Sorry, the review will be long because the novel is profound and offers a lot to think about. 

When my students pout that I “hurt their feelings” or “made them feel stupid” by correcting their Spanish grammar in class or in their papers, they exhibit the typical consumerist philosophy of life. A consumer believes that if s/he paid for education (with money or the fact of enrollment), this purchase, just like any other object of consumption, should bring nothing but uniform, unbroken pleasure. When a purchase results in anything other than pleasure, consumers revolt. 

Consumers bring the same approach to interpersonal relationships. It’s impossible to create a profound, meaningful bond with another human being without exposing oneself to a certain amount of unpleasantness, conflict, incomprehension, compromise, anger, pain, etc. Profound relationships can’t be built with objects, only with human beings whose full humanity you are willing to accept and accommodate. 

Consumers, however, can’t tolerate compromise or conflict with their purchases. They flit from one lover, friend, boss, co-worker, etc. to another in search of a uniformly pleasing, ego-stroking relationship. All they manage to encounter is a series of superficial, disappointing contacts that never manage to provide them with the Hallmark tableau of endless bliss that they seek.

François, the protagonist of Michel Houellebecq’s best-selling novel Submission is precisely this kind of pouty consumer. At the age of 44, he feels useless, lonely and sad because all he has in his life is a long procession of indifferent, uncaring lovers with whom he fails to establish any sort of a fulfilling bond.

Like a typical consumer, François never conceives of the possibility that the reason for his loneliness might lie inside himself. If the goods – that is, women in his life – fail to satisfy, there must be a design flaw in the goods. François decides that the reason why women can’t provide him with a family, love, a strong emotional bond, great sex and wonderful cooking is that. . . they work and working exhausts them so much that they have no energy left to fulfill all these functions.

François is not an idiot. He is a university professor and a very well-read man. However, he is so overpowered by consumerism that he fails to observe how bizarre his explanations of his own unhappiness are. For instance, François argues that the only truly sexual women are those who live in Saudi Arabia because they really don’t have to work and can save all their energy for sex.

When life doesn’t work out the way commercials promise it should, consumers begin to look for a “happy pill” that they can buy to make themselves feel better. François searches for his “happy pill” everywhere he can: at a Catholic convent, in the apartments of prostitutes he hires, at the house of his polygamous Muslim colleague, in an endless succession of restaurants and bars, etc.  

The real tragedy of the novel is not that the pill which François buys is called “Islam” (as opposed to “Christianity”, “nation-state”, “humanism” or “pink elephants with blue spots”), as many of this book’s reviewers suggested, but that his incapacity to awaken from the consumerist slumber of reason prevents François from abandoning the search for a “happy pill” altogether.

Western journalists are truly something special. The following photo with the caption you can see has been making the rounds on English-speaking websites:

Crimea without power from Ukraine after electricity pylons ‘blown up’|

Why a Russian senator’s opinion on the Ukrainian pylons should be valuable is not clear. What is even less clear is what exactly is preventing the journalists reporting the story from noticing something that looks very much like a flag tied around the base of the pylon. One might even expect a responsible journalist to find out which group this flag represents ( a hint: not Ukrainian nationalists) and maybe even discover who and why is most interested in liberating the Crimea from the Russian occupation.

If we allow our imaginations to suggest that some really professional journalists might exist somewhere on the planet, we could even expect such journalists to discover what exactly forced the group represented by this flag to blow up the pylons now and not, say, two months before or after.

But no, that would be too much work. It’s easier to ask a Russian senator, a cow in the field, or a bunch of tea leaves what is happening.

To begin today’s festivities, a couple of entertaining but true factoids about Russia.

1. In Russia, anybody who mentions ISIS in a public context is obligated by law to follow the word “ISIS” with “a terrorist organization that is banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.” In Russian, this sounds even more clunky than in English. Imagine what poor TV journalists and commentators have to go through when they do news segments on ISIS. The endless repetition of this formula has a hypnotic effect and, at this point, nobody hears anything but the formula.

2. The Russian Parliament (called “The Duma”) has a committee dedicated to the defense of Christian values. Yes, seriously. But wait. It gets better. The committee is chaired by an MP who belongs to the Communist Party. Yes, seriously. But wait. It gets better. This Communist / defender of Christian values suggested that Russia take Hagia Sophia away from Turkey. Since Hagia Sophia is located in Istanbul, this must mean an invasion of Turkey by Russia, but hey, when Christian-Communist values demand an invasion, an honest MP cannot resist.

One of the most entertaining traditions of American Thanksgiving is the yearly deluge of posts, articles, and videos that, in a tone of outraged, puritanical virtue, inform everybody that the pilgrims and the natives were not all warm and fuzzy with each other, history textbooks and Thanksgiving stories don’t communicate “The Truth,” and “this country started with murder.”

Of course, “invented traditions” lie at the basis of every nation-state on the planet and there is no country that avoided bloodshed in the process of coming into existence, but these pesky little facts don’t flatter the American sense of exceptionalism. Turkey and sweet potato pie go down so much better when one can imagine oneself as the baddest baddie of all baddies.

Russians retaliated against Turkey today by hitting a Turkish humanitarian aid convoy that was moving from Turkey to Aleppo. The convoy was attempting to bring humanitarian aid to a refugee camp. It was hit just as it crossed Turkey’s border.

