tall and handsome man who contracts then dilates so swiftly, you can’t refuse. In fact, you don’t say a word when a ghost, when two ghosts, lead you by your upper arm into an empty place, verdant with cypress and elm.

3. I want the grey paint extending to the wall in writing. Why? I can’t say why. It filled me with such desire to see the photograph of the studio in the Whitehot article. A wet wall incarnates an image. The matter a figure is made of is scraped from an undocumented environment. That wet page is a silver page, and perhaps this is why I am always elated when I visit San Francisco. It is dark too, but with red and yellow flowers in the writer’s garden. Chrome yellow, a merged color, and I want that too. Inflorescence. I write because I cannot paint. I write with the painter in the pink afternoon, the red day, and sometimes at night, true night, evacuating future books and writing new ones, in which countries and bodies are visible.

Luke Butler, THE END #23, 2007.

About [2nd floor projects]:

Since establishing [ 2nd floor projects ] in San Francisco in 2007, I have featured twenty writers in the exhibitions, with six writers forthcoming in 2011. My programming includes commissions to writers throughout the country to produce an edition: essays, personal narratives, interviews, poetry, or mixed-genre pieces in the form of handcrafted broadsheets or chapbooks. From early on in my art practice, I have been interested in trespassing disciplines. These visual, theoretical, and narrative crossings perhaps address an interstitial space of engagement with the artists’ works from the writer’s point of departure. A distal approach rather than the traditional essay model, such as an exhibition catalogue. For each exhibition, I design and print in-house a limited run of 100 on archival papers. The writers are also invited to give a reading during the run of the exhibition, or to send a recording if they are not in the area. [ 2nd floor projects ] participated in the NY Art Book Fair in 2009 and 2010. BOMBlog will be re-publishing these pieces regularly over the next several months.

—Margaret Tedesco, Director

Bhanu Kapil is a British-Indian writer who lives in Colorado, where she teaches at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, as well as Goddard College. Her full-length collections are: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), and humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009). A new prose work, Schizophrene, is coming out this Spring from Nightboat Books.

Gil Scott-Heron RIP bro... All my loving...

2011-05-31T10:06:00.000-03:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvHNmx41fo0&feature=autoplay&list=PL75CDE29E8CAF7B24&index=13&playnext=8

Western Media Fraud in the Middle East

2011-05-30T08:00:00.001-03:00

Western media fraud in the Middle East

Too many journalists report official narratives of the powerful, missing the stories of working class people.

Nir Rosen Last Modified: 18 May 2011 17:44

Most Western reporters covering the war in Iraq do not speak Arabic, so they are dependent on translators and various officials and getting opinions average people becomes challenging

Too often, you consumers of mainstream media are victims of a fraud. You think you can trust the articles you read - why wouldn't you? You think you can sift through the ideological bias and just get the facts. But you don't know the ingredients that go into the product you buy. It is important to understand how knowledge about current events in the Middle East is produced before relying on it. Even when there are no apparent ideological biases, such as those one often sees when it comes to reporting about Israel, there are fundamental problems at the epistemological and methodological level. These create distortions, falsehoods and justify the narrative of those with power.

In discussing the manners in which the Western intelligentsia and media depict the Middle East, the French intellectual and scholar Francois Burgat complained that two main types of intellectuals tasked with explaining the "other" to Westerners dominate. Firstly, there is what he and Bourdieu, another philosopher, describe as the "negative intellectual" who aligns his beliefs and priorities with those of the state, and centres his perspective on serving the interests of power and gaining proximity to it. And secondly, there is what Burgat terms as "the facade intellectual", whose role in society is to confirm Western audiences with their already-held notions, beliefs, preconceptions, and racisms regarding the "other". Journalists writing for the mainstream media, as well as their local interlocutors, often fall into both categories.

A vast literature exists on the impossibility of journalism in its classic, liberal sense with all the familiar tropes on objectivity, neutrality, and "transmitting reality". However, and perhaps out of a lack of an alternative source of legitimation, major mainstream media outlets in the West continue to grasp to these notions with ever more insistence. The Middle East is an exceptionally suitable place for the Western media to learn about itself and its future, because it is the scene where all pretentions of objectivity, neutrality towards power, and critical engagement have faltered spectacularly.

Framing the 'other'

Journalists are the archetype of ideological tools who create culture and produce knowledge. Their function is to represent a class and perpetuate the dominant ideology instead of building a counter hegemonic and revolutionary ideology, or narrative, in this case. They are the organic intellectuals of the ruling class. Instead of being the voice of the people or the working class, journalists are too often the functional tools for a bourgeois ruling class. They produce and disseminate culture and meaning for the system and reproduce its values, allowing it to hegemonise the field of culture and since journalism today has a specific political economy, they are all products of the hegemonic discourse and the moneyed class.

The working class has no networks, that applies too to Hollywood and television entertainment and series; it is all the same intellectuals producing them. Even journalists with pretentions of being serious usually only serve elites and ignore social movements. Journalism tends to be state centric, focusing on elections, institutions, formal politics and overlooking politics of contention, informal politics, social movements.

Those with reputations as brave war reporters who hop around the world, parachuting into conflicts from Yemen to Afghanistan, typically only confirm Americans' views of the world. Journalism simplifies, which means it de-historicises. Journalism in the Middle East is too often a violent act of representation. Western journalists take reality and amputate it, contort it, and fit it into a predetermined discourse or taxonomy.

