The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

To crib a line from an old song.....something is happening in Iran, but what it is ain't exactly clear. Tehran is witnessing its largest street protests in decades. Twitter and youtube and the blogosphere offer riveting testimonials of students beaten in the streets, protestors taking to the rooftops in a conscious emulation of 1979, allegations of electoral fraud, arrests and detainments of reform activists across Iran, and massive demonstrations in spite of official prohibitions. Aerial views of Tehran display a sea of green - the color of reform candidate Mir Hosain Mousavi. But it's still very difficult to know what has really happened. Did the regime manipulate the election results on behalf of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as the protestors allege, or did the Western media vastly overrate Mousavi's support because of its blinkered focus on the educated, upper-class population of Northern Tehran, rather than Ahmadinejad's support base amongst the rural poor? Is this a moment of historical reckoning, the beginning of a new day in Iran, or are we witnessing a doomed revolution, to be quashed with minimal effort by the true power in Iran: the Supreme Leader?

I have absolutely no idea how to answer these questions, but I figured all those 24-hour cable news networks would at least be covering the situation in Iran during their Monday morning news shows. Shame on them all. As I flipped through the news channels this morning, I learned about a tomato throwing fight in Colombia, a botched in-vitro fertilization in the UK, angry sports fans somewhere in America, the David Letterman vs. Sarah Palin smackdown, and Rod Blagojevich's onstage appearance at a comedy show in Chicago. Seriously???? No wonder Americans are so pathetically ignorant about the rest of the world. If MSNBC and CNN had existed during the buildup to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, one imagines they would have been discussing the fading popularity of bellbottoms, Jimmy Carter's adulterous subconscious, and the outrageous fashion on display at Studio 54 while security forces massacred demonstrators in Tehran on Black Friday.

I suppose I should have known better. It's not like I can remember a time when CNN and MSNBC were anything but gossip and soundbite channels anyway. Can someone remind me why I own a television set again?

Very Simple Question

Presuming I have any readers left, I have a question for you peeps:

Where is the best hummus in Memphis?

Discuss.

When Pigs Flu

As soon as I heard about the swine flu, I knew exactly what was coming. Nativist-Racist-Right-Wing-Seal-The-Borders-Freakout v. 2.0. And sure enough, just like clockwork, the Michelle Malkin/Michael Savage/Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck/tattered-remains-of-the-Republican-Party faction whipped themselves into self-righteous hysteria over such chimeras as infected "illegals" swarming across our border with the Four Horsemen of the Aporkalypse, and even a secret Muslim bioterrorism effort to destroy America by....somewhat inexplicably....infecting Mexicans with swine flu. Exhibit A. (Nothing gets these guys more aroused than combining the threat of "Islamoterrorism" with the threat of illegal immigration - it's like Decline-of-Western-Civilization porn.) Saner observers pointed out that the high rates of swine flu infection in New York could easily be traced to a school field trip to Mexico rather than illegal immigration, and that if terrorists were truly intent on destroying America via swine flu (a rather bizarre ambition since the disease, by all accounts, has been quite mild outside of Mexico and poses almost no risk of casualty thus far in the United States) they could just, you know, take it directly to us. But hysteria about illegal immigration has never had anything to do with facts or evidence anyway, so it is useless to point these things out.

