A J&B ad campaign showed up in France a few years ago, and I again saw one of the ads today. The whisky ad features two tag lines. The first, “So British!”, is also how the local press likes to describe Kate Middleton. The second tag line translates to “Born in London, distilled in Scotland.” If Wikipedia is a guide, the second tag line holds rather true, but I always find it rather funny that a “blended Scotch whisky” would brag about its English roots (in London, no less!). I imagine someone focus grouped it rather thoroughly and learned that, for the French, everything north of la Manche is basically London. So take a Scotch whisky, add the Queen’s Guard, and you’ve got a rather confusing ad campaign that makes perfect sense to French stereotypes about their neighbors.
But Britain plays a different role in an ad I saw a few times last year while watching English TV:
Here, the image is exactly the opposite. “You can’t beat local,” explains the Plusnet spokesman, pointing out that even the call center for the broadband provider is based in Yorkshire. Considering the cliché of the call center in India, or somewhere far off where labor is cheap but divorced from some kind of exotic, “imported” otherness, it’s to Plusnet’s virtue that its call center is “down t’road.” And in this age of crisis, it suggests that Plusnet is giving the Yorkshire economy a boost by providing call center jobs it could have easily outsourced to, again, say, India.
For J&B ads in France, it’s the (near) otherness that’s the draw: the appeal is that the whisky is “so British!”, not “as French as the person viewing this ad.” This is all pretty straight forward and typical about ads. Sometimes you want the product next door. Sometimes you need to go on a walkabout to find the exotic product you want.
So what to make of this, an ad I saw on (Irish) TV this weekend:
Cobra is a “splendidly Indian” beer, we’re told. If we don’t believe the voiceover regarding the Indianness of the beer with the Portuguese name, we have the stylised “कोबरा” beside the slogan. Then there’s the ad itself. The decidedly non-nostalgic images, playing up something more on the side of Darjeeling Limited than “Chaiyya Chaiyya” (I’ll wait for you to watch the clip again for the nth time), play up some kind of Indianness much like, I guess, Heaven 17 conjure up Yorkshire. But where Heaven 17 is played for (nostalgic) laughs, the effort here is edgily sincere. Hot, sweaty India is overcome by drinking the refreshing, splendidly Indian Cobra beer.
A beer that, as we’re told in the 26th second of a 30-second spot, is “Brewed in the UK.”
To me, the spot becomes disorienting to the extreme, as, whether it succeeds or not, it’s audaciously trying to do simultaneously what both of the commercials above attempt separately. On the one hand, you have orientalized, exotic India with its inscrutable, fractured scribblings printed on the pint glass. On the other, Terry down the way works the night shift at the Cobra brewery, and whatever it takes to keep honest jobs in Blighty, innit.
Anyway, if one doubts the orientalizing nature of the ad campaign, head on over to cobrabeer.com, rewatch the ad, and “enter our competition to win a splendidly Indian adventure” (train and Wes Anderson film crew not included).
Tags: advertising, England, France, Heaven 17, India, J&B, nationalism, Orientalism, Yorkshire
My concern trollish ways got the better of me. In my previous post, on Mélenchon as a pedagogue, I expressed worry that he was serving to bring workers over from the Front national to the Front de gauche only to later have troops available to follow Mélenchon into pushing for a Hollande victory over Sarkozy in the second round.
Well, I should not have been quite as skeptical, as on Thursday, while I was distracted by a weekend holiday, Mélenchon expressed no interest in being in Hollande’s government.
Last week, the NPA asked Mélenchon to join them in resisting Hollande’s government (assuming the PS candidate is swept into power). While the two strains of the far-left may not unite in opposition, this makes me take Mélenchon more seriously than I did a mere week ago.
But I’ll wait for May 7 for further thinking about this. Let’s let Hollande win, first.
Tags: Communists, France, Front de Gauche, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste
This early February speech, by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the presidential candidate for the Front de gauche, a left-wing coalition in France, has been helpfully subtitled in English:
Jean-Luc Mélenchon Discours de Villeurbanne Eng… par kominaaa
Jean-Luc Mélenchon Discours de Villeurbanne Eng… par kominaaa
If you only have time for one part of the speech, I recommend the 35 minutes of the second part.
Mélenchon has been getting a bit of attention in the English-language press of late, largely because of his amazingly successful march on the Bastille on the anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune. This was then buoyed by his overtaking Marine Le Pen in the polls, to now be the infamous “third man” in the election.
The first round of elections is on April 22, and, should no one top 50% (very likely), then the top two performers will square off for the second round, whose polls are on May 6. It’s interesting to read the Guardian coverage, especially since it focusses so much on, for example, his anti-1%er rhetoric, like charging 100% tax on all income over 360,000€.
But the speech presents a far different man. Choosing not to rail on the rich, Mélenchon doesn’t seem like a rabble-rouser, but, rather, as a pedagogue. In comparison to, say, the State of the Union Address, which is nothing but a series of lines with the life polished out of them to cue standing ovations, Mélenchon early on tells the crowd not to cheer too much or make too much noise. There’s not enough time, he explains, to get through what he needs to do.
What he needs to do is not make promises (though he does that, too, in spectacular fashion in the second part). As he says, he has to teach his supporters, make sure they understand why they’re fighting the way they are, so that they can, subsequently, take his message to others and convince them.
It sounds a bit vanguardist, but that does not mean it’s a bad approach. Throughout, he jokes that he is criticized for being too intellectual in speeches. That’s not the case, he responds. Everyone in the audience understands perfectly well what he is saying. It’s only complicated to those, like the mainstream media that he claims ignore him, who can’t manage to listen and learn.