The American media always want to fit events in the region into an American narrative. The recent assassination of Osama bin Laden was greeted with a collective shrug of the shoulder in the Middle East, where he had always been irrelevant, but for Americans and hence for the American media it was a historic and defining moment which changed everything. Too often contact with the West has defined events in the Middle East, but the so-called Arab Spring with its revolutions and upheavals evokes anxiety among white Americans. They are unsettled with the autogenetic liberation of brown people. However, the Arab Spring may represent a revolutionary transformation of the Arab world, a massive blow to Islamist politics and the renaissance of secular and leftist Arab nationalist politics.

But the American media has been obsessed with Islamists, looking for them behind every demonstration, and the uprisings have been often treated as if they were something threatening. And all too often, it just comes down to "what does this mean for Israel's security?" The aspirations of hundreds of millions of freedom-seeking Arabs are subordinated to the security concerns of five million Jews who colonised Palestine.

There is a strong element of chauvinism and racism behind the reporting. Like American soldiers, American journalists like to use the occasional local word to show they have unlocked the mysteries of the culture. 'Wasta' is one such word. One American bureau chief in Iraq told me that Muqtada al-Sadr had a lot of wasta now so he could prevent a long American presence. 'Inshallah' is another such word. And in Afghanistan it's 'pushtunwali', the secret to understanding Afghans. Islam is also treated like a code that can be unlocked, and then locals can be understood as if they are programmed only through Islam.

Arab culture and Islam are spoken of the way race was once spoken of in India and Africa, and it is difficult to portray Arabs and Muslims as the good guys unless they are "like us" as in Google executives and other elites who speak English, dress trendy and use Facebook. So they are made to represent the revolutions while the poor, the workers, the subalterns, the majority who don't even have internet access let alone twitter accounts, are ignored. And in order to make the revolutions in Tunisia and especially Egypt seem non-threatening, the nonviolent tactics are emphasised while the many acts of violent resistance to regime oppression are completely ignored. This is not just the journalists' fault. It is driven by American discourse which drives the editors back in New York and Washington.

I've spent most of the last eight years working in Iraq, and also in Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen and other countries in the Muslim world. So all my work has taken place in the shadow of the war on terror and has in fact been thanks to this war, even if I've laboured to disprove the underlying premises of this war. In a way my work has still served to support the narrative. I once asked my editor at The New York Times Magazine if I could write about a subject outside the Muslim world. He said even if I was fluent in Spanish and an expert on Latin America, I wouldn't be published if it wasn't about jihad.

Seclusion and narrow narratives

It is important to understand the environment journalists inhabit, the interlocutors, translators and fixers they rely on to filter and mediate for them and the nature in which they collect information, accounts and interviews. One of the popular myths about reporting in Iraq is that journalists stayed in the Green Zone, the walled off fortress neighbourhood that housed the American occupiers and now houses the Iraqi government along with some foreign embassies. This is not true. Throughout the occupation, almost no journalists actually inhabited the Green Zone. They stayed in green zones of their own creation, whether secure compounds or intellectual green zones, creating their own walls. The first green zone for journalists was the fortress around the Sheraton and Palestine hotels in Baghdad, which was initially guarded by American soldiers and later by Iraqi security guards. The New York Times soon constructed its own immense fortress, with guard dogs, guard towers, security guards, immense walls, vehicle searches - so too did the BBC, Associated Press, and others, then there were was the Hamra hotel compound where many bureaus moved until it was damaged in an explosion in 2010. CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera English had their own green zone, though freelancers like myself could rent rooms there. And there is one last green zone which is a large neighbourhood protected by Kurdish peshmerga, where middle class Iraqis and some news bureaus live.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with staying in a secure compound. Foreigners are often targeted in conflict zones and authoritarian countries. You want to go to sleep at night without wondering whether men will kick down your door and drag you away, or whether you should go to sleep with your clothes on so that if a car bomb hits you wont be caught sleeping naked under a pile of rubble. You want to eat decent food and have running water, constant electricity, internet access, conversations with colleagues. A journalist doesn't have to live like an impoverished local. But the less local life you experience, the less you can do your job, and this is what readers need to understand. The average person anywhere in the world goes to work and comes back home. He knows little about people outside his social class, ethnic group, neighbourhood or city. As a journalist, you are making judgements on an entire country and interpreting it for others, but you don't know the country because you don't really live in it. You spend 20 hours a day in seclusion from the country. You have no basis for judgement because to you, Iraq is out there, the red zone, and the pace of filing can make this even harder.

Most mainstream journalists have since 2004 treated reporting in Iraq like a military operation: going out on limited missions with a lot of planning, an armoured car, a chase car for backup, in and out, do the interview and come back home to their own green zone. Or they would more often just make the trip to the actual Green Zone, where officials are easy to meet and interview, where you can enjoy a drink, socialise with diplomats and feel macho because you live in the red zone. But in their artificial green zone, they are still sheltered from life - from Iraqis and from violence.

They did not just hang out, sit in restaurants, in mosques and husseiniyas, in people's homes, walk through slums, shop in local markets, walk around at night, sit in juice shops, sleep in normal people's homes, visit villages, farms, and experience Iraq like an Iraqi, or as close as possible. This means they have no idea what life is like at night, what life is like in rural areas, what social trends are important, what songs are popular, what jokes are being told, what arguments take place on the street, how comfortable people feel, or what sorts of Iraqis go to bars at night. Hanging out is key. You just observe, letting events and people determine your reporting. They also did not investigate, pursue spontaneous leads, develop a network of trusted contacts and sources. Dwindling resources and interest meant bureaus had to shut down or reduce staff, and only occasionally parachute a journalist in to interview a few officials and go back home.