Nonetheless, the Swine Flu Freakout is revealing in a Know Your Enemy sort of way. What it reveals is the gargantuan ignorance of right-wing nativists regarding the actual causes of immigration. You have to live in a pretty serious fantasy world to imagine that you can have a globalized economy, in which goods, services, financial instruments, and ideas cross borders with relative impunity, but actual human beings can somehow be prevented from following. And you might as well just take up permanent residence underneath a rock if you fail to understand how agreements like NAFTA undermined the Mexican farming sector, thus fueling undocumented immigration into the United States. And, regarding the swine flu, one might ask not where the disease originated geographically, but instead, how it originated structurally. If we're so upset about the possibility of Mexican immigrants bringing swine flu to the United States, then perhaps Mexico should be even more upset about a criminally underregulated meat industry bringing toxic factory farms to the Mexican countryside. Indeed, most of these factory farming operations are headquartered in the United States, including Smithfield Foods, which operates a huge industrial pig farm in Veracruz. (Exhibit B) Globalization means that if in fact Mexican immigrants are posing a health risk to Americans, it might be because of an American company to begin with. So if you're going to get upset about globalization, at least be consistent about it. (On the other hand, I do feel compelled to note that Mike Davis is every bit as hysterically over-panicked about this as the right-wing doomsayers; swine flu is NOT going to "produce carnage equivalent to a major war" - I love Mike Davis, but he has always had a dubious affection for the apocalyptic.)

Anyway, the point is simple: once you have a globalized economy, both good and bad things will cross borders. Brilliant ideas and life-changing inventions will cross, but so will diseases, drugs, and criminals. You can join the nativist backlash against globalization by irrationally isolating immigration from its economic context and imagining that you can just build a wall around the United States, or you can start to ask what kind of global regulation we need for the global economy - and of course, that includes public health protections. What we're really seeing is a simple replay of the original 19th century reactions to industrial capitalism itself. There were those who were so horrified by the sight of smoke-spewing factories and decaying tenement houses and workers' taverns that they longed nostalgically for a return to some never-was Feudal Utopia of lush manors and obedient serfs. But, at the same time, there were those who recognized the clock would not start moving backwards; industrialization was a fait accompli, and it was necessary to harness the new productive forces in a just and egalitarian manner. Those people were called....cue Twilight Zone soundtrack...socialists.

Update:: OK, I don't like to spread misinformation on my blog, and I'm obviously not an epidemiologist. so it seems worth mentioning that the link between industrial pig farms and swine flu is highly speculative at best. I've been doing a bit of internet research, and there have been some pretty compelling critiques of articles drawing a connection between Smithfield and swine flu. Given that pigs in factory farms live in overcrowded, disease-breeding conditions, they are generally pumped full of various vaccines and antiobiotics - which is of course alarming for many other reasons, both health-related and environmental - but actually makes it rather unlikely that swine flu originated on a factory farm. That said, I would stand by the general point of this post, that factory farming is an environmental and public health disaster, and that one can't trace epidemics to immigration alone as though immigration itself weren't a byproduct of a globalized economy.

Zombie Redux

Has anyone else noticed that the rain always holds back for the Zombie Massacre, but returns for Beale Street Music Festival? I think perhaps it is a sign that the gods themselves recognize the real creativity of Memphis is on display amongst the brain-eating hordes:



These were my favorite zombies of the evening, although they should be chastized for smiling for the camera. Zombies don't pose for pictures. Zombies don't even comprehend photography. They just try to eat the photographer's brains. Though I suppose I'm thankful these zombies were apparently confused about their vocation. In any event, their costumes are sheer brilliance, insofar as they bring together zombies and Stepford Wives, who are already, in a certain respect, zombies anyway.


And then there was this bit of briliant street theater, courtesy of Brent Diggs/Doctor Toboggan/who-in-the-world-IS-this-guy???, who played a combination evangelizing zombie therapist/snake-oil salesman diligently handing out brochures to the undead horde advertising his 12-step cure bringing zombies back from the brink:





Though I was completely uninvolved in planning the march this year, it was nonetheless edifying to see my ghoulish, depraved baby growing up so....ghoulishly.

The Undead are Among Us

Due to the busiest semester of my life, I was uninvolved with the approaching zombie apocalypse this year, but theogeo still appears to have sinister relations with the undead. And so, they're baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack.....



After this semester, I think it would come as a relief to have my brains eaten!

