Year: 2013

Two recent examples spring to mind, because they are representative of the complexity of this kind of issue in a world of such staggering social and cultural change. Here’s a quote from the UKIP member of the European parliament, Godfrey Bloom, on the perils of foreign aid:

How we can possibly be giving a billion pounds a month when we’re in this sort of debt to bongo bongo land is completely beyond me.

That’s a weird formulation – aid is not debt. But the context reveals that the man’s main ire is directed at the European Union, and not just at developing countries:

Mr Bloom, who pointed out he has a Polish wife and Kashmiri staff, said that his comments were not racist. Asked by the BBC where “bongo bongo” land is, Mr Bloom referred to “Ruritania” – a fictional country in Europe that formed the setting for three novels by Anthony Hope.

Does that make him a racist or just a xenophobe? This hilarious interview – dissecting the origins of the term “bongo-bongo-land” – suggests both to me:

But I’m not sure I’d be able to prove that point beyond a reasonable doubt. Sometimes, a racist expression is so foul and unrelated to any broader context that it merits no debate – like this tirade from Eagles player Riley Cooper. The trouble is: racism is often also interwoven with all sorts of other factors. It collides with legitimate resistance to fast cultural change, xenophobia, generational attitudes, and legitimate questions, such as immigration policy, in which one side should not be deemed irrational because of an implied racist motivation. Take this explanation of Smith’s broader point:

When a country has a trillion pounds of debt and we’re cutting our hospitals, our police force and we’re destroying our defense services, that the money should stay at home and people who want to give money to worthwhile charities…what I would argue is that is for the individual citizens. It’s not for the likes of David Cameron to pick our pockets and send money to charities of his choice.

That may in some way be a reflection of racism, but it is also a legitimate political argument. And it’s hard to tackle the latter if you are constantly wrapped up in debates about the former. Then there’s the complex interaction of tradition, culture and social change. So this sure looks like racism on the surface:

But this context – a detail from a similar event in 1994 – is also important:

T.J. Hawkins rolled out the big inner tube, and the bull lowered his head, shot forward and launched into the tube, sending it bounding down the center of the arena. The crowd cheered. Then the bull saw the George Bush dummy. He tore into it, sending the rubber mask flying halfway across the sand as he turned toward the fence, sending cowboys scrambling up the fence rails, hooking one with his horn and tossing him off the fence.

What might be seen as racist in one context – because the president is black – may not be in another. What some may see as a legitimate reclaiming of sovereignty from European bureaucrats can also be motivated by bald “bongo-bongo-land” racism. This is not either-or. And if it’s not either-or, we have to make a decision as to whether to hunt for these manifestations of racism or ignore them and get on with the actual arguments at hand, regardless of their psychological motivation. I favor as a purely pragmatic measure not jumping on every incident like this to yell racism – not because it is never racist, but because that charge cannot truly be proven without peering into opaque human souls, because it diverts potentially constructive debate into moral posturing, and because it is crowding out our discourse with gotchas that don’t really advance substantive debate.

And now I’ve written an entire post about whether certain people are racists. See how the cycle continues?

The upcoming book To Be or Not to Be is an illustrated “chooseable-path adventure” version of Hamlet. Cartoonist Ryan North explains his inspiration:

“It occurred to me that [Hamlet’s] favorite speech, ‘To Be Or Not To Be’, is structured like a choice, almost like those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to write this.'” North says. So he wrote his version of Hamlet in the style of the classic children’s book series, in which the reader would be prompted to make the main character’s decisions — turn to page 3 for this, turn to page 5 for that — and take the story in many different directions.

Alison Hallett credits the Kickstarter project’s record-breaking $580,905 to North’s business savvy:

[T]hanks to North’s voluble backer updates and creative reward tiers, being a part of his campaign didn’t feel like simply preordering something, as Kickstarter so often does these days; nor did it have the faint whiff of desperation that often comes with artists asking their friends and family for money. This felt like being a part of the creative process, and having a front-row seat to an artist giddily realizing that his biggest dreams are now possible.

And she deems the result is a success:

In Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark has one of the most famous existential crises in literary history, as he ponders aloud whether suicide is worth the risk that whatever happens after death might be even worse than life itself. North’s version puts the being vs. not-being decision square in the reader’s hands, though it turns out choosing “Not to Be: turn to page 17” isn’t much of an adventure at all: It leads to artist Mike Holmes’ illustration of Hamlet chugging from a vial of poison, one pinky lifted genteelly, while Ophelia peeks from behind a curtain. There’s no sign of the terrifying death-nightmares Hamlet’s so worried about; just the words “The End.” But even asking the reader to make the decision highlights how much of the original play—and how much of life itself—revolves around possibly crazy people bumbling through situations they barely understand, possessing a fraction of the information they need to get from one scene to the next.

Keith Lowe explores how historians are increasingly reevaluating idealistic beliefs about World War II. Aaron William Moore, for instance, examines the wartime diaries of Japanese, Chinese, and American soldiers in his book Writing War:

Perhaps most disturbing of all is the way that Moore analyses the actual process of diary writing by these men. In all three countries, he reveals, the thoughts and feelings of soldiers were closely monitored by their superior officers. As a consequence the sentiments they expressed were self-policed: soldiers effectively used their diaries as a way of convincing themselves to act in the way that was required of them by the state.

The implications of this are huge, and draw a question mark over one of our strongest taboos about the war. When Chinese, Japanese or American soldiers spurred themselves on to commit acts of bravery, or atrocity, how much were they expressing their own desires and how much were they resigning themselves to things that were expected of them? Does this – can this ever – at least partially absolve them of the things they did during wartime?

The fact that we can ask such questions says as much about our own time as it does about the second world war. Perhaps we are more comfortable expressing doubt now than we were a generation ago, or even 10 years ago, when we were deeply embroiled in the black-and-white certainties of the cold war or the war on terror. Perhaps the behaviour of our armed forces today – such as the Abu Ghraib scandal – has allowed us also to ask questions about how our soldiers behaved in the past.

(Photo: The ruins of a firebombed Dresden, circa 1945, via Michael Scott Moore)

Using data from Google N-Gram, the largest database of digitized books, Edgard Barbosa created the above graphic illustrating the frequency of city names over the last two centuries. Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan comments:

First, the obvious: That English-language books tend to feature English-language cities, like New York and London. But beyond that, things get more interesting. For example, Rome starts off strong—thanks to its strong hold on the Victorian-era imagination—and peters out in contemporary times. Meanwhile, Beijing and Mumbai are nearly absent (with the exception of a few blips during the peak of Britain’s colonial reign) from the 19th century, but explode over the past two or three decades.

In another Google N-Gram study, a scholar has found that the rise of individualistic words and phrases parallels increasing urbanism over the last 200 years:

Use of the words “individual,” “self,” and “unique” all steadily rose over the course of the two centuries, while “obedience,” “authority,” “belong,” and “pray” all gradually declined. The use of the words “feel” and “emotion” also increased, reflecting “the growing importance of psychological expression,” she writes.

Greenfield does not see this as evidence of our ethical decline, but rather an entirely logical shift that reflected the realities of our new environments. In her view, a mindset that values “choice, obtaining things for oneself, child-centeredness, psychological mindedness, and the unique, individual self” is one that is more likely to thrive in an urban area.