Finessing the social fabric

And since they don't know Arabic, they literally cannot read the writing on the wall - the graffiti on the wall -whether it is for the mujahedin, for Muqtada Sadr, or for the football teams of Madrid or Barcelona. It means that if they talk to one man, the translator only tells them what he said and not what everybody around him was saying, they don't hear the Sadrist songs supporting the Shia of Bahrain, or hear the taxi driver complaining about how things were better under Saddam, or discussing the attacks he saw in the morning, or the soldiers joking at a checkpoint, or the shopkeeper cursing the soldiers. In fact they don't even take taxis or buses, so they miss a key opportunity to interact naturally with people. It means they can't just relax in people's homes and hear families discuss their concerns. They are never able to develop what Germans call fingerspitzengefuhl - that finger tip feeling, an intuitive sense of what is happening, what the trends and sentiments are, which one can only get by running one's own fingers through the social fabric.

A student of the Arab world once commented that any self-appointed terrorism expert must first pass the Um Kulthum test - meaning, has he heard of Um Kulthum, the iconic Egyptian diva of Arab nationalism whose music and lyrics still resonate throughout the Middle East? If they hadn't heard of her, then they obviously were not familiar with Arab culture. In Iraq an equivalent might be the Hawasim test. Saddam called the 1991 war on Iraq "Um al-Maarik", or the mother of all battles. And he called the 2003 war on Iraq "Um al-Hawasim", or the mother of all decisive moments. Soon, the looting that followed the invasion was called Hawasim by Iraqis, and the word became a common phrase, applied to cheap markets, to stolen goods, to cheap products. If you drive your car recklessly like you don't care about it, another driver might shout at you, "what, is it hawasim?" If you don't make an effort to familiarise yourself with these cultural phenomena, then just go back home.

Relying on a translator means you can only talk to one person at a time and you miss all the background noise. It means you have to depend on somebody from a certain social class, or sect, or political position, to filter and mediate the country for you. Maybe they are Sunni and have limited contacts outside their community. Maybe they are a Christian from east Beirut and know little about the Shia of south Lebanon or the Sunnis of the north. Maybe they're urban and disdainful of those who are rural. In Iraq, maybe they are a middle class Shia from Baghdad or a former doctor or engineer who looks down upon the poor urban class who make up the Sadrists. And so in May 2003, when I was the first American journalist to interview Muqtada Sadr, my bureau chief at Time magazine was angry at me for wasting my time and sending it on to the editors in New York without asking him, because Muqtada was unimportant, lacking credentials. But in Iraq, social movements, street movements, militias, those with power on the ground, have been much more important than those in the establishment or politicians in the green zone, and it is events in the red zone which have shaped things.

You don't understand a country by going on preplanned missions; you learn about it when unplanned things happen, when you visit a friend's neighbourhood for fun and other neighbours come over. You learn about it by driving around in a normal car, not an armoured one with tinted windows. That's when Iraqi soldiers and police ask you to hitch a ride and take them towards their home. A few months ago, soldiers at a checkpoint outside Ramadi asked me to give one of their colleagues a ride to Baghdad. He was from Basra. In addition to the conversation we struck up, what was most revealing was that a soldier outside Ramadi felt safe enough to ask a stranger for a ride, whereas before he would not have even carried his ID on him, and that a stranger agreed to take a member of the security forces. I've since given rides to other Iraqi soldiers and policemen.

Class politics

Over the last year, there have been a slew of articles about whether the Iraqi security forces are ready to handle security for themselves, but these have all been based on the statements of American or Iraqi officials. Journalists have not talked to Iraqi lieutenants, or colonels, or sergeants, they have not cultivated these sources or just befriended them, met them for drinks when they were on leave, sat with them in their homes with their families.

So the views of the Iraqi security forces, the Iraqi soldiers and policemen who man checkpoints and go on raids, are not written about. Meeting with them also lets you understand the degree to which sectarianism has been reduced in the security forces, while corruption and abuses such as torture and extra judicial killings remain a problem. And just travelling around the country since 2009 would reveal that yes, Iraqi security forces can maintain the current level of security (or insecurity) because they have been doing it since then, manning checkpoints in the most remote villages, cultivating their own intelligence sources, and basically occupying Iraq. The degree to which Iraq remains heavily militarised has not been sufficiently conveyed, but since 2009 Iraqi security forces have been occupying Iraq, and the American presence has been largely irrelevant from a daily security point of view.

And then there are the little Abu Ghraibs. The big scandals like Abu Ghraib, or the "Kill Team" in Afghanistan, eventually make their way into the media where they can be dismissed as bad apples and exceptions, and the general oppression of the occupations can be ignored. But an occupation is a systematic and constant imposition of violence on an entire country. It's 24 hours of arresting, beating, killing, humiliating and terrorising, and unless you have experienced it, it's impossible to describe except by trying to list them until the reader gets numb. I was only embedded three times over eight years - twice in Iraq for ten days each, and once in Afghanistan for three weeks.

My first embed in Iraq was in October 2003, six months after I first arrived. I was in the Anbar province. I saw soldiers arresting hundreds of men, rounding up entire villages, all the so-called military aged men, hoping somebody would know something. I saw children screaming for their daddies while they watched them bloody and beaten and terrified, while soldiers laughed or smoked or high-fived or chewed tobacco and spit on the lawn, as lives were being destroyed. I know one of the men I saw arrested died from torture, and countless others ended up in Abu Ghraib. I saw old men pushed down on the ground violently. I saw innocent men beaten, arrested, mocked and humiliated. These are the little Abu Ghraibs that come with any occupation, even if it's the Swedish girl scouts occupying a country.

