when the status quo frustrates.

What Can I Do?

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

I’m looking for ways to volunteer in my community. The catch is, I live in Fukuoka, Japan, and my Japanese language skills, while functional for my daily life, are really not at a level where I can be useful in the same ways I could in an English-speaking country. Which is to say, I talk like a four-year-old. At least I can talk at all, but still, options. Kind of limited.

My vague thoughts on the matter run like this. I’ll get Japanese friends to help me research, and see if I can find a worthy oppression-fighting organization, and then offer my services by:

1. giving free English lessons to their activists (if it’s a group for whom this is helpful);
2. helping with childcare, if their activists rely on any kind of volunteer childcare– maybe I could even lead some free music or English classes for the kids, since, after all, teaching English to Japanese kids is my regular day job; or
3. doing anything else they think I could helpfully do.

I’m a bit stymied by my language restrictions. I’m afraid any kind of proper activism is beyond my means right now. I mean, I guess I can just ladle out soup to the homeless if need be…

Please share any other ideas you might have.

22.05.2009 Advice, Orientalism, Something you can do 8 Comments

God how I hate things that other people like

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

When I first saw Shakespeare in Love, god how I adored it. I went to see it two times in one day. And then I’m pretty sure I saw it a third time after that. The premise was just so clever! The dialogue so witty! Everything fit together so perfectly! It was utterly and completely impossible to duplicate. It was a feel-good movie that catered to smart people.

I basked in its glow for a couple of weeks. Then it started to pick up steam in the press, and with the public. By the time it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, I was so done with it. The premise was just too clever. The dialogue too witty. Everything fit together too perfectly. It was utterly and completely superficial. It was a feel-good movie that flattered people who wanted to feel like they were better than the groundlings in the pit because they actually “get” Shakespeare.

And so I find myself reliving the same pattern with Slumdog Millionaire. I absolutely loved it when I first saw it. The premise was so clever! The setting so gritty! Everything fit together so perfectly, etc, etc, etc.  In the theater where I saw it, when the movie ended, there was a moment of silence. So I started clapping… and soon, the whole audience was clapping too. 

Funny thing is, whenever I told people about it, I would point out its flaws even as I gushed. “It was WONDERFUL! I mean, it kind of bothered me how the romantic leads grew up from dark-skinned kids into light-skinned model types! And how it reinforced the fate narrative that’s fucked up India through the caste system for thousands of years! But it’s just so clever, the way the game show fits in with the story!”

Needless to say, now that it’s won Best Picture… Well. Did I say I ever liked it? I deny your slander uncategorically. It’s cotton candy. It’s the same old crappy story about people who succeed because the sky fairies want them to. And it uses the beautifully trashy slum setting to get in under the defenses of people (like me) who would normally know better. Damn. I led the clapping. Man, I feel lame now.

I really dug Mitu Sengupta’s criticisms:

It is no secret that Slumdog is meant to reflect life in Dharavi, the vast sprawl of slums at the heart of Mumbai.  The film depicts Dharavi as a feral wasteland, with little evidence of order, community or compassion.  Other than the children, the no-one is even remotely well-intentioned…

But nothing is further from the truth.  Dharavi teems with dynamism, and is a hub of small-scale industries, whose estimated annual turnover is between US$50 to $100 million.  Nor is Dharavi bereft of governing structures and productive social relations.  Residents have built strong collaborative networks, often across potentially volatile lines of caste and religion….

In the end, Slumdog presents a profoundly dehumanizing view of the poor, with all its troubling political implications.  Since there are no internal resources, and none capable of constructive voice or action, all “solutions” must arrive externally.  After a harrowing life in an anarchic wilderness, salvation finally comes to Jamal in the form of an imported quiz-show, which he succeeds in thanks only to “destiny.”  Must other unfortunates, like the stoic Jamal, patiently await their own destinies of rescue by a foreign hand? While this self-billed “feel good movie of the year” may help us “feel good” that we are among the lucky ones on earth, it delivers a patronizing, colonial and ultimately sham statement on social justice for those who are not.

Yeah. What she said.

And also that I’m a shallow wannabe hipster who can’t handle liking things that other people like.

23.02.2009 Movies, Orientalism 20 Comments

A billion dollars isn’t what it used to be…

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Red Queen has been thinking about parity:

If you or I were to rob a bank (no guns, no violence, just a scary note and the threat of violence) we’d be facing some serious jail time. But if you are a banker and you rob the treasury department with threats of violently collapsing the entire world economy, you don’t get jail time. You get TARP money. And you still get to hand out annual bonuses and bitch about salary caps.

Now if you or I had to apply for government assistance, there would be some serious investigation into our finances. If you own a car worth more than a couple thousand bucks ($5000 I think), you have to sell it and use up that money first. If you have stocks or bonds or a 401k even a prepaid funeral plan, you have to use that up first. Then maybe you can get some kind of government help. Maybe.

But if you’re a banker, and you’ve run your company into the ground, your own assets are safe. The government will not require you to sell off your vacation house and pump the proceeds back into the bank before writing a check. They won’t even require salary cuts or end bonuses (who the fuck gives out annual bonuses at failing companies anyways?)

What is absolutely fascinating to me are the cases in between– like Kazutsugi Nami, a Japanese businessman/swindler who invented a “quasi-currency” called “Enten” (円天=”money from heaven”), and after eight years of this, recently got arrested on accusations of defrauding thousands of investors of at least $1 billion (and possibly as much as $2 billion).

You can only stand slackjawed at the awesome chutzpah of sharks like this:

Moments before his arrest in front of the TV cameras, Nami was unrepentant as he held court over breakfast in a restaurant near his Tokyo office.

“Please shoot the face of the biggest conman in history,” he said, sipping from a glass of beer at 5.30am. “Time will tell if I’m a conman or a swindler. I’m leading 50,000 people. Can they charge a company this big with fraud?”

Shortly before being led away by police, he was asked if he felt sorry for his cheated investors. “No. I have put my life at stake,” he said. “Why do I have to apologise? I’m the poorest victim. Nobody lost more than I did. You should be aware that high returns come with a high risk.”

So Red Queen is right, people get locked up for stealing chewing gum but get a private island nation if they get some buddies together to steal seven or eight hundred billion dollars at a time. What’s interesting to me is that, in this new age of economic crapitude, evidently even stealing a mere billion dollars isn’t enough to save you from the slammer.

(In truth, I think that Nami’s problem wasn’t that he wasn’t scamming enough money. Even as paltry a sum as a billion dollars is surely enough to protect you, if you do it right. It’s just that that he tried to go it on his own. Gotta go through the family. If he’d funneled just 5% of that money into lobbyists, he’d still be a free man.)

20.02.2009 Economy Blues, Orientalism 2 Comments