Russian bomber jets hit the convoy, killing seven and wounding ten people. Twenty of the trucks that composed the convoy burned to the ground.

Killing humanitarian aid is a very Russian method of conducting warfare.

People, a GREAT article by Slavoj Zizek on the refugees. In brief, Zizek argues that the Left should get over many of its ridiculous hangups because they are boring and counterproductive. Examples:

1. Abandon the idiotic idea of “freedom of movement” for refugees.

2. Drop the ridiculous  anti-Eurocentrism. What we need is more Eurocentrism, not less.

3. Stop blabbing stupidly about how “the West is to blame for ISIS.”

4. Criticizing Muslim fundamentalists is a noble endeavor. Stop using the bugbear of Islamophobia to shut down any discussion of the evilness of these fundamentalists.

5. If people want to come to Europe, they should be forced, yes, forced, by law if necessary, to accept the European norms and freedoms such as women’s rights and gay rights.

6. Drop the obnoxious S&M dynamic that Westerners so love and that Zizek describes as follows:

The more Western Europe will be open to [the refugees], the more it will be made to feel guilty that it did not accept even more of them. There will never be enough of them. And with those who are here, the more tolerance one displays towards their way of life, the more one will be made guilty for not practicing enough tolerance.

7. Stop treating immigrants as subhuman and hence immune from legal and moral norms being applied to them. This insanity was manifested, for instance, in the Left’s incapacity even to verbalize what happened in Rotherham:

What is not acknowledged is that such anti-racism is in effect a form of covert racism since it condescendingly treats Pakistanis as morally inferior beings who should not be held to normal human standards.

In short: yes, OF COURSE, Western value of women’s rights, sexual freedom, representative democracy and welfare state are vastly superior to anything that exists anywhere in the world. They are not superior in the sense of “Let’s go kill someone to make them happy against their will” but they are superior in the sense of “Can’t respect and uphold our Enlightened values? Proceed to the exit immediately.”

I don’t know about New Jersey and dancing in the streets, but on 9/11 I was at a café in front of my apartment building in Montréal, and the patrons of the café who were overwhelmingly Muslim men were watching the footage of the Twin Towers with smiles, good cheer and obvious enjoyment.

In all fairness, however, before I witnessed that, I had already heard non-Muslim people from Canada, Spain, Mexico, Australia and Uganda express contentment at the attacks.

One of my biggest surprises on that day was how alone I felt in my shock and outrage over what happened. I found out about the attacks in class but it took me a while to believe the story because it was delivered in such playful, smug tones and with such outlandish commentary that I thought people were trying to be funny. It was unbelievable that this sort of news could be delivered in such a comedic way.

I hadn’t been to the US at that time and had maybe only met a couple of Americans, so I couldn’t understand the reaction. But now I have had many opportunities to find out that Americans have a tendency to adopt one of two attitudes when they engage with the world:

1. Self-satisfied, self-congratulating, condescending superiority that drives people nuts.
2. Self-deprecating, drama-queenish condemnation of everything American that leads people to think, “Hey, if Americans say they are such bastards, then maybe they are.”

None of these attitudes generate a lot of goodwill.  This doesn’t cancel out the fact that the people who were behaving like jerks on 9/11 were, indeed, jerks. I hate them, they are all jerks, OK?

But, Americans, you are not making it easy to love you as a group (as opposed to individually, given that you are the most personable and easy to like as individuals of anybody I know.) Find a different collective narrative to engage with the world, shall you? I believe you deserve a more nuanced identity than the inelegant “We are the best / the worst.”

The best way to be really unhappy at work is to integrate the job into your identity.

Happy workers go to work (metaphorically speaking, because many people work from home) in order to do their job, get paid and then go home.

Unhappy workers go to work to feel a certain way, experience a certain range of emotions, and foster a certain sense of self. And in this way, they set themselves up for disappointment and heartache because a sense of self can’t be found at work and brought home. It has to be carried around inside one and brought to work or anywhere one goes.

Look, folks, I love my job more than any other academic I know. I love everything about it – the students, the colleagues, the campus, the research. I don’t like the governor of Illinois but he’s only part of academia inasmuch as he’s part of the state where my piece of academia happens to be located at the moment.

However, I’m not my job. I’m not emotionally or existentially attached to it. If for whatever reason I couldn’t be an academic any longer, this would not impact my sense of self. Because the sense of self does not reside at work. It resides inside me.

If you are younger than me and have no idea what I’m on about, that’s fine. This comes with age in most, except for some very fortunate and psychologically healthy, people.

In the meanwhile, Russia is going to give Iran 7 billion dollars as a gesture of good will (translation: “please, like us more than Americans”). This is happening in the midst of a severe economic crisis caused by the drop in oil prices and aggravated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and later Syria.

While we are all busily searching for more opportunities to feel outraged on the subject of refugees, the situation is being used by all kinds of folks to sneak by measures that will benefit them:

A leaked recording made of a conference call posted by the Edison Electric Institute, which lobbies for the power industry, reveals lobbyists for high pollution talking about how they can exploit the Syrian refugee crisis to get a rider inserted into a pending bill that would kill the EPA’s Waters of the United States rule, which protects America’s waterways from pollution.

The participants on the EEI call appeared eager to use the refugee fight to distract the administration.

Didn’t I say from the very start that the refugee drama is a non-issue that is being exploited for its emotional potential as a way to distract everybody from the really important stuff going on?