Many journalists spent their entire careers embedded, months or even years, so multiply what I saw by hundreds, by thousands and tens of thousands of terrorised traumatised families, beatings, killings, children who lost their fathers and wet their beds every night, women who could not provide for their families, innocent people shot at checkpoints. Then there are the daily Abu Ghraibs you endure when you live in an occupied country, having to navigate a maze of immense concrete walls, of barbed wire, waiting at checkpoints, waiting for convoys to go by, waiting for military operations to end, waiting for the curfew to end, military vehicles running you off the road, fifty calibre machine guns pointed at you, M16s pointed at you, pistols pointed at you, large foreign soldiers shouting at you and ordering you around. Or maybe in Afghanistan, the military convoy runs over a water canal destroying the water supply to a village of 30 families who now have no way to live, or they arrest an innocent Afghan because he has Taliban music on his cell phone - like many Afghans do - and now he must make his way through the Afghan prison system.

But if you are white and identify with white American soldiers, then you ignore these things, they just don't occur to you. And so they never occur to your readers. Likewise you never think of how your average Yemeni or Egyptian or Iraqi deals with their own security forces on a daily basis because you focus on the elite level of politics and security, and your cars don't get stopped at checkpoints because you have the right badges. You don't get detained by the police because you have the right badge. Until you get beaten up by regime thugs like Anderson Cooper, then you can become a hysterical opponent of Mubarak and crusader for justice. Television reporting is overprotective of the celebrity correspondent - they barely go out, they just embed -and they do their live shots on the street inside their safe compounds, while making the story more about the celebrity correspondent rather than the story. Then they show the "back story" about the journalist and his work rather than the story.

Robert Kaplan, a terrible writer and great supporter of imperialism, said one smart thing by accident when he criticised journalists for not being able to relate to American soldiers, because journalists represented an elite while soldiers come from rural areas, went to public schools, and come from the working class (we're not supposed to use that word because everybody in America thinks they're middle class). But equally they cannot relate easily to the working classes anywhere, and so they gravitate to the elites. Focusing on elites and officials is a problem in general, not just in Middle East coverage. An American official visiting the region warrants articles about the region, but it is not studied empirically in its own context. People in power lie, whether they are a general, a president or a militia commander. This is the first rule. But at best, journalists act as if only brown people in power lie, and so they rely on the official statements of white people, whether they are military officers or diplomats, as if they should be trusted. The latest example is the bin Laden killing, when most mainstream journalists lazily relied on US government "feeds", and they were literally fed an official version that kept on changing, but this is business as usual.

The revolution must be televised

One reason for the failure of journalists to leave their green zones may be a combination of laziness and aversion to discomfort. But in Iraq, Afghanistan, other developing countries and areas of conflict in some countries, you have to leave your comfort zone. You might prefer an English-speaking whiskey-drinking politician over six hours of bouncing along dirt roads in the heat and dust in order to sit on the floor and eat dirty food and drink dirty water and know you're going to get sick tomorrow, but the road to truth involves a certain amount of diarrhoea.

When there are no physical green zones, journalists will create them, as in Lebanon where they inhabit the green zones of Hamra, Gumayzeh, or Monot, which shelters journalists from the rest of the country, giving them just enough of the exotic so they can feel as if they live in the Orient, without having to visit Tripoli, Akkar, the Beqa, or the majority of Beirut or Lebanon where the poor live. Like other countries, Lebanon has a ready local fixer and translator mafia who can determine the price, and allow a journalist who parachutes in to meet a representative of all the political factions, drink wine with Walid Jumblat and look at his collection of unopened books (including one I wrote) and unread copies of the New York Review of Books while never having to walk through a Palestinian refugee camp, or Tariq al Jadida in Beirut or Bab al Tabaneh in Tripoli and see how most people live and what most people care about.

A green zone can be the capital city or a neighbourhood or a focus only on officials, as long as it shields you from the red zone of reality, or poverty, of class conflict, of challenges to your ideology or comfort. In Egypt, even before the revolution, Cairo got most of the media's attention, but during the revolution journalists barely ventured outside Tahrir Square. Egypt is 86 million people - it's not just Tahrir, it's not just Cairo or Alexandria. Port Said and Suez were barely covered, even though Suez was such a key spark in the revolution. In Libya at first everything was new and everybody was an explorer and adventurer, but now the self-appointed opposition leadership is trying to manage the message so you can be lazy and just refer to their statements. Yemen was totally neglected, but when people came, it was almost always just to Sanaa. And Yemen's capital has its own green zone in the Movenpic hotel, situated safely outside the city. Now Yemen is portrayed as if it were two rival camps demonstrating in Sanaa, even though the uprisings started long before (and were much more violent) in Taez, Aden, Saada and elsewhere. Yemen is viewed mostly through prism of the war on terror, through the American government's prism, rather than the needs and views of the people.

But if you spend any time with the demonstrators, you realise how unimportant al-Qaeda and its ideology are in Yemen, so that they don't even deserve an article. And you would do well to remember that even though the Yemeni franchise of al-Qaeda is portrayed as America's greatest threat, AQAP's record is little more than a failed underwear bomber and a failed printer cartridge bomb.

American reporting is problematic throughout the third world, but because the American military/industrial/financial/academic/media complex is so directly implicated in the Middle East, the consequences of such bad reporting are more significant. Journalists end up serving as propagandists justify the killing of innocent people instead of a voice for those innocent people.

