MoveOn Pac puts a little star wars in to the Senate

Can you Save the Republic? See the ad, feel the power?

Is this good for George Lucas and bad for politics to make everyone believe that we are all innocent little R2D2's, rolypoly Yoda's fighting againgst the dark lords of the frist?

Are we avoiding complexity and politics and history by joseph campbellizing this whole situation into a 'journey of the hero' jungian piece of seductive but empty bs? And is it giving too much charisma to the extremely banal and perhaps even more evil Frist to compare him with Anakin Skywalker, savior of the galaxy gone very, very bad?

human rights crisis and no one seems to care

So Newsweek is pummeled into submission for reporting that Korans were flushed down the toilet, but prisoners have actually been "interrogated" to death in Afghanistan . The lack of public and official outrage, or I should say the tepid American response to all of this confirms one thing: the racist legacy of lynching and torture is being revived and re-enacted in the prisons of Iraq and Afghanistan. I think it is a bunch of white underprivileged and undereducated kids who have not been taught any sense of responsibilty for the racism of the their forebears.

As long as we as a nation, condone even one secret act of torture, one lynching and one secret killing we countersign a logic of perversion -- which means that we can do to the Other if we are stronger, anything we like -- with total impunity. The Other is just an instrument in our fantasies that ANYTHING is permissible when strong meets weak. This is regression of the most brutal kind.

There are twentysomethings in Iraq and Afghanistan running wild, given free rein to act out upon the bodies of their prisoners. They have been told that "Geneva Conventions" do not apply. The superego has gone on vacation. It is the intolerable psychic price that we are paying for this war on terror and while we romanticize fetuses, we treat our fellow human beings as the objects of our sadistic fantasy.

Star Wars Politicized

Tomorrow's New York Times reports on the politicizing of the latest Star Wars bomb for all manner of causes - an amusing piece that shows the cultural hold the Revenge of the Shit with its binary stupidity holds over America.

go native go kitsch

Making native cultures cute and kitsch is just one of the tactics of modernity to domesticate the Other within while training children to perform in the spectacle of state-sponsored multiculturalism. I spent many weekends of my childhood in "traditional" Chinese costumes spinning fans and in half and full splits -- now the Chinese-American girls have moved to "native" cultures, more skin, more feathers, more "primitive."

click here to go native

Harvardland

The middle class Taiwanese parent is spending thousands of NTS a month sending their children to afterschool English classes with names such as Harvardland. Harvardland just about says it all -- it's about the brand, it's about Harvard, which is not just a university, not just an education, a standard, a campus, it is a land -- a golden land of opportunity and big bucks that will open up naturally to the English speaker. The owners of Harvardland are canny indeed. They can avoid piracy charges because of their clever generalization of Harvard over an entire land -- Harvard -- land. It's not Harvard after all.

A local kindergarten in the area is called Stanford. Not Stanfordland.

It just goes to show that in the war of international branding for higher education, my alma mater, Yale, is losing.