Robert Sharp

The state legislature of Vermont has just voted to extend the right to marry, to homosexual couples.  Meanwhile in Iowa, the state supreme Court has ruled that denying gays the right to marry is unconstitutional.   If you believe Andrew Sullivan, then the floodgates have opened in America and gays are finally nearing the promised land that is  full equality.  However, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight predicts that it will take a little longer for some of the deep south states to vote in favour.  His model says that Mississippi would not liberalise until 2024.

Predictably, there is a backlash from the socially conservative segment in American society.  The most intellectually inept I have seen comes from Michael Savage at WorldNet Daily:

There is a rising tide of pink fascism in this country, and it comes as a result of the election of Barack Hussein Obama.

The I think the ‘Hussain’ meme, which implies that the President is a secret Muslim, offers increasingly diminishing returns.  That some columnists in America are still earnestly deploying it is quite, quite sad.  However, to use it in the same sentence as the ‘pink fascism’ slur makes no sense whatsoever.

Here’s a post I’ve just had published over at Comment is Free.  Later, I will post a selection of the comments I’ve received there.

Credit where its due: The Way of the Blogs is hardly a new idea.  It was much discussed back in the ‘04 when people in the UK were starting to take notice of online debate.  More recently, it was discussed at one of English PEN’s round-tables that we held as part of our ongoing inquiry into UK libel laws.

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There was some depressing news from Geneva last week, as the UN Human Rights Council voted to adopt a resolution on “defamation of religions”. Although the resolution is non-binding, and does not compel any state to change its laws, it does lend authority to those in countries around the world who wish to clamp down on criticism of religion.

Here in the UK, English PEN’s No Offence campaign in 2005 successfully ensured that religious defamation laws remained off the statute books, and that blasphemy laws are a thing of the past (thank God). Such laws are bad for freedom of expression, of course, but in seeking to shield adherents from criticism of their faith, they ultimately weaken religion, too.

However, when religion comes under attack, the alienation and marginalisation felt by believers is real. How can they achieve redress for a perceived offence, without resorting to censorship, or its kid brother, the boycott?

I think there is a lesson to be learnt from blogs. Despite the robust nature of much of the debate online, I do perceive a sort of online Omerta, a Way of the Blogs. This states that if you have been offended or disrespected online, you can always fight your corner by setting up a counter-blog somewhere else. The idea is that you do not attempt to suppress the offensive material, legally or otherwise, but instead use the same medium to counter and debunk it.

Offline, a recent example from the US, shows this spirit in action. The Jewish organisation Theatre J, based in Washington DC, has been staging readings of Caryl Churchill’s controversial Seven Jewish Children, despite many people branding the play anti-semitic (Comment is Free has already discussed this point at length). Director Ari Roth says he doesn’t endorse the play, but feels the playwright’s language has some resonance: “So many of the lines resonate not with the language of hate, but with the language of perception.”

Roth denies that he is engaging in a form of self-flagellation, because Theatre J’s staging was not done so uncritically. He commissioned two new pieces that engage with Churchill’s text, entitled Seven Palestinian Children and The Eighth Child. Ultimately, what Theatre J has done is to appropriate Churchill’s play. They have mirrored its style in new works, subverting it in order to advance an alternative world view. The quick and impromptu way they have done so seems to me to be very much a 21st century act, reminiscent of the mash-ups, parodies and rebuttals at which internet culture excels. Not so different from The Way of the Blogs after all.

So, staging someone’s play, singing their song, or telling their story, is not necessarily an act of endorsement. Sometimes it can be a broadside attack on a particular orthodoxy. Appropriation and mutilation of art is an act of rebellion, a well-established weapon of the disenfranchised. To give two other examples: I am reminded of Angela Carter’s feminist reworking of traditional fairy tales; and the sampling and looping that is an inherent feature of urban music such as hip-hop. Those who found Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Behzti offensive, or those who were upset by Jyllands-Posten’s provocative Mohammed cartoons, could and should have responded in a similar manner. New digital technology makes this cheap and easy.