There are many brave and dedicated journalists working in the Middle East whose work deserves attention and praise. Some even work for the mainstream media. Too often their independent voices are drowned out by the mass of writers who justify power instead of opposing it. Our job should not be about speaking truth to power. Those in power know the truth, they just don't care. It's about speaking truth to the people, to those not in power, in order to empower them.

This article is based on a speech given at a conference sponsored by Jadaliyya on teaching the Middle East at George Mason University.

Nir Rosen is an American journalist who writes on current and international affairs. He has contributed to The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, among others. His latest book is Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World.

Western Media Fraud in the Middle East

2011-05-30T08:00:00.000-03:00

Para Tudo

2011-02-25T10:46:00.001-03:00

Play that Funky Bristol Sound...

2011-02-06T08:28:00.001-02:00

Interview with Guido (Guy Middleton)
Interview from De:Bug Musik of Guido, 21 year old dubstep master:

Your album has been released for nearly a month now. Are you happy with the feedback so far? Anything that surprised you?
Yes it has been astonishing the amount of people from different places like it, I am very happy. It surprised me that Mad Sax has received perhaps more attention than the others.
The first time you heard Garage and Grime, what was intriguing about it for you?Was it only the music or was there something else that caught your attention?
Simply I just liked the music. There was nothing overly special about it for me just something i listened to a bit whilst growing up.

What came easy for you when you started making music and what did you struggle with?
I started learning the different software from an early age, Fruity Loops, Reason and Cubase. I seemed to have lots of ideas when I first started but looking back not all of them were that great haha. The only thing I struggled with was learning how to express myself musically something which I still do now but you get better at doing along way.

Before “Anidea” you had only released two eps. There are not many young producers who face the challenge to produce an album so fast (especially not within dance music, where dj-tools still reign supreme). How did “Anidea” and the idea to do it come about?
Pretty simply, I was asked by Peverelist if I was up for doing an LP for his label. Seeing as I had lots of tunes and was working on more we decided to have an aim to put it out. It wasn’t produced that quickly it has grown over a year or so.

It seems to me that melody is at the core of your tracks rather than rhythm or bass. Where does this fascination with hooks and melodies rather than breakbeat science come from?
Melody and the harmonies created from this for me is the most important aspect of making music. I tend to have that in mind most when making music but everything contributes as well which means rhythm can be just as important. I tend to feel most inspired by melodic sounds therefore it feels right to approach making music from that angle also.

In another interview you talked about your love of the music of computer games like Fnal Fantasy. How big is the influence of those soundtracks in your music? When you started making music at the age of 14, what place did you have have in mind for your music to be played at – a club or a game? And did this change over the years?
I did not think once about what place the music should fit in. I just made music because it was something I enjoyed doing a lot. The computer game music I listened to resonates with so many different feelings growing up, that’s why I have mentioned it. In particular the Final Fantasy series was just what I played as well as other games like Sonic, Mario etc.

A lot of the so-called “Bristol Sound” had a dusty, kinda dark and gritty tone to it. Your sound is synth drenched and rich in colorful melodies. Is Bristol’s musical history from the soundsystem culture to Drum and Bass and Trip Hop something that you can relate to or is it just one influence under many others?
It’s nice being from a city with such a great musical history and it has been inspiring at times. But sometimes I get confused about the saying “Bristol Sound” I just see that different artists that come from here have all had there own sound and have been described to be apart of a whole Bristol Sound which is cool if that’s how people want to interpret it.

Egypt - Chris Kline

2011-02-06T08:24:00.001-02:00

Saladin Awake: Revolutionary change in the Middle East

Feb 5th, 2011 | By Chris Kline | Category: Op-ed, Op-ed Featured

The late Anwar Sadat once stated that “you are not a realist unless you believe in miracles.” The spark of populist uprising against the forces of an autocratic status quo ignited in Tunis that soon engulfed Algiers now burning brightly in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as never before in the nearly thirty years of Hosni Mubarak’s draconian rule seems nothing less than a miracle, however precarious and fraught with danger, Egypt’s people’s revolution in the making remains. And if it is a stark awakening for every authoritarian regime still entrenched in rule by decree, cronyism, cleptocracy and brutality in the whole of the Middle East, North Africa and the larger Muslim world, it should come as a warning to dictatorships everywhere. A seemingly cowed and fearful population armed with little more than its courage, anger and hope for democratic change inexorably reaches a breaking point when it can no longer withstand misrule and misery that has lasted generations. The police state becomes meaningless when an entire nation does not run from its guns and torturers. The miracle IS reality in the Sahara and Egypt today and it already is echoed albeit in milder form in Yemen and Jordan. Perhaps it will also reach Teheran in time. The Iranian people’s stunted leap to revolution last year has been driven underground, but to judge it will never reawaken is folly, especially now.

This cataclysmic change is as much a shrill alarm bell for Western foreign policy that business as usual in the region is finished forever. Western cultural myopia and the arrogance of might that has traded alliances with repressive regimes, for an ephemeral, corroded stability in the Middle East cannot endure. The US which has long inherited the mantle of the now bygone British and French colonial powers in the region, must now read the slogans on the Arab street and grasp their meaning clearly. Democracy, free societies, a more even handed chance at prosperity and the transparent rule of law, are not gifts Washington can selectively hand out or withhold as it pleases, nor can it impose them by force. Arab societies will be themselves, on their terms, not what outsiders wish or force them to be. As demonstrators and Mubarak’s praetorian guards are alike silent to outside pressure or influence as Egypt’s showdown ensues, the White House, its allies at Number 10 Downing Street and the Elysee Palace have seldom seemed quite as superfluous and powerless as actors in the Middle East. That Barack Obama or David Cameron fail to find any words that could offer solace, wisdom or even a clear signal to the Egyptian people seems to underscore this impotence.

