Clarissa's Blog

I understand that it’s hard to be profound when tweeting, but does one have to be especially stupid?

After the deluge of articles, posts, comments, etc. that literally ripped Catholicism apart just in this century, I think one should not be making a fool out of oneself by claiming that nobody ever criticizes any faith but Islam.

I seem to remember that Catholics are about to celebrate their Easter (or are celebrating it now), so happy Easter, folks!

Let’s also recognize that the Jews (who are celebrating their Pesach around now) can give Muslims a huge run for their money in any competition of “Who Bellyaches About Their Religion and Its Fundamentalists the Most”. So happy Pesach, folks!

I picked up a recent issue of Times at the newsstand because there was a long article on Cuba. The piece went on and on forever, managing to say absolutely nothing while allowing the author to make some money by exploiting a theme everybody but him is interested in.

The article provided the tired old canard of a stat about Cuba’s 98% literacy rate. It always mystifies me why not a single person who joyously trots out this figure ever stops to think about its provenance. Who provided the figure? The Cuban government? The same Cuban government that is desperate to find some shred of proof that the Revolution was not a giant failure?

I remember how during the perestroika happy Western tourists started descending on the USSR.

“But why do you keep saying there are shortages of food?” they would ask with scary sincerity. “We are being offered really fantastic meals at the hotel.”

The idea that the Soviet government might not be feeding regular citizens in the same way it was catering to the tourists that it wanted to impress never occurred to them.

I’m now seeing the same thing happen in Cuba. Chirpy Westerners stay at expensive hotels, eat and drink just like they do back home, and then post gushy accounts on Facebook of how Cuba’s poverty was all nasty propaganda because there are like, totally luxurious resorts all over the island.

I don’t subscribe to the school of criticism that values authorial intention above all. The way a work of art impacts me is of a greater interest than what the author might have wanted. And this stone pleases me.

Here are also some spring flowers:

Not as patriotic as the stone but still pretty.

The Kremlin is flipping out in a major way over the US-Iran deal.  Even just to stick it to Putin, it would make sense to ensure the deal happens.

And it’s not only that the Kremlin fears that the oil prices will continue to stagnate if the deal is made. Russia sees the Middle East as one more of their “areas of influence” (and I cringe even to use this Putinoid terminology). Any departure from the US being massively hated in the region bugs the Kremlin to no end.

So the way the author of Europe’s Angry Muslims explains the 2005 riots in the French banlieues is the following. The banlieuesards rioted, he says, because, as the representatives of the nascent global underclass that was being left behind by the withdrawal of the nation-state, they wanted to provoke the nation-state into manifesting itself. They needed evidence that the nation-state still exists.

And the nation-state state they were trying to conjure was France.

The riots stopped when the nation-state finally did show up in the slums and even promised that there’d be a new labor law that would somewhat relax the harsh legislation in France that keeps a few lucky workers in amazing lifetime jobs while destroying the very notion of a career for everybody else.

That new legislation, however, never came into existence because every French person who was delusional enough to believe that those cushy lifetime jobs would go to him or her personally came out in a massive wave of protests. And that’s many very delusional folks.

Since the citizens so openly and massively walked out of their commitment to the nation-state, the nation-state responded in kind. So now there are no jobs for anyone.

What does this have to do with Muslims, you’ll ask? Only that , as immigrants, they were by nature more sensitive to not finding a nation-state and freaked out, trying to get it back. But there is no Islam in this story because it failed to show up.

Is anybody still wondering why I dig this book?

People, the blog turned 6 yesterday, and I didn’t even notice. 2,800,000+ hits, a crazy number of posts and comments, readers from every country in the world, and, I insist, the best group of regular commenters anywhere. This April Fool’s Day joke of six years ago has been very serious for quite a while.

Let’s celebrate the bloggiversary and our collective achievement with a traditional Q&A session. You ask me anything you want and I answer.

Scroll down for new posts because I’m making this one sticky.

And now Putin is threatening the NATO with nuclear strikes not only over the Crimea but also over the Baltics.

And I mean, why not? This threat worked beautifully when he easily got the US to go back on Budapest accords and allow Russia to annex the Crimea a year ago. So why not continue with such a winning strategy?

I’m reading Europe’s Angry Muslims: The Revolt of The Second Generation, and it’s really good. There is very impressive research behind it, I’m spotting no idiocies at all, and I’m learning some really eye-opening stuff. The author makes it very clear that different Muslim communities in different European countries are, in fact, very different, and it’s absolutely crucial not to generalize. And there is not a single whiff of “Islam makes people violent” or, actually, “Islam makes people anything” crap, which is rare and hugely refreshing.

I’m only about 15% in at this point, but one curious insight I want to share in order to create some suspense for my forthcoming Book Notes post on the book is the following. The author argues (based on a plethora of information) that one big reason why the young European Muslims are getting radicalized, turning towards fundamentalist trends in Islam, putting on head-coverings, etc. is because this is their way to try to break the patriarchal hold their families have on them. Before it becomes a revolt against the European societies where they find themselves, it is a revolt against their religiously more lax and secularized parents. For instance, one girl in France who made a huge scandal with her hijab and with how crucial it was for her to have it on is a daughter of a Jewish man and a non-veiled Muslim woman. And there are many more cases of young people who became fundamentalist terrorists after growing up in families who practice Islam in as lax a way as the rest of the French, for instance, practice Catholicism or Judaism.

Reader Cliff Arroyo left an interesting comment:

It is true that the “men and women are different!!!!” is often code-speech for the meta-message:

I treasure my emotional problems and intend to use them as an excuse to act in a horrible self-centered way and if you protest I’m going to get hysterical and/or violent.

On the other hand, no society exists that doesn’t socialize the sexes differently and it’s not clear what the benefits of taking that approach would be.

There would be no benefits, Cliff is absolutely right. Identities allow people to alleviate the burden of living in a complex, incomprehensible world. And that’s fine. We all use identities to make our lives easier.

So I’m not advocating that we all move away from identities. All I want is for more people to begin to understand that identities are artificially created and are only good inasmuch as they make things better for us. We should control the identities and not vice versa. All that’s needed is to generate a little bit of a critical distance from identities.

For instance, I have warm and fuzzy feelings when I see a Ukrainian flag and I’m choked with tears when I hear the Ukrainian anthem. But I’m fully aware that this response was conditioned in me. This was created artificially and purposefully by someone other than me. I’m letting it exist because I’m in control of these feelings and only let them exist while they benefit me. The “me” is not subjugated to the identity. And that’s my only goal in what identities entail.

Taking gender identities as an example, if a guy is into sports, cars and track suits because he was told that this is what guys do, good for him. But if the same guy takes this manufactured identity so seriously that he doesn’t go to a doctor and shortens his life span as a result, that is taking it too far. Or, if a woman is into makeup, frilly dresses, and spas, that’s fantastic. I’m that woman, and let me tell you, it’s fun. But if I hated all this stuff and tried to force myself into it because I take the identity script too seriously, that would not be good. 

Just a little critical distance, that’s all I’m asking for.