Friday, February 11, 2011

FINALLY, HE RESIGNS!

I'm not particularly fond of the daily fare of social networks like Facebook, but at last such tools have been used to advocate for a democratic society and urge protests aimed at the removal of an oligarchy that has been in place since for thirty years! Now, that's employing the Internet in a constructive manner, and I applaud the youth liberation movement in Egypt for its fervor and ingenuity.

As Frederick Douglass stated in the latter part of the nineteenth century, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." Certainly, the masses of people repeatedly demanded the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, and today their earnest met with success. Hallelujah! Alhamdulillah!

After Anwar Sadat was assassinated, Mohammed Hosni Mubarak seemed like a godsend. He appeared generous to the opposition, freeing many political prisoners, and interested in opening up the economy to the marginalized. But that soon changed. In trying to squash what he saw as radical fundamentalism, the trajectory of his rulership changed dramatically. Rather than becoming a paradigm for democratic leadership, he became increasingly repressive and oppressive, allowing for nearly half of the population to live at subsistence levels. Mubarak cracked down on free, fair, and open elections, and sought to orchestrate his eventual succession. He put a lot of his personal allies in high political positions, including his son Gamal. Egypt has been in a state of emergency for decades, which served as a vehicle to crush any political reform. The dream of democracy was transformed into a nightmare of exploitation.

Somehow, Egypt remained a strong ally of the United States, as administration after administration simply looked the other way in order to maintain American interests in the region. As we have become increasingly receptive to the alleviation of pain for the Palestinians, we have not stridently criticized Mubarak for closing off refuge for displaced Palestinians. Because we consider Egypt key to our national security interests, we have oftentimes suddenly become blind when Egypt offends--as we have been with Saudi Arabia as well as with Israel. Rather than support the burgeoning liberation movement in Egypt, we acted like immobile deer in approaching headlights. The Obama Administration did not have the foresight or insight to discern the unrest brewing at the surface; it was afraid that any words critical of the Mubarak regime would enervate our friendly relations and destabilize the region. Mubarak use this softness on the part of the United States and continued to horde money for himself and his henchmen for a couple decades.

What's in store for Egyptland now? I would never fully trust military personnel to rule a country. It would be optimistic, however, to expect the military to share power, for the instability of the country needs to end, and who else but the military can forge such a state of affairs? I think a civilian coalition should spring up to help organize a new democracy that believes in curtailing the plight of the disinherited. That's what ethical government is all about!

In a very real sense, Mubarak is a tragic figure. Despite his billions, he clinged to a position against the will of the people. He still needed to be bolstered by status and station, rather than ceding to the masses their own process of striving for ideal democracy. In essence, he had become corrupt to the bone: delighting in power and disdaining the people whom he, at one time, vowed to support, sustain, develop, and enhance. Lord Acton was right: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Mubarak had to be forced out; an it happened without the violence of most protesters. Now that's how to walk like an Egyptian!

Sunday, February 6, 2011

PORTMAN & THE BIG O

I have never been a fan of Natalie Portman’s acting ability. Unlike critics who have been making comments about last year’s female performances, I do not believe she should be the odds-on favorite. I do not regard her acting in The Black Swan to be persuasive; she does not seem to emote very well and the way she talks appears to me to be one step removed from struggling both to remember her lines and to follow the director’s instructions. It seems to me she tries to rely on her appearance–which is far less than a lot of other talented actresses–to get her over. However, her outward countenance simply cannot compensate for a very shallow reservoir of talent.

Another aspect which is troubling is a condescending comportment on Portman’s part. I recall years ago when she was criticizing actresses who appear nude on screen, she insisted she would not deign to that. It was not long ago that she played a stripper in Closer scarcely removing any of her underwear. Her playing of this role was not only weak, but also mocking reality. Strippers remove their clothing and their relationship to the clientele goes much further than Portman’s portrayal. Perhaps, her statement was more a reflection of her age, rather than some precocity or moral compass. Clearly, age, romance, and pregnancy removed this sexual constipation, if you will, for she engages in hetero and same-sex activity in The Black Swan, albeit Mila Kunis is more knowledgeable and bare than Portman.

Of course, I am under no illusion that the buzz about Portman’s being a shoe-in for the Oscar will not mirror reality. The unfortunate thing is that her victory will slight the many other powerful performances over the past year. I liked her words at the Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony, when she supported labor. I glad she took advantage of the opportunity to say what she did. So, even though she did not, in my opinion, deserve to be standing there receiving the Actor for Best Actress, her real life show was par excellent!

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

WHOSE WAR IS IT NOW?

During the Presidential Campaign of 2008, candidate Barack Obama repeatedly stated that in the Executive Office and as Commander in Chief, he would search in the mountains and caves of Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden and kill him. Those words, which I heard numerous times, not only sent chills up and down my spine, but also elicited anger. They still make me cringe! I did not see the point: after all, he had been criticized for saying he would converse with so-called enemies of the United States; however, I guess killing the enemy of all our enemies was alright.

When it was announced that President Obama would be the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, my horror and ire returned. Initially I felt it must be some weird or cruel joke, for how could a person who advocated violent retaliation against another be considered a paragon of peace? As a matter of fact, he was not only advocating murder, but also escalating warfare that had clearly failed heretofore and lost its erstwhile, ostensible purpose. Obama had spent much of the second term of President George W. Bush condemning the latter’s foreign policy and diplomacy. Now, here he was proverbially talking out of both sides of his mouth by extending and intensifying the war through a surge of military combatants.