The Middle East like Africa, seen through a Western prism is often presented as an inherently dysfunctional powder keg, readily given to fanaticism and fierce hatreds. The sub text in bipolar contrast is the presumed calm, logical rationality of the West. The volatility of the Middle East and the larger Muslim world is not make believe but we seldom look at the complete picture of causality for the turbulence that reigns. We choose not to look in the mirror too closely. It’s always them, not us who made the mess, somehow. And it still beggars credulity how former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who so fervently championed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, could serve as the EU’s Middle East peace envoy.

If we consider the strident hostility of Ahmadinejad’s Iran towards the West, do we remember the instrumental role Anglo-American skullduggery played in toppling Mossadeq and installing the Shah? Would Israelis, who do face a genuine existentialist threat from Iran, acknowledge that the Mossad was a key player in training the Savak, the dreaded secret police of the Peacock throne? Could we then regard Western complicity as Shah Pahlevi’s principal sponsor as bearing any responsibility for the backlash against the doomed Emperor’s repression that birthed, the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Khomeni, and the intransigent Iranian theocracy that rules today with a Holocaust denier as President? The archive of modern Middle Eastern history is full of the ghosts of bad Western choices.

The Sykes-Picot treaty at the end of the First World War neatly divided the choice morsels of the fallen Ottoman Empire between the British and French empires, shaping much of the map that comprises the contemporary Middle East. Since it bears on the disastrous Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 it is worth revisiting a nascent British mandated Iraq. The monarch the British installed had little to no claim over his subjects. The proxy power structures the British imposed were defined by a complete disregard for traditional tribal, ethnic, religious and geographical fault lines. They empowered a Sunni minority over a Shia majority and thus the seeds for both the blueprint of Saddam Hussein’s savage regime and future sectarian conflict that still grips Iraq were sown. Worth noting that it was the British Empire that first used poison gas to subjugate rebellion among restive Kurds in the 1920’s. Winston Churchill himself then Colonial Secretary judging aerial chemical warfare a cost effective and expedient method of counter-insurgency. But when Saddam Hussein notoriously unleashed gas on Hallabja in 1988, viscerally we understood such bestial conduct as antithetical to our own.

But then the West has difficulty even now looking at its more recent mistakes unequivocally. Former US President George W. Bush and Tony Blair are both unrepentant and morally secure in having devised the invasion of Iraq, a conflict fought in the name of stopping entirely illusory weapons of mass destruction and avenging a 9/11 conspiracy and linkage to Al Qaeda that proved as fictitious. So some 5000 Allied dead later, hundreds of thousands of mostly civilian Iraqi dead with several hundred still dying violently each month and untold billions spent, Al Qaeda is now a firm presence in Iraq. Moreover a demagogue theocrat like Moqtada al Sadr is a key player in Iraqi politics and the future or even remote possibility of a unified and cohesive Iraq that isn’t blood soaked is as unpredictable as the desert winds.

While the Iraqi quagmire deepened two pivotal fronts in the quest for stability in the Middle East and security in ever contentious South Asia, foundered from sheer neglect: the Palestinian Israeli Peace Process which no longer merits the name and the war in Afghanistan where all hangs in the balance by a frayed thread despite a massive influx of US and NATO troops. The Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan seems as implacable and powerful as ever and the Palestinian Territories are a house divided the Palestinian Authority virtually powerless, Hamas ruling Gaza and most Palestinians still in abject poverty and seething with anger.

Which new direction then can Western policy take to regain relevance and coherence, build real friendships and yield a positive impact in the Middle East to better serve its own strategic interests and the aspirations of the region? It can throw out the previous handbook on diplomacy and power politics as utterly obsolete and counter-productive and start from scratch. It could stop ignoring the legacy and forces of history, acknowledge its own mistakes and for a change listen to the pulse of the people, now given an historic opportunity to do so. Re-examining the West’s unholy alliance with Wahabbi Saudi Arabia, the leading financier for radical Islamic terror groups and extremist indoctrination worldwide would be helpful. It is somehow fitting that the Saudi Monarchy, one of the last absolute kingdoms on earth, has been the only voice in the Middle East to offer moral support to Mubarak. The necessary change is at its core an attitudinal one and the West would do well to shed its growing Islamophobia, its equating of Islamic extremism with the whole of Islam, when the butcher’s bill for radical Islam’s atrocities is predominantly borne by Muslim suffering not Westerners.

Islam is not a monolith; it has never been and never will be, it is a universe as diverse as Christianity, ideologically, spiritually, politically, culturally. The societies of the Middle East must be recognized for their own uniqueness. Egypt, Algeria and Iran, have thriving, well educated, large, liberal thinking, middle classes. French President Nikolas Sarkozy recently stated that the only choice lay in dictatorship or the Taliban. Surely, the Egyptians on the street clamoring for democratic change, seek a third path. In the larger Muslim realm Indonesia and Turkey remain in the secular fold and so too, there is no indication in Egypt that because the Muslim Brotherhood has rallied in open defiance to the ancien regime that an Islamist revolution is in the making. On the contrary, all the signposts point to the Egyptian people seeking a far broader, tolerant and inclusive society to be born.

