interim craziness

I haven't had the chance to post in a little while, being as I was preoccupied with finding and now moving into a new apartment (in the city!), and also a lingering incomplete for class that I had to finish.

In the meantime, I'll rely, as usual, on the craziness of the American right, now seemingly undergoing either a renaissance (did someone say 'birth'?!) or a last gasp (because their demographic was rationed?) or maybe neither. I might try to devote a future post to the nonsensical contradictions that infuse this movement, but maybe I shouldn't waste anyone's time with what's obvious.

In any case, here's a week's worth of conspiracy theories. Enjoy.



ps. favorite moments
3:23 - to the chalkboard!
4:45 - pointillism!
5:52 - "all it will take is an event, or an emergency." indeed.
7:41 - things getting "scrubbed" from the internet
7:49 - "I've said before I think they're building something. I don't know what it is...I have my thoughts but there are many things that I believe that I shall not say...it's a machine of some sort, it's an exoskeleton."
8:30 - thugocracy
9:15 - "is it unreasonable...to think that this government would ask you to spy on your neighbors." why, that's not unreasonable at all...
11:45 - "I ain't gonna be a victim anymore"

oh, that was fun. btw, those are water guns people are carrying around, right?

"bargaining is the third stage of grief"

Wherein I direct you to a well-written and seemingly reasonable article about the imminent death of a public option in the health reform bill.

I also wonder about the details about moving a bill through on "reconciliation." That means something that can pass the senate with a simple majority of votes, but as I understand it, under current rules you can't create something new - like a public option - through reconciliation but instead must modify something that already exists. But I've also heard that the vice-president is in charge of making these rules so Biden could theoretically change them to allow for health care to pass the senate in its entirety. So I don't really know. It does raise the question as to whether passing a weak public option that can later be modified and strengthened through reconciliation might be a way to go, or if we should stay strong, whatever that means.

Or maybe we can just abolish the filibuster.

Curry

This feels like something of a tangent (from what?), but I thought of it today so I thought I would post it. It might be edifying. One of my long standing pet-peeves is the word 'curry'. 'Curry', as will be shown, is a colonial neologism that is as vague as it is inauthentic. Currently it seems to refer to any 'soupy' Indian dish, or more generally any dish that uses a mix of spices, and so, practically, to all of "Indian" cuisine (by which most people mean Punjabi cuisine). And also to Thai food, for some reason.


Let us look into the history of the word, shall we:

Most people in the world today know what a curry is - or at least think they do. In Britain the term ‘curry’ has come to mean almost any Indian dish, whilst most people from the sub-continent would say it is not a word they use, but if they did it would mean a meat, vegetable or fish dish with spicy sauce and rice or bread...

The origin of the word itself is the stuff of legends, but most pundits have settled on the origins being the Tamil word ‘kari’ meaning spiced sauce. In his excellent Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson quotes this as a fact and supports it with reference to the accounts from a Dutch traveler in 1598 referring to a dish called ‘Carriel’. He also refers to a Portuguese cookery book from the seventeenth century called Atre do Cozinha, with chilli-based curry powder called ‘caril’...

The one thing all the experts seem to agree on is that the word originates from India and was adapted and adopted by the British Raj. On closer inspection, however, there is just as much evidence to suggest the word was English all along...

In Richard II’s reign (1377-1399) the first real English cookery book was written. Richard employed 200 cooks and they, plus others including philosophers, produced a work with 196 recipes in 1390 called ‘The Forme of Cury’. ‘Cury’ was the Old English word for cooking derived from the French ‘cuire’ - to cook, boil, grill - hence cuisine...

The development of the curry industry in Britain has been peculiarly Anglo-Asian such that many people brandish ‘authenticity’ as if it were the Holy Grail. According to Camellia Panjabi “Ninety nine per cent of Indians do not have a tandoor and so neither Tandoori Chicken nor Naan are part of India’s middle class cuisine. This is even so in the Punjab, although some villages have communal tandoors where rotis can be baked. Ninety five per cent of Indians don’t know what a vindaloo, jhal farezi or, for that matter, a Madras curry is”.

Another, similar account:

The notion of a curry is what the British during their rule in India referred to when eating spicy food. Indians in India would never have used the word curry to describe all sorts of dishes. They would use individual names reflecting the regional variations of countless curry dishes. The British in India created their own spicy dishes which were diluted versions of original recipes that the cooks were ordered to make to suit European tastes...

Every social event paid special attention to the food and the British Memsahibs ran households that included chefs and cooks. Many of them were highly trained to cater for the western palate...

Also with more and more people from the sub-continent coming to live in the UK, there was a surge in popularity for spicy cuisine. There was an influx of people from the Indian sub-continent coming to live in the UK who were Commonwealth immigrants welcomed into Europe to deal with the labour shortages that were then faced by several industries. Many Asians brought with them the exotic flavours of home. It was during this birth of multiculturalism in Britain that post war curry became a phenomenon. It is now part of the fabric of British tradition and culture and looks like it is here to stay in some form or another, be it formica topped or fine dining...

In sum, at best the word 'curry' derives from a Tamil (ie, south Indian) word referring to a specific or specific set of dishes which was taken up by colonialists and used rather liberally in general reference to any number of specific dishes throughout India, and is now used to refer is such a vague fashion to north Indian hybrid dishes made by immigrants in England. Or, interestingly, it has its origin in Britain or Europe itself.