But why engage? Why should religious communities have to dignify such attacks from a secular majority that is intent on insulting them at every turn? The answer is simple: art and culture evolves through conflict. Failure to engage leads a culture to stagnation, irrelevance, and finally, death. Religious defamation laws will strangle the very communities they seek to protect. Only raw and offensive free expression can offer salvation.

(Comment at Comment is Free)

At the fantastic and soon-to-be-essential techPresident, there’s a post on a new technological openness from Congressional Republicans.  Although their site at GOP.gov carries pretty run-of-the-mill content, it actually has an extremely substantial API.  For non-technophiles, the API is the Application Programming Interface, and gives all the information that programmers would need to interact with the site, and - crucially - to pull data from it.  Nancy Scola notes that people have been wondering what the Obama Administration has in store for the whitehouse.gov site, and suggests that a robust API may be more important than ensuring that there are enough photos of the Obama’s for us to gawk at ( abug-bear from a few days ago).

And that raises the idea that for all the attention we’ve been paying whitehouse.gov, maybe thinking about the White House site as a destination is just wrong-headed. The focus should instead, perhaps, be on pushing clean data — and the engagement it can fuel — out from the White House , in the hopes of creating “government everywhere.”

Its Big Brother in reverse.  A robust API removes another barrier to scrutinizing the government and legislators, something that will become ever more important as President Obama begins to spend the $800 billion or so in his ‘”fiscal stimulus” package, and the Senators and Representatives start to vote on any number of issues.  There will be no escape!

I do think that the very fact of more information in the public domain will increase the trust people have in politicians, precisely because there is less room for obfuscation and drastically reduced room for corruption and misconduct.  As I’ve noted previously, a Governmental cover-up is always worse, and much more annoying, than a Governmental cock-up.  We saw an example of this earlier in the week, where President Obama made a swift mea culpa when it turned our that two cabinet nominees had not been vetted properly, and not paid their taxes.  An early admission neutralises the story.

It also goes some way to restoring the trust that has been lost through the cock-up.  Why? Because it avoids the possibility that Government spokespeople will have to engage in the sort of verbal and logical gymnastics, the mongering of letter-but-not-the-spirit technicalities, that characterised the Bush administration… and which still plagues New Labour.

Philip Blond’s interesting cover essay for this month’s Prospect, ‘Rise of the Red Tories’, advocates a new form of Conservatism for David Cameron, centred around the Tories’ new thinking on social issues (I’m going to be as radical a social reformer as Margaret Thatcher was an economic reformer says Cameron). Blond says the consensus that has emerged in British Politics - socially liberal-left, economically liberal-right - has failed on both fronts. The vice-versa, which would be a social conservatism alongside a leftist economy, seems a rather chilling prospect to my mind, but Blond thinks that an alternative could be to push through a full-blooded new localism which works to empower communities:

[Cameron] could start with four task: re-localising our banking system, developing local capital, helping normal people gain new assets and breaking up big business monopolies.

I suppose the emphasis on market forces (albeit at the local level) makes this a nominally right-wing policy, but with an emphasis on local, community ownership and assets, its not immediately clear to me why these ideas couldn’t be labelled left wing instead (indeed, I assume that confusion is why the article is illustrated with a graphic of Thatcher-as-Che). Yes, Conventional Wisdom would have it that a Labour Party under the Authoritarian Gordon Brown would not adopt such policies. But on the other hand, these ideas seem to be precisely the sort of wings that Hazel Blears’ Community Empowerment agenda requires, to get it off the pages of think-tank reports, and into actual communities.

Meanwhile, The Economist reports on ‘For-profit activism’, that is, harnessing the power of social networking to build-up buying power, to bend markets in favour of socially acceptable or environmentally friendly businesses.

Residents of San Francisco have been signing up enthusiastically for a new green-energy campaign called 1BOG. Short for “one block off the grid”, it aims to convince homeowners to switch to solar energy one block at a time, by organising them into buying clubs. Members get a discount on solar panels, and typically try to get their neighbours to sign up too. The city has also seen several recent examples of Carrotmobs—crowds of activists who buy everything in the winning shop in a contest between retailers to be the greenest.