Feel-Good Video of the Century

I can't believe I'm posting a link to this. Can. Not. Believe. It. It's a clip of a 47 year old woman, who lives alone and has "never even even been kissed", appearing on Britain's Got Talent, which, apparently, is the British equivalent of American Idol. Before this afternoon, I had no idea this show even existed, and less-than-zero interest in American Idol. I originally saw the link on Andrew Sullivan's blog, and passed right by it, thinking that I had better things to do than watch a lame British version of a lame American reality-talent show. Well, then, boredom and procrastination set in, so I decided to see what the fuss was about.

OH MY GOD. If this video doesn't make you choke up just a little bit, you probably have a heart made of steel. Unfortunately, the video can't be embedded, so you'll actually have to clink THE LINK to watch it, and you should do it. NOW NOW NOW. I don't really care one way or another for the song she is performing, but what's absolutely priceless about the video is how she completely defies the expectations of the audience, the judges, the announcers, all of whom are essentially mocking her and laughing at her naive little dream to be a famous singer - and all of whom look like they are about to swallow their own tongues when she actually starts singing. Serious awesomeness.

The South vs. The World

For obvious reasons, this poll conducted by DailyKos and Research 2000 sparked my interest. American respondents were asked whether they had a "favorable or unfavorable opinion" of San Francisco, New York, France, and Europe. Overall, substantial majorities (in the 60-70% range) expressed a favorable opinion of all four places. However, when the demographics were broken down along such dimensions as gender, political affiliation, race, age, and region, one glaring exception is clear: in all four categories, respondents from the South cut against the grain, with an almost even division in all four categories between favorable and unfavorable opinions.

So - the obvious question - why? Trying to answer that question is tricky. You don't want to fall into contemptuous, dismissive stereotypes of the South. But there is a very obvious regional exceptionalism here, and it's hard not to wonder what it's about. Is it just lingering animosity that dates all the way back to antebellum dates, when the South and the North clashed over issues like slavery, industrialization, and trade policy? The South has always prided itself on its exceptionalism and viewed other regions of the country with a certain suspicion, even when it was not harboring secessionist fantasies.

Add to the historical clefts in the United States the present political distinctions between South and North and you might think there's no mystery at all. The South is, on the whole, more socially conservative than the the rest of the country, and SF, NYC, France, and Europe are all to varying degrees portrayed as bastions of social liberalism - or decadent, satanic hedonism, pace the religious right. During the 2008 elections, Republicans trying to appeal to "real" America frequently lambasted their opponents for harboring "San Francisco values" - presumably meaning they supported public gay orgies, forcible sex-change surgery, and voting ballots exclusively in a Spanish-ebonics creole. As for Europe and France, we can't forget that post-9/11, Republicans frequently demonized "Old Europe" and especially France as borderline treasonous enemies of progress and the democratization of the world.

But is that the whole story? I don't think so. I know quite a few Southern liberals who have .... less than favorable, shall we say.... opinions of New York and San Francisco. I think there is a two-part explanation here: first, New York and San Francisco, and coastal American liberals, routinely express their own overwhelming contempt for the South, as demonstrated by this venomous screed after George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004. So Southerners are merely returning the bile. Second, although closely related, I suspect a lot of Southerners are just plain sick and tired of hearing about what wonderful, utopian, successful, perfect cities San Francisco and New York are, and how merely residing there automatically confers enlightened status upon San Franciscans and New Yorkers. To dislike San Francisco and New York is, then, a gesture of disapproval for a certain sense of snobbery, privilege, and entitlement.

But what then? Can this gap ever be bridged? Will the South and the rest of the country (the rest of the world?) always and forever view each other across a chasm of suspicion and animosity? Of course, bridging the gap requires a mutual transformation - if this poll had bothered to include opinions of the South, I'm sure we would have seen even lower approval ratings than for France. In order for the South to view the rest of the world differently, the rest of the world probably needs to stop being so incredibly dismissive of the South. How does that happen??

10 Completely Random Thoughts

Oh look, I have a blog!


