what I learned in Shanghai

Government controlled media in China gives detailed analysis of the global economy, global stock markets and currency and commodity trading. It is more in depth than NPR. Of course it's biased, but it's also informative. Our working class neighborhood masseuses understood that Americans are bankrupt because all Americans do is consume.

Street urchins may seem straight out of central casting, off the main boulevards Shanghai has so much character, I weep in the OC for it.

LOL theo

2008

a brighter tomorrow?

A bright and happy Asian-American family is looking into the sunshine of a brighter tomorrow through organic consumerism… wow! Brought to you by Chank Diesel.

let me make a few totally presumptuous connections

between the blond mother with the three year old I saw at an Irvine Community Park today and the fact that the USS Nimitz is steaming into the Persian Gulf. Republican politicians count on the indifference and ignorance of their constituents and their supporters. Witness Orange County, Gucci sunglass wearing, Paris Hilton-channeling citizen mother who let her toddler feed cheerios to a pair of ducks. She and her toddler referred to the one with the brilliant green head as the mommy duck, and to the duller, brown one as the daddy duck. "Give some to the daddy!" she said. The seven year old friend of my six year old told her politely, "That's not the daddy duck. The daddy duck is the one with the greenish blue head, but the mommy duck has a bluish feather on her wing." She looked at him and said in with a flatliner's inflection, "Really?" Her perfectly made up lips and the red riibbons on her high heeled espadrilles matched, and her hair was so beautifuly highlighted that she must have just figured that the more colorful duck had to be the female duck, decked out in the best ducky finery to attract a well-endowed, and financially fit male.

I said in my best National Geographic commentator voice, "Yes, isn't that funny? The male ducks have to win over the female ducks with the colorful plumage." Ha. Ha. Ha.

She confirmed my worst fears about this region of California that we live in -- and I hate to be anti-fashion or anything like that, but the more expensive the outfit, the dumber the wearer...Actually, she looked as if she were trying to get a role on the next Real Housewives of the OC...a show that demonstrates to me everyday that the worst fears of Allan Bloom have come to pass, but not because of the PC Left...It's worked out very well for a political class that hopes to dupe us all into indifference...an unpopular war seems to be in the throes of begetting a disastrous continuation. Animal Planet has replaced stodgy documentaries with TEN MOST EXTREME PREDATORS so you can NOT even learn any natural history from television. You end up with an E! channel count down...TEN BEST CELEBRITY BODIES....

Joan Didion on the Women's Movement

I'll let Didion's The White Album do the talking about the Stalin-Mao configuration of 1970s feminism that emphasized personal transformation and revelation of resentment as the MOST political event:

They [feminists] had invented a class; now they had only to make the class conscious. They seized as a political technique a kind of shared testimony at first called a 'rap session,' then called 'consciousness-raising,' and in any case a therapeutically oriented American reinterpretation, according to the British feminist Juliet Mitchell, of a Chinese revolutionary practice known as 'speaking bitterness.' They purged and regrouped and purged again, worried out one another's errors and deviations, the elitism here, the 'careerism' there. These puritans of the political spirit, they made of social injustice a moral issue -- one that could only be repaired by a thorough and public flogging of the enemy. The laughable practice of "speaking bitterness" that was recast from the practices of revolutionary China as a way of making the peasants understand their victimization at the hands of a class enemy was supposed to give women a new sense of agency - as the politically pure protagonists of a drama of self-discovery as collective redemption.

Didion's aphoristic criticism cuts to the core, but this is not to say that our work is done. The early deformations of the women's movement have to be understood historically and in the context of the successful institutionalization of "new social movements."

the decline of neoliberalism

as described by David Brooks is a sign that this conservative commentator can use his intelligence when his powerful overlords turn their backs temporarily. The demise of decline of neoliberalism is due in no small part -- and Brooks gets this right -- to the powerful progressive, liberal blogosphere, which has emerged as not only politcally, but intellectually critcla to those of us deeply shaken by the political scene since the election of 2000. The blogosphere has given me the confidence to assert a strong notion of contentious, historical universalism that is the pragmatic and theoretical grounding of a politics and ethics.