Israel does have cause to be concerned as it awaits the ultimate outcome of the Egyptian debacle, fearing its long peace with Egypt may evaporate. It is also understandably nervous that Hezbollah has continued its march to dominance in Lebanese politics and essentially called the tune that formed the current Lebanese government. It is as unfortunate that the recent Wikileaks on Israeli Palestinian negotiations reveal an Israel seemingly incapable of granting a pathway to peace when the Palestinian Authority was offering territorial concessions of such magnitude, other Palestinians deem them traitorous. Where there is room for less fear perhaps is that Hezbollah, regardless of its Iranian and Syrian patrons, will likely look to consolidate its political position, continue building its prestige internally and not seek to precipitate another war, especially when it is celebrated as the victor of the last showdown with Israel among its followers. And Egyptians may not be enamored of the Israelis but with so much internal reform sorely needed, it is doubtful either the population at large or the armed forces would countenance military adventurism. And nobody in the neighborhood wants another Iraq.

The urgent message, the demand for change on the homemade banners in Tahrir square is for everyone in the Middle East, the West and indeed the whole world to read and comprehend in its true meaning. What was acceptable yesterday is not palatable today to downtrodden people who refuse life on their knees and are now bravely standing upright. The cry for justice and self-determination of the Egyptian people cannot be drowned out by the rifles that answer them. Clearly there are violent forces deaf to their pleas and others in far away but powerful capitals who prevaricate and fumble unable to interpret the signal that has been so passionately conveyed. If the streets of Cairo are silenced by indifference and an iron fist, quashed peaceful dissent will become the rag in the bottle of gasoline of armed insurrection. It will only burn more terribly in the hell of civil war. At that point of no return, when hope becomes rage and tolerance becomes vengeance in an escalation of violence there is no telling what form of extremism could yet emerge. The Frankenstein would then be real and all fears would be realized, the grim cost of inaction.

Like so many Arab nations the insignia of the Egyptian army and security forces is the proud eagle of Saladin, the greatest warrior king, peacemaker, lawgiver and unifier of Islamic antiquity the Middle East ever witnessed, deeply respected even by his Christian adversaries, the Crusaders from whom he wrested Jerusalem free. It is often forgotten that he wasn’t even an Arab but Kurdish. He was also a Sufi, an adherent of the most tolerant even ecumenical, mystical form of Islam, regarded today by Al Qaeda and their fellow travelers as apostate and heretic. Sufi masters, as he had been undertake a vow of poverty. Saladin did not amass wealth though he was supreme overlord of all the lands he had freed or conquered. When he died, at the apex of his power, he left but a few pieces of coin. Mubarak, the arrogant, soldier statesman who refuses to leave his post, his enforcers and the cleptocrats he has enriched, would do well to heed Saladin’s example. To serve the nation now means to exit and answer to the will of the people. It is good Tahrir, translates as Freedom Square. May freedom come.

** Chris Kline, a former CNN Correspondent is an independent, international frontline journalist and documentary maker with extensive conflict experience in the Caucasus, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America. He is the American grandson of the late Ahmed Sukarno, founder of modern Indonesia, the world’s largest predominantly Muslim nation.

BM

More

Egberto Ontem

2011-02-03T08:09:00.002-02:00

O segundo recital da série Concertos no Jardim trouxe ontem, na quarta-feira, dia 2 de fevereiro, o maestro e compositor Egberto Gismonti e a Orquestra de Sopros da ProArte ao Espaço Tom Jobim (dentro do Jardim Botânico mesmo) – para os incautos – que sempre surpreendem em termos de quantidade. Em tempos de inflação, vale dizer que a série é gratis.

Dizia o programa que “o frevo, o maracatu e o lundú seriam alguns dos gêneros apresentados em arranjos inovadores dos renomados Carlos Malta, Zeca Assunção e Matias Corrêa.” E foram. O grande clássico de Egberto “Frevo” teve pitadas de maracatu, curiosamente. O Malta estava sentado duas fileiras adiante. Músicos de renome estavam coalhados na plateia. Ele mesmo, um talento monumental cujos arranjos estavam bem ricos e criativos, ouvia embevecido um dos maiores compositores vivos do planeta.

Egberto faz com Hermeto uma espécie de dupla onde o populacho fica num pedestal de melodias e harmonias indescritíveis. Sangue italiano e libanês de Carmo e karma. E pode ser que tenha uma programação de Ivettes e Luans, como diria Dapieve, mas Egberto e Hermeto não tem por aí todo dia, e como não sobram muitas horas no meu caminhar por esses senderos terráqueos, tenho que agarrar a oportunidade. Como eremita e “hermetão”, somente assim para enfrentar os bafos do Coisa Ruim, com as temperaturas de Alighieri. O acaso nos concedeu uma refrescada após a queda do sol no horizonte.

O programa ainda me auxilia mais ainda, e algo que Egberto contou à plateia. “Há menos de um ano, a orquestra carioca, formada por jovens de 17 a 25 anos, passou a se apresentar com [Gismonti] em concertos e festivais por várias regiões do país.

- Eles estão felizes e eu também. É uma diversão e daqui a um tempo alguma coisa que ainda não sei o que é sairá deste encontro - garante o maestro….”

Bom, de fato o que se pode ouvir foi primeiro Egberto sentado ao piano numa espécie de rapsódia de suas várias mélanges musicais, onde quem conhece a obra pode ouvir e ver um destaque especial dado ao “Fantasia” de 1982 – no original ele tocou com sintetizador OBX - que ele mesmo chamava de “obsha”. Ouvi ecos de “Palácio de Cristal” e outros temas do disco de enfiada. Depois voltou a temas (acompanhado da Orquestra) do “Em Família” de 1981, e seus grandes hits como “Frevo” e “Palhaço”.
Além dele mesmo tocar Villa-Lobos (Miudinho das bachianas), nessa colagem sonora que evoca tudo ao mesmo tempo.

