I tend to hate biopics (except this one maybe). But maybe as a minimum, more people will know who the hell it is they are wearing on their t-shirts.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Che
Millions in New Delhi slums being displaced
Though I think the real shocking news might be that the American press has actually covered it.
Via CNN:
Millions of Indians have been displaced for the causes of economic and cultural development over the past decade. (I wonder if a recent widely acclaimed film about these slums had anything to do with this random piece of coverage on the matter.)Bulldozers razed the makeshift home and hundreds of others earlier this month as the Indian government moves to improve New Delhi for the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
Officials say the land is for a road and the demolitions are simply part of a master plan to clean up the city and move slum-dwellers to proper housing.
But, the government says, there will be no relocation for families like Hanso Devi's because they do not meet relocation requirements.
The government says they are squatting too close to the road, and are located in a major development zone.
"You see they have encroached on the specific project lengths -- there will be no notice, no relocation projects for them," said New Delhi Mayor Arti Mehra, who says she and the city are worried about those who have been left homeless.
About 3 million people live in New Delhi's slums, the government estimates. Mehra says New Delhi is slated to build 100,000 new apartments, though only 6,800 are under construction.
As for the razing of slums for an international sporting event, it's nothing new. It happened most recently in China, for the Olympic games, and is happening right now in South Africa in preparation for the 2010 World Cup. Ah, isn't "development" a beautiful thing to watch unfold?
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Amid increasing violence, murdered Sri Lankan journalist urges restraint
Sri Lankan editor Wickrematunge was murdered last week, but prediciting the government may try to silence him, had already prepared a final column in which he named his probable murderers and made his final argument against military aggression against Sri Lanka's minority Tamil population. From the Guardian:
Wickrematunge was shot in the head in Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo, by two gunman on a motorcycle as he drove to work on Thursday. More than 4,000 people attended his funeral yesterday, including opposition leaders and human rights activists.
[...]
The government has made a series of military gains over the [Tamil] Tigers in the last two weeks, capturing their political capital and reopening the main road from Colombo to Jaffna by seizing the important Elephant Pass. In the editorial Wickrematunge said this would not bring victory - a sign he wrote his article very recently. "A military occupation of the country's north and east will require the Tamil people of those regions to live eternally as second-class citizens, deprived of all self respect. Do not imagine that you can placate them by showering "development" and "reconstruction" on them in the post-war era.
"The wounds of war will scar them forever, and you will also have an even more bitter and hateful diaspora to contend with," he wrote.
[...]
The editor ends his article appealing to his readers: "If you remember nothing else, remember this: the [Sunday] Leader is there for you, be you Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, low-caste, homosexual, dissident or disabled. Its staff will fight on, unbowed and unafraid, with the courage to which you have become accustomed. Do not take that commitment for granted. Let there be no doubt that whatever sacrifices we journalists make, they are not made for our own glory or enrichment: they are made for you. Whether you deserve their sacrifice is another matter. As for me, God knows I tried."
Ugh, the article is just chilling. A man who was silenced by violence managed to get out one last plea for peace...and it will undoubtedly be ignored by the same people who likely arranged for his assassination...
Monday, January 12, 2009
More reviews of Slumdog Millionaire
Apparently Slumdog won about 9,000 Golden Globe awards last night, including Best Drama, so the internets are all abuzz with it today, which has helped me to stumble upon some other really interesting takes on the film.
See MMW's take on the love interest of the movie, Latika, and the film's overall portrayal of Muslims here.
Also to consider is Manohla Dargis' NYT review, in which her only reservation with the film is with the aesthetics, rather than the politics, of the wonderfully happy ending I wrote about:
"In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker’s calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit (or, better yet, a moral tale). In the past Mr. Boyle has managed to wring giggles out of murder (“Shallow Grave”) and addiction (“Trainspotting”), and invest even the apocalypse with a certain joie de vivre (the excellent zombie flick “28 Days Later”). He’s a blithely glib entertainer who can dazzle you with technique and, on occasion, blindside you with emotion, as he does in his underrated children’s movie, “Millions.” He plucked my heartstrings in “Slumdog Millionaire” with well-practiced dexterity, coaxing laughter and sobs out of each sweet, sour and false note."And just a final note from me on the film, based on my exploration of these other reviews: I never fail to be amazed at how freaking defensive people can get when someone criticizes art that made them feel good! It's personal...
TN Man Fired for Being Gay
Hat tip, Pandagon:
Tennessee man is fired from Nashville-area hotel for living an "alternative lifestyle."
It really blows my mind that gay marriage has become more central (read: more publicized) in the gay rights fight than ENDA. I can't help but feel that reflects not only a co-op by the religious right, but also the bougie nature of gay rights activism. This next congress better get its ass in gear on this issue.
Economic crisis leads to conservative budget hysteria
One of the most conservative-dominated states in the nation, Utah, is planning to cut its budget by 15% for the coming year, despite the fact that even the Republican governor recommended only about a 7% cut. And where is this 15% coming from?