As the article notes, we’ve seen these sorts of enterprises before, from the Body Shop, to Bono’s RED iPods, to Fair Trade Labelling, to the expensive soaps and hemp shirts you find in charity catalogues. Only this time, its local.

However, I would note a fundamental difference. On the national level, the kind of eco-friendly, ethical capitalism has found a niche within the retail economy. It has become successful, and crucially, normalised. On the other hand, the Carrotmobs and 1BOG seem to be one-off gimmicks. Indeed, the latter only works because a large company subsidises it as part of a marketing campaign. Its almost as if those people who are actually spending the money to make this work are participating in a leisure activity, rather than an everyday participation in a market that could sustain the local economy. We won’t be able to herald the coming of a ‘new localism’ until this sort of thing can arise and sustain itself without being shepherded by a well-meaning entrepreneur, or subsidised as part of a pilot scheme. Its not clear from these examples that this is possible.

Via Blattman, by way of Sides and Sullivan, an interesting piece of research on how the slave trade had an impact down the generations:

we show that individuals whose ancestors were heavily threatened by the slave trade today exhibit less trust in neighbors, family co-ethnics, and their local government. (pdf)

This reminds me of several things.  The first is the debate between Alan Keyes and Barack Obama in 2004, when they contested the Illinois Senate seat that Obama eventually won by a landslide.  Keyes essentially accused Obama of being “not black enough“:

Barack Obama and I are of the same race, but we are not of the same heritage. And there is a distinction. Race is something physical. Heritage is something that may have an element that is physical or biological, but that also includes other elements of history and experience–the kinds of things that have helped to shape the mind and heart of an individual and that are not determined by physics and biology. And we are of different heritages. I’m of a slave heritage, and he is not.

Although Keyes was right to make the distinction between heritage and race, he was wrong to think it had any electoral relevance.  And in the light of the Harvard research, it looks like he was wrong about the extent of the differences between his and Obama’s heritage.   Even if Obama, through his father, is not of slave descent, he is however from a people from whence slaves were drawn.  And that brings with it similar social problems to bona fide slave children (as Keyes would have it).

Second, I’m reminded incidentally of the correlation between the counties that voted blue (i.e. Democrat) last November, and the cotton picking regions of mid-nineteenth century America.

Thirdly, I’m reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s formulation: “We are the heir of all ages”.

Which in turn allows me to ponder the idea of ancestor worship, popular in many African cultures.  Taken literally, the idea that your forebears might be watching you seems like an irrelevant and primitive idea.  However, seen through the prism of the Harvard research, the idea of being haunted by your country’s collective past takes on a new and very real meaning.  The unease of great-grandparents long-since buried, still festers in the soul, and it cannot be excised by education, science or modernity.

Is it hard to make fun of Obama?  Chris Rock:

He’s just one of those guys, you know, like Will Smith. There’s no Will Smith jokes. There’s no Brad Pitt jokes. You know, what are you going to say? “Ooh, you used to have sex with Jennifer Anniston. Now you have sex with Angelina Jolie. You’re such a loser.” What do you say? “Ooh, your movies are big. You make $20 million.” There’s nothing to say about Brad Pitt. [And with Obama] it’s like “Ooh, you’re young and virile and you’ve got a beautiful wife and kids. You’re the first African-American president.” You know, what do you say?

Not so, Chris, not so. Jon Stewart (until recently labelled as Obama’s Fawner-In-Chief) has resumed the satire.  And a good thing too.

Update: Other Inaugural Addresses

While Stewart compares Obama to George W. Bush, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight thinks that the new President’s speech had echoes of FDR.

Elsewhere, a MetaFilter user has located inaugural addresses dating back to 1901 (via Kottke). Watching at the Kennedy speech, I’m struck by how his delivery matches Obama’s on Tuesday. Neither “soar” in the manner we saw in Obama’s 2004 convention speech. Instead they seem businesslike and assertive, which is probably more appropriate. In fact, Kennedy’s delivery doesn’t age well - the parody of his style by Dan Castellaneta as Mayor Quimby in the Simpsons sadly damages the gravitas, I feel.