So, given that I don't consider myself very Indian and am certainly not interested in recuperating (read: reinventing) Indian 'authenticity (read: nationalism) from the diaspora, why does the misuse or at least ignorant use of this word get under my skin so much? Part of it has to do with my annoyance (to say the least) with the failure of people in the west to understand the cultures which they appropriate. In this case it has to do with the inability of people, starting with Dutch and British, to distinguish between the many types of cuisine and the specific dishes in those cuisines. Indeed this was even extended to Thai cuisine, and made even more ridiculous by adding color prefixes ( 'red curry,' 'green curry,' etc.) Maybe I see this 'indifference' analogous to the inability of these same soldiers and traders to distinguish among the people of India (the first state-organized fingerprinting identification systems arose in India for this reason). Maybe this also reminds me, affectivly if not analytically, of the all too frequent confusion of me with almost any other person of Indian descent (I could relate many memorable incidents here, but I'll choose the time when someone in my freshmen dorm to whom I had spoken with many times came up to me one day and for some reason started a conversation about the student government, of which I was not apart. It took about 5 minutes for me to realize he thought he was speaking to a different person).

Even if I have no stake in Indian authenticity, I am still annoyed by the pretension of authenticity. I'm also uncomfortable in assigning this refusal of specificity and pretension of authenticity only to 'westerners,' more frequently known as 'white people,' which would be unfair. On the other hand, there is a colonial history here, and one aspect of these articles I find interesting is the way in which food produced in the colonies and then by colonial immigrants was developed in an imperial history spanning several hundred years. Not an innocent history, mind you, not a simple 'fusion,' but one part of a broader cultural assimilation, and now perhaps a more global assimilation. Food and cuisine is always evolving, but it is also interesting to think of it as stamped with certain power relations (now manifested by the global food industry, Monsanto and the like); this is something I'll have to research more.


ps. and what the hell is "curry-wurst"? sigh...

Our Transnational Mercenaries

One of the most, if not the most, destructive wars in European history, the thirty years war, was fought primary with mercenary armies. About 1/3 of the population of German states were decimated by free-lancing armies whose raison d'être was in fact raping and pillaging. This led, basically, to our current system of sovereign nation states, each with its own army, which eventually began to take on the structure of secular theology known as 'nationalism.' While I think overall the case that we are entering into a post-national or trans-national period of globalization is somewhat exaggerated, one interesting case is the phenomena of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. While these contractors are international corporations without ties or obligations to the nation-state from which they originate (like paying taxes...), they are also companies that are through-and-through creations of what one might prosaically call 'real america.'

When the role of these contractors is so great that their profit becomes plausible explanation for the war itself, accusations such as the ones that surfaced against Blackwater (now Xe) this week seem more business as usual than shocking exception. In case you haven't heard, they allege that Blackwater's founder Erik Prince arranged the murder of individuals who were snitching to the feds about the company, and threatened many others with violence. And that the company was involved in illegal trading of illegal weapons. And that they used child prostitutes. And that they had a vision of "christian supremacy" in which "going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game," Iraqis who were more commonly referred to by Blackwater personnel as "ragheads" or "hajiis. Personnel who used "call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades." What no one has mentioned is that Prince, who "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," bears something of a resemblance to Gary Oldman's character from The Fifth Element, the wonderfully titled Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg.



















Anyway, so, ok, maybe that list of transgressions is a little more than business as usual. But, really, if you think that, you should tell one Barack Obama, who continues to pay said company - to the tune of $20 million for August alone - for such vital services as "Air Charter for Things." Things! We must get those things to Afghanistan at once, for how would we wage war without things. Maybe things like banned ammunition that explodes after penetrating the human body. Moreover, it is likely that the 'end' of the war will likely mean a continued US presence, especially in the form of contracted personnel. We might not be there for a million years, but that's only because the US won't be around for a million years. Blackwater, on the other hand, might survive its nation's demise.

If I have a point, it is this: to whom does Blackwater/Xe owe its loyalty? They are a transnational, for-profit, mercenary army fighting a transcendental, religious war. On the other hand they seem to be staffed entirely by Toby Keith's inbred cousins. Are they children of the post-9/11 nationalist hysteria, or transnational profiteers adept at exploiting such hysteria? Would Xe mercenaries switch sides for the right price? That last one is doubtful. I don't think that Blackwater as a transnational company can escape its national roots, but at the same time these roots are in a nation that is silently discordant, a nation whose incongruities and irreducible differences are starting to show. In this context, Blackwater's trancedental war against Iraq and more local operations, say their deployment to New Orleans during Katrina, represent nation-state hegemony gone international, what one might call privatized imperialism.







ps. I'm reasonably sure that tricky is now Erik Prince's assistant as well.

blogging

To be perfectly honest with you, dear reader, I don't have a clear sense of what this blog is about, or what I'm trying to do with it. The title refers to something my friend Allison and I would say to each other while trekking around San Francisco (ie, 'working from home'). We would be talking about some random idea, one that we would likely never pursue (as is the fate with such ideas), and then say, one to the other, "that could be a thesis." One such idea was to have a blog of this title to keep track of these idle thoughts. Funny now that I must find a topic for an actual thesis. Anyway as you can see the blog has turned into this plus a reposting of other stuff I find on the internets, mostly of a political nature because that's what I do on the internets.

Which is to say the blog isn't cohesive in any sort of way. At this point, I think the 'purpose' of it is to have an escape valve from academia, a place where I can develop my writing, which will inevitably tend towards ('academic') abstraction and cultural commentary while retaining a desire at least to connect to a larger audience. But the key to develop a readership, even if those readers are mostly people I personally know, is to post frequently, and so in between longer pieces I think I will continue to relay links, videos, and stories that find interesting, with my somewhat superfluous commentary. In fact I think I read in Harper's that 94% of blogs have not been updated in the last four months. Anyway, I don't know why I'm telling you this, dear reader, as this particular post falls in neither category. Oh well.