Meals on Wheels and a host of support programs for at-risk teenagers and seniors. As the Salt Lake Tribune reports:
Salt Lake County prevention programs -- which help immigrants, teens in juvenile court and others -- stand to lose as much as 38 percent in state dollars, or $811,872, under one scenario. An estimated 17 employees at different community groups would likely lose their jobs due to reduced contracts.
Of the 3,200 students who participated in Cornerstone Counseling programs in the 2007-2008 fiscal year, about 1,300 could no longer be served. That would mean a significant reduction in the teaching of practical life skills that studies link to a drop in drug and alcohol use.
The day the [Governor John] Huntsman scenario was announced in December, Salt Lake County served 1,084 meals to seniors in their homes, a number that could drop by half if the dollars aren't replaced.
"These are people who are very frail, very sick, and we're taking food away from them," said Shauna O'Neil, Salt Lake County's director of aging. Though the governor has proposed backfilling those and other dollars, many community groups and local officials are skeptical the dollars will be found.
Acute needs, particularly those involving youth, have been prioritized at the state level. For example, programs for treating substance abuse were protected while many programs preventing alcoholism were suggested as cuts.
"This is at the point where there aren't a lot of good choices," said Lisa-Michele Church, executive director of the Department of Human Services. She hopes her agency will have some safeguards, because of its mission.
What's being overlooked, advocates say, is how much money prevention programs can save the state in the long run.
A huge chunk of money was cut by eliminating $4.7 million from DORA, a substance abuse program set up by the Drug Offender Reform Act. Its closure ends treatment for 1,400 and could lead to the need for more jails. But without a long track record of outcomes, it was more vulnerable to cuts.
An economic crisis does not mean it's time to stop spending government money. In fact, as pretty much every economist who isn't a libertarian ideologue has told us recently, it's the time to spend, not only to help support those suffering from economic decline in the markets, but because it's the only way to stimulate the markets back into productivity. Beyond this alone, however, it's difficult to see anything but conservative exploitation of the economic crisis to get out of the mandatory welfare programs they have long resisted.
These programs are life-saving programs. Cutting the budget itself is unnecessary, and cutting it at these places is morally repugnant. These calculated political moves demonstrate a marked animosity toward the under-privileged.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire: Mixing raw reality and fantastic fiction
Today I had the chance to a see a new movie in an actual movie theater, the first one in a long time. My indie loving family and I deliberated between Milk and Slumdog Millionaire, before finally deciding Milk might be too tortured to watch on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Well, that might be true, but the first 30 seconds of Slumdog Millionaire let us know we'd made a mistake if we'd been hoping for something light and nice.
While I'd heard a lot of hype about the movie, I hadn't heard any detail about the plot other than it centered around a poor Indian man trying to win a million dollars on the Hindi equivalent of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. Jamal, our "slumdog," tells us the story of his life, with all its violence and disappointment, as he grew up in the slums of post-colonial Mumbai.
The soundtrack is wonderful, the acting superb, the romance lovely and endearing. The poverty is raw and (for the most part) inescapable, the injustices of modern India obvious. But I think it's the general premise of the movie, the skeletons of the plot, that left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction. For 100 minutes or more, this movie illustrates in a most heartbreaking and gritty way, the slums. The poverty, the violence, the broken system of India feels so raw, and then suddenly the wordly angst of the first-world viewer is distracted, when something completely fantastic happens: (SPOILER ALERT) Jamal wins the million dollars, and the girl, mostly because he got lucky, because as Jamal himself says, his destiny was simply written this way. After the money and the girl are safe in his arms, the end credits literally roll amid scenes from a Bollywood-inspired finale, complete with Jamal, his lady, and a train station full of celebrating slumdogs dancing and singing.
The fact that Jamal's success, after all his pain and loss, is one in a billion (one in a billion in India alone, let's not even try to consider the entire globe here), is a moot point. So where does the movie leave us? We feel really good for Jamal. He's beaten the odds. He has found happiness even though the world around him is chaos. But what about the world? They're left singing and dancing like in some of the most feel-good fictions we can create for ourselves. The directors (Trainspotting's Danny Boyle and Monsoon Wedding's Loveleen Tandan) make no apologies for this resignation to unreality to tie up the all too real loose ends of the movie. Are we really supposed to buy it? Can't art do any better than that? Is it a matter of deciding on a ridiculously unrealistic conclusion that makes us happy or a realistic, depressing, frustrating ending? Is there no in-between? I'm honestly not sure right now. It may be that question that has left me so restless and not the movie itself.
Trailer, if you're interested:
Children of the Left, Unite!
Check out this essay in todays NYTimes on an anthology of radical Leftist children's literature recently published by NYU press.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Friday, January 9, 2009
Roundup on Gaza
- This article is written by an AP correspondent living in Gaza and what they have seen during the recent attacks. Very sobering.
- Watch former ambassador debates Norman Finkelstein on the Gaza attack on Democracy Now! here.
- Rashid Khalidi's recent intervention published in the NYTimes, titled "What you don't know about Gaza".