No piano tem ecos de Tom, Debussy, contrapontos meio Chopin, Mussorgski, de tudo um pouco. Uma nota apenas - dissonante - para enfeitar uma melodia circular, e uma quebra de compasso e parâmetro para ilustrar um tema que é quase uma “fuga” ou “fantasia” mesmo, em “musiquês”. O cara é sacanagem, por isso na minha religião, que como a dele, é a música, ele é santificado e reverenciado – deveria ser parte do currículo escolar público no Brasil. Seria a única teocracia tolerável. A respeito de “música” em si ser expressão do Divino, basta consultar os grandes filósofos agnósticos, pernósticos e ateus. Eu não vejo Deus, com meus cinco sentidos, mas ouço ele com muita frequência.

Realmente no nosso universo esses caras é que deveriam lotar uma temporada de Municipal de meses, como nos grandes centros da música. Pois é o seu quintal. Pela demanda, observamos que a oferta não foi suficiente.

A Orquestra tem meninos aplicados, jovens em formação, que precisam realmente do pulso firme de um maestro permanente. No caso deles houve uma perda exatamente dessa figura que era mais que isso. E estavam já com um projeto de reverenciar Egberto, o primeiro no qual a reverência seria a um músico que ainda respira.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWxv_VFCx-s

Deixo aqui (nesse link aí arriba) no post a versão original de Lôro, no Youtube existem outras, somente no piano solo, uma dedicada a Hermeto até. Como disse um amigo, dos guitarristas mais exímios no país tecnicamente, essa canção, que ele tocou aliás, tem uma linha melódica de repetição contínua de apenas uma nota. E é algo absolutamente rico. Acho que somente Tom e Egberto demonstraram ao mundo o poder de uma nota apenas, dentro de um contexto harmônico mais sofisticado como revestimento... E Lôro é isso. Como ele estava tocando ali no JB, baixou talvez esse repertório 80s, em termos de “gismontiana”.

P.S. Não deixem de ouvir também o trabalho de duos de piano de sua filha, o “Gisbranco”, e para quem é “aficionado”, o Hamilton de Holanda lançou disco reverenciando somente Egberto e Hermeto. Vi milhares de apresentações desses dois expoentes de nossa música, multi-instrumentistas que fazem coisas que não teríamos capacidade de fazer nem com anos de aplicação e dedicação, ambos com o dom do sopro divino.

Em termos de música instrumental brasileira é o que há de mais superlativo por aqui feito. Juntos, vi apresentação somente fora do Brasil, uma vez, mas aí chega a ser um “overload” emocional pois depois de ouvir Egberto, vem um Hermeto e parece um tsunami, o teatro desaba.

São sim já clássicos pois trabalham com essa dicção erudita na obra popular. Como fazia o Villa. Só que ao contrário. Nada diferente.

Brazilian Hair

2011-01-24T19:49:00.002-02:00

Melhor descricao de cabelo tonhonhom ou Don King do mundo, que nos caracteriza, locais aqui.... Louis Agassiz numa expedicao na Amazonia levou o William James que com 23 anos desenhava as coisas, e a "diarista" deles la era uma tal de Alexandrina. Eles estavam numa expedicao de "catalogacao". Agassiz, o grande naturalista suico levou William junto, o filosofo e psicologo que desenhava e escrevia pra cacete. Eh a melhor e mais poetica definicao de cabelo ruim em outro idioma....

"...The adjoining sketch is a portrait of my little house-maid Alexandrina who, from her mixture of Negro and Indian blood, is rather a curious illustration of the amalgamation of races here. She consented yesterday, after a good deal of coy demur, to have her portrait taken. Mr. Agassiz wanted it especially on account of her extraordinary hair, which, though it has lost its compact negro crinkle, and acquired something of the length and texture of the Indian hair, retains, nevertheless, a sort of wiry elasticity, so that, when combed out, it stands off from her head in all directions as electrified..."

Isso devia estar pregado em todos os saloes de beleza de escovas progressivas. Sempre fomos os animais exoticos estudados por outrem... Que belo texto.... Very funny.....

Isso foi no Solimoes, depois pegou outro "buque" e foi ter com Tavares Bastos, rio abaixo, a epoca deputado por Alagoas mas interessado nas coisas amazonenses, for sure...

My girl

2011-01-10T20:19:00.002-02:00

My girl,

I am a man of words only, very little action, but above all words. You blow me away with your extravagant laughter, your contagiousness, your courage above all. Everyone is unique in one sense or more than three… You are more than all of that. You are my Henry V. You took the doubters, you shat on everyone’s head and you still made them laugh with you. Sometimes people have to stop and recognize the greatness in others… You are one of the very few, the proud few, the happy few (polish up your Shakespeare). I am so proud to be your father that I have no words to express my affection. Keep on with your life, share it the way you are sharing it now. What purpose is life without sharing it, right? I will send a fastball in the middle, do not worry. This is because you always help me to become a better person.

You still have a long way to go, keep the consistency. The other paths are treacherous and dangerous leading to tears and pain. Stay the course. We all must. Time always runs out. But love will always be there. A sad Papi turns its lonely eyes to you. Where have you gone, like a DiMaggio…? Now you are far but I carry you in my heart.

Remember uncle, love and only love will endure. And like Neil Young would say further, love only love, will break it down. Thanks for the impeccable behavior of affection. That is what I expect.

The best thing I can tell you and the most truthful one. I hope I can be like you one day….

Love, Papi…..