1) I have the sense that we have recently approached a cultural tipping point beyond which the decriminalization of marijuana becomes inevitable. This is not to suggest it is coming anytime soon, as we all know that politicians have about a 30-year lag time when it comes to getting on board the cultural zeitgeist. Nonetheless, it strikes me that serious discussion of alternative drug policy has become ubiquitous, mainstream, and respectable, and it is not confined to any particular side of the ideological spectrum.

2) There is absolutely nothing wrong with wearing black and brown together at the same time. I refuse to recognize this as a fashion faux-pas. I happen to think black and brown look lovely together. One of these days, I'm going to write a guest entry for Up Up Down Down on this very subject. (And yes, that blog has recently been revived from the dead, ladies and gentlemen.)

3) I might have a serious Wii addiction problem when all the suggested videos on youtube for me are related to Mario Kart shortcuts.

4) I don't like Keith Olbermann. I'm supposed to like him, I know - but I find him to be an absurdly melodramatic, pompous blowhard who is contributing to the disappearance of serious reporting and its replacement by narcissistic infotainment. That said, I do like Rachel Maddow. But I'll take Bill Moyers over pretty much anybody on MSNBC.

5) Illustrated BMI Categories is a truly fascinating flickr set. It consists of photographs of people, mostly but not exclusively women, and their corresponding official obesity designation according to BMI categories (underweight, normal, overweight, obese, severely obese, morbidly obese). Essentially, it illustrates what a complete crock these categories are - and it's great to see ostensibly "obese" women who look proud and confident in their own skin, and who wear flattering fashionable clothes with tons of personality.

6) I've recently tried a couple of restaurants outside of the usual midtown/downtown Memphis axis that were really fantastic. Edo on Summer Ave had the best sushi I've had in town, and even more importantly for me, it's the only place in town I've discovered yet that does Agedashi Tofu correctly. Also way off the beaten path, we had fantastic Korean barbecue at Asiana Garden on Mount Moriah. But I'm lamenting the end of Lobster King, and put the following question to anyone who still reads this almost-dead blog: is there anywhere in Memphis to get dim sum, now that Lobster King is gone?

7) Why is the Obama Department of Justice apparently determined not only to preserve but to expand the Bush Administration's flagrantly unconstitutional Imperial Presidency theories? Don't take my word for it; please please please please read Glenn Greenwald. The DOJ has been fighting tooth and nail to preserve the doctrine of "state secrets" in order to throw out entire cases against the government - a dramatic perversion of the original doctrine which merely allowed to federal government to request the exclusion of particular pieces of evidence during trial. And, now, we learn that the Obama DOJ is fighting equally hard to preserve the presidential power to imprison people indefinitely in Afghanistan (abducted from anywhere in the world) with no legal rights whatsoever to challenge the basis of their imprisonment. In other words - "yeah, we'll close Guantanamo - and then we'll just reopen it under another name in Afghanistan!" If you were outraged by Guantanamo, if you thought it was one of the blackest marks on a very bleak American presidency, then you have absolutely no excuse not to be equally outraged by the Obama DOJ.

8) Once upon a time, I mocked friendster, flickr, myspace, facebook, and blogging as narcissistic preening. Gradually, I acquired friendster, flickr, myspace, and facebook accounts, and I started blogging. At the moment, twitter strikes me as narcissistic preening. Thus, I fully expect to be hopelessly addicted to twitter in approximately one year.

9) I cannot WAIT to read FICTION at the end of the semester. Just a few weeks separate me from glorious warm spring days lying outside with FICTION books. (Yes, I'm going to capitalize FICTION ever time I write it, that's how excited I am.) I have the following books waiting to be read, feel free to make recommendations: Robert Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, Nathanel West's The Day of the Locust, Céline's Journey to the End of the Night, Jonathan Coe's The House of Sleep, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, and Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World. Thoughts?

10) I think this blog needs a new topic. For some reason, I have an aversion to the idea of maintaining a topic-less blog, which is precisely what this has degenerated into, where the author simply pontificates about whatever strikes her at the moment. I prefer precisely focused blogs. I don't know why. But I'm clearly running out of things to say about Memphis. So..... what now????