It strikes me that we may actually have seen the last of Obama’s barnstorming speeches. They were appropriate for a young, upstart candidate seeking to break a glass-ceiling and an establishment lock on the nomination. Less so for a President, who must exercise greater caution, diplomacy and tact than the Average Joe Politician.

The buoyancy of the President’s daughters, Malia and Sasha, at the inauguration yesterday, was refreshing and delightful. Its fashionable to lament the fact that children “grow up too quickly these days.” Its becoming equally as fashionable to note the innocence of the Obama girls in the midst of the overwhelming pomp of campaign, transition, and inauguration.

Especially noteworthy, bizarre yet endearing, was Malia’s insistence on taking digital photos of the event with her consumer camera (appallingly, though not unsurprisingly, E! Magazine has wondered aloud about how much those pictures would be worth). Most hilarious was the moment, right after her father’s speech, when she leant forward and asked the old man sitting in front to take a photo of the crowd, because he clearly had a better view. It was Joe Biden, the new Vice-President.

Meanwhile, a defining image of the inauguration for me was the sight of thousands of other citizens all stretching to capture the moment on their own cameras, phones and camcorders, something like this:

This sort of image will become, has become, commonplace.  I think this obsession with recording significant moments for ourselves is fascinating.  Malia and The Crowd had two utterly different viewpoints on the proceedings, yet both exhibited the same urge.  In both cases, there is an irrationality to their actions.  The inauguration was long known to be one of the most reported events in the history of news media.  On one level, its absurd that the First Daughter would need to actually press the shutter herself - the image of her father raising his hand will persist without her (I noted athletes doing a similar thing during the Olympics).  Likewise, its absurd that the grainy figure of Obama raising his hand in a wave, as he strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue, will not be similarly recorded in high-resolution, extreme close-up, by hundreds of professionals.

And yet, I’m as guilty of this as the next man.  For example, was my recently posted photo of Gordon Brown at all necessary?  To no-one but me, I would suggest.

And that, I suppose, is the answer.  Contrary to what the reporters at E! Magazine might hope, Malia’s photos are not for public consumption.  They are a personal aide memoir (much like this blog).  The camera-phone photos, poor quality, though they may be, server as a document to one’s presence of the event, a self-generated certificate of attendance.  The grainier the better, to the extent that poor picture quality actually becomes a mark of authenticity.

Update

ChicagoSuz, a commenter at Huffington post:

Weegee (my favorite photographer) would go to a fire and while all the other photogs were taking pictures of the flames, he would take pictures of the fire’s victims watching their homes burn. That seems to be what Malia is doing. While the media focuses on her Dad, she seems to be focusing on the people who came to see him. It’s a whole different perspective.

Update II

Here’s the sort of image I mean.  The glow from the digital camera screens looks like fireflies:

This seems appropriate to me, as it does to many other people too:

Note how he seems almost in a trance at the end.

Welcome, President Obama.

To mark the inauguration, and let us hope a more nuanced and optimistic USA, here’s a strangemap of America’s state mottos:

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight fame dissects the demographics of the recent US elections in Esquire:

If Bill Clinton was the first black president, then Barack Obama might be the first urban one. He is the only American president in recent history to seem unembarrassed about claiming a personal residence in a major American city.

And the future of America is urban, with populations in cities growing much faster than in the reliably Republican rural areas.  They’re also easier to canvas.

During the election campaign (or was it the Primary campaign, its all a bit of a blur), Obama’s one gaffe was to pity rural voters who “cling to religion and guns.”  He was universally panned at it threatened to compartmentalise him as a candiate without mass appeal.  The gaffe went through several news cycles.  Meanwhile, John McCain and Sarah Palin spent their entire campaign proudly drawing a distinction between urban elites and the so-called “real” America in the rural areas.  At the time, it seemed to be your normal, run-of-the-mill Republican campaign rhetoric.  With hindsight, it was one huge gaffe.

Update

Just remembered this link, which describes the “Bittergate” gaffe, how it came to be reported, and the tough decision taken by the ‘citizen journalist’ who reported it.

“A candidate should never play political scientist”