I am not certain when a current U.S. president ought to stop blaming present circumstances on the past administration and take ownership of what is happening in the nation and the world under his own term. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were, indeed, inherited by Obama—bequeathed to him by Bush and his entourage. But now we are two years past that abomination, if you will, and the continued 50,000 troops in Iraq and the nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan clearly belong to Obama. He has lowered the number in Iraq, although some U.S. soldiers are still fighting there; and he has acceded to the necessity of a surge in Afghanistan that continued the debacle of the Bush administration. This concessionary behavior emphasizes the fact Obama has purchased certain policies and made them his own.

Although I hold to a pacifist faith, I do not expect or require that posture of my political leaders. However, the greatest advocates and articulators of international law promulgated some dimension of the just war theory. Warfare is something that should never be engaged in lightly; and it should always be the last resort. It is not even arguable that our entrance into Iraq was either justifiable or the final straw, so to speak. Weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein, and Islamic feuding had absolutely nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Pres. Obama seemed fully aware of this duping of the American people from the outset. Our foray into Afghanistan within a month after the horrible attacks seemed, on the surface, to be in hot pursuit of the alleged orchestrator of 9/11—this despite the fact that the base of operation for the terrorist themselves was our ally namely Saudi Arabia!

The U.S. military had been in Afghanistan before. Apparently, the Commander-in-Chief and the Joint Chiefs of Staff should have known the nearly insurmountable challenge of ferreting out terrorists in the cavernous, mountainous terrain would not achieve the goal of breaking up Al-quaeda and gaining the corporation of the Taliban. By perpetuating this folly, Obama must now own whatever course of action is taken under his watch. If withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan actually takes place in July without a concomitant redirection of foreign policy, then Obama is only engaging in cosmetic surgery without having made a precise diagnosis.

This October will mark the tenth anniversary of war against terror in Afghanistan. Better yet, it reveals some level of ineptitude over trying to find a culprit without a hint of warmness, if you will, for an entire decade! When should such a feckless pursuit end? I believe Obama’s wars—may, our wars—should come to an abrupt end!

SORRY IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

There is very little substantive discussion about affirmative action these days, because the opposition has successfully distorted the debate in a way that is fundamentally both racist and sexist. This opposition allows for the perpetuation of white-male dominance and the denial of white-female privilege, for the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action policies have been white women. Antagonists of affirmative action skew the discussion from how to address historical discrimination and oppression of categories of people—especially African Americans—to the horrible and countless rejection of white men under the specious rubric of reverse discrimination.

The inception of affirmative action related to the centuries of African slavery and the subsequent near-century of Jim Crow segregation, which existed prior to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, but became legal after the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Clearly, the purpose of affirmative action was to account for the long duration of suppression of black people in the United States by ensuring such discrimination and exploitation would not happen again. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower sought to address antidiscrimination in government contracts through executive orders, but it was President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 that pinpointed taking affirmative action to eliminate racial bias and President Johnson’s enforcement thereof with Executive Order 11246 to inject that phrase into the veins of our civilization.

The major, unfortunate problem with these renditions of antiracist hiring policy is the letter did not reflect the intent. For the mandates were not to ignore the history and refuse to make amends for egregious past wrongs; instead, they were to compensate for deliberate obstruction of employment opportunities for generations. By using language that indicated hiring should not occur with race in mind, the presidential orders created the possibility for white people to claim they were being discriminated against based on the very orders intended to improve and increase the chances of people of color to be gainfully employed! Those words, “without regard to race,” eventually became the precise impediment to redressing the historical lockout that plagued the African American population for centuries.

The arguments pleading reverse discrimination failed to appreciate past oppression. All of a sudden, opponents of affirmative action wanted to forgive the discrimination of categories of people over time by dismissing such categories in favor of individual or selfish concerns. Thus, from their vantage point, two candidates qualified for a job at a particular institution that practiced racially discriminative hiring could not now hire the black, rather than the white, applicant because of the former’s belonging to a racial category heretofore deemed unemployable by that institution. Supposedly, the white candidate would be treated unfairly by being denied employment as a member of the white race—a category nevertheless privileged over blacks for centuries! This type of thinking disrespects history and turns upside down the intent of affirmative action.

The initial executive orders did not include sex and gender as protected classes so to speak. Gender was added in 1967. With this addition, affirmative action garnered some support, because it softened singularly advantaging persons of color. By the late 1970s, however, along with the coincident white backlash after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., affirmative action was being publically lambasted and attained status with the Bakke decision, which attacked the use of quotas.

Another turning point in the affirmative action debate came with the shifting of the burden of proof from defendants to plaintiffs. Many plaintiffs seeking legal redress for being discriminated against had, as a result, to research and present the evidence with the necessary help of a costly attorney. They simply did not have the means and wherewithal to challenge unfair practices. The continuous assault against affirmative action sullies and hides the fact that institutional racism still exists in this country and employers knowingly and unwittingly perpetuate it.

Affirmative action has never been about hiring unqualified persons. It has always been about alleviating structural racism and its myriad effects by ensuring certain categories of people land jobs and get promoted as they ought and in accordance with or greater than their numbers in the local and county populations. Despite the election of a U.S. president who is biracial and self-identifies as black, and in spite of the fact that his ascendancy has provoked and elicited fantasies about a colorblind society, the terrible fact remains that paucity of opportunities available to employable people of color reveals not only that we have not yet arrived at such a society, but also that we must call into question the validity of such dream in the first place.

The past is very important, and we cannot turn a blind eye to it. The attack on affirmative action is disingenuous, at best, for it continues to dismiss not only the history of racism in the United States, but also the ongoing institutionalized oppression and exploitation of peoples of color throughout all dimensions of life. Apologizing for racism, which is the pernicious categorizing of certain people as inferior, is not enough. It requires, using Christian references, repentance, redemption, and reconciliation: in other words, to make amends to the categories of people adversely affected, to leave and never return to the dehumanizing system, and to regard each member of each category as a complete human being.

Sorry is not good enough!