- Naomi Klein's recent piece at The Nation: Boycott, Divest, Sanction.
- London Times reports that Israel used White Phosphorus on Gaza.
- Rasmussen reports that Americans are divided over Gaza.
- Eric Ruder at SocialisWorker.org has a succinct recent piece on the attacks here.
Excellent "Lenin" post on Gaza
In general, the posts at Lenin's Tomb on Gaza recently have been sharp, informative and refreshing (to the extent that any news about Gaza can be said to be so). Here's an excerpt:
The IDF's initial justification for the attack on the Al-Fakhura school was that Hamas had used the building to fire mortars from, and its tanks had responded. Implicit in this was an admission that they had targeted the school on purpose. The tank shells, presumably shot from quite nearby, were fired by soldiers operating under orders from command centres equipped with detailed targeting intelligence. As is now known, the Israeli military had the GPS coordinates not only of this UN school but of the other UN schools that it attacked. We also know that the UN told Israeli forces that the schools were being used as refuges for those driven out of their houses by Israel. And the first thing the IDF let us know is that it was done on purpose. Their excuse was barbaric, of course. The idea that an invading force may attack a building filled with hundreds of terrorised civilians just in order to kill two of those resisting the invasion is nothing short of grotesque. But the fact that it was barbaric was part of the point: rather than bluntly condemning a war crime, you were invited to focus on whether Hamas would be so evil as to attack Israel's brave boys from within a civilian building. Because it is so frequently repeated you might be predisposed to assume that Hamas did indeed position its 'infrastructure of terror' among unsuspecting citizens but, whether you are so predisposed or not, you are already drawn into the macabre calculus of the murderer if you even get involved in that argument. You have tacitly accepted the logic in which war crimes are not merely acceptable, but actually appropriate, if the enemy really is as evil as Israel says. The usual suspects, of course, immediately embraced Israel's excuse: Israel's killing, they expostulated, merely demonstrates the ruthless, diabolical genius of Hamas. If anything, they added, the IDF was admirably restrained in its action. But it is doubtful that many others were taken in.Read the entire post here.
Bipartisanship?
One vote short of a super-majority in the Senate, with punishing majorities in the House and control of the White House, the last thing we should be hearing is talk about "bipartisanship". We hold elections for a reason, and the consequence of the last two is that the GOP has been thoroughly hammered and rejected as the ruling party. The Dems need one vote (if we include Lieberman in the Dem caucus) to push through any proposal they like and overrule a filibuster.
Yet despite these electoral mandates, despite the huge momentum of political capital buoying up the new President-elect, we are given tepid, half-way proposals for action.
Paul Krugman writes in his most recent column:
Is the plan being limited by a lack of spending opportunities? There are only a limited number of “shovel-ready” public investment projects — that is, projects that can be started quickly enough to help the economy in the near term. But there are other forms of public spending, especially on health care, that could do good while aiding the economy in its hour of need.Or is the plan being limited by political caution? Press reports last month indicated that Obama aides were anxious to keep the final price tag on the plan below the politically sensitive trillion-dollar mark. There also have been suggestions that the plan’s inclusion of large business tax cuts, which add to its cost but will do little for the economy, is an attempt to win Republican votes in Congress.
Whatever the explanation, the Obama plan just doesn’t look adequate to the economy’s need. To be sure, a third of a loaf is better than none. But right now we seem to be facing two major economic gaps: the gap between the economy’s potential and its likely performance, and the gap between Mr. Obama’s stern economic rhetoric and his somewhat disappointing economic plan.
"Political caution"? "An attempt to win over Republicans"? A friend has suggested to me that the rhetoric of bipartisanship could be being implemented in an attempt to forestall the inevitable obstruction from the Republican congressional minority. But we aren't talking about rhetoric here. Obama's stimulus plan is a concrete policy proposal, and I cannot see any reason to blame Republican opposition for its tepid and 'cautious' (which is to say, unduly conservative) character.
When this 'cautious' spending regimen doesn't work wonders, what will Democrats say to idiotic morons like Mitch McConnell when they inevitably start bantering that "gummint spending doesn't work"?
We would be mistaken in a characteristically liberal fashion, however, if we simply assumed that "political caution" meant only throwing a bone to the Democrat's electoral opponents. Obama and company took power with the blessing (and financial backing) of powerful business interests, and the Administration already has representatives of Capital sitting in cabinet posts. In short, there is a general sense in which Obama's crew aims to keep Capital supportive of the new Administration. But we should not confuse this with prudence, expediency or economic wisdom: this is an expression of the new Administration's ideological trajectory and economic alliances.
FDR's administration made the nearly-fatal mistake of trying to balance the budget after an initial round of massive government spending and quasi-Keynesian initiatives, a similar example of political 'caution' which derailed and obstructed the ability of the spending initiatives to generate recovery by stimulating demand. This example is different in many important ways, but the strategy was mistaken for the same reasons as Obama's apparent flip-flopping, hodge-podge approach.
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