To my ear, at least, this pedagogical position works. It doesn’t sound patronizing. And even when, in a bravura performance of “they want intellectual? I’ll give them intellectual!”, he reads from Les Misérables on the differences between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized barbarians, the words hit home, clear as day.
The approach also suggests a mode of politics based on persuasion—moral and intellectual. He’s not whipping a bunch of stormtroopers overflowing with resentment into a hate-filled tempest. Nor are his words the tepid promises of continued stewardship, drawing support by promising the status quo. He doesn’t say, “Isn’t it crazy that they are doing this?” Instead, he teaches, “They are doing this. Here are the reasons why it is crazy.” He knows that, as a non-mainstream party politician (though not far from it), he needs to persuade. He can’t, like a (US) Republican whispering “Dred Scott” and having his audience understand “abortion,” assume too much about those listening to him. After all, they’ve not heard all this before… that’s why it is exciting!
And what is he teaching? An interesting theory merging social struggle (la lutte) with the rule of law (la loi). The low union membership in France, he explains, is not a problem, since workers do not negotiate their rights on a contractual, but rather on a legislative basis. It’s not the case, then, that one needs a strong union to negotiate with management. Better to have the state intervene and tell management that they can only have, for example, 5% of their staff on temporary contracts. That way, everyone in the working class benefits, not just the union members. The law is stronger than the contract—a profoundly anti-neoliberal formulation, where the law serves to ensure contract.
The state needs to remember its obligations to the class that makes up its largest number and are its fiercest republicans, the workers. This is not very far removed from 99% rhetoric, but it’s a different approach than the tubthumping on marginal tax rates above.
For those who have been confused in the past by why Mélenchon saves particular venom for Marine Le Pen (and it’s a rich, rewarding venom), here he explains it clearly. Le Pen and he, he believes, are fighting for the same votes—those who have been brought to ruin by politics as usual and want the little guy to have a voice for a change, not the boring suits represented by Sarkozy and the socialist candidate, François Hollande. He does not need to convince the apparatchiks of the PS to break ranks and vote for him. Similarly, the UMP voters are also out of his reach. But Le Pen’s voters… the gambit is that, if they see past the flattering sublimated racism of her political program, they’ll see that she will not actually help the working class. Mélenchon makes this point clearly by pointing out Le Pen’s plans regarding curbing abortion and getting women out of the workforce. How will these things help the working class? Mélenchon’s then adds that Le Pen, upon seeing the workers in the streets demanding no change in the retirement age, called them “rioters.” Rioters whom she now needs for electoral viability.
And so he marches on in the speech. To Le Pen’s taunts that he is a “communist,” he responds that if believing what he does makes him a communist, then, so be it, he’s a communist. He’s not afraid of the term or of what people did in another part of the world half a century ago under the name of “communism.”
But is that actually the case? Lutte ouvrière’s presidential candidate, Nathalie Arthaud, stares ahead in her campaign posters, with the text underneath that announces that she’s a communist candidate for president, implying that Mélenchon is hardly that, despite his backing by the PCF. And it would be a mistake to assume that his pedagogical tone merely masks a revolutionary spirit. His proposals sound like aggressive social democracy. His first step to help end the crisis of precarity in France, for example, would be to transform 850,000 temporary government workers into permanent employees. Not quite workers taking over the means of production, is it? (Though he does also argue that if firms are going out of business, the workers should have a right to buy it and become the owners, themselves.) On the other hand, Mélenchon’s coalition, as well as the Lutte ouvrière as well as the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste, as this article from the ICFI-backed World Socialist Web Site points out, will back Hollande in the case of his (likely) plurality in the first round, which would then earn, at least someone like Mélenchon, a nice post is Hollande’s government. No more Thalys to Brussels; Mélenchon will be able to live and work in Paris.
Not that the rallying around Hollande will be a shock. It’s nailed on. But it does force Mélenchon’s rhetoric into a sort of uncomfortable zone bordered by skepticism. He’ll never convince the neoliberal Hollande administration (even with him in it) to pursue his stated legislative agenda, much less start a Sixth Republic. But this is the problem with abandoning the revolution. You get mired in legislative coalition-building and the like.
During the regional elections two years ago, I paid little attention to Mélenchon’s coalition. The Front de gauche seemed like a desperate move by leftist parties left in the lurch with the neoliberal socialists on one side and the revolutionaries on the other side to consolidate and rally around Mélenchon, who founded his own party, the Parti de gauche, after turning his back on 30 years of loyal service as a high-level functionary in the PS, and continues to live a comfortable life on 6,000€ a month as an MEP. Mélenchon’s comments at the start of his speech about being vehemently against a cult of personality seem like a direct response to my skepticism two years ago.
Instead, I paid attention to the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste. The NPA, judging from their posters in my neighborhood, seemed like an energetic and young party, riding the coattails of their own charismatic presidential candidate, the boyish part-time mailman and media darling who gives speeches in a hoodie and sneakers, Olivier Besancenot. Besancenot refused to be his party’s candidate this time around, despite good showings in the previous two elections. Over and over he has repeated that the NPA is not “Besancenot’s party,” but that, rather, it is the “Party of Besancenot, and Poutou (the current candidate), and others.” Yet he remains a huge spokesman. Here, he took to the airwaves today to repeat his party’s current approach to the election: ensure that Sarkozy is tossed aside, but also not support the government of Hollande.
Besancenot fait un appel du pied à Mélenchon par Europe1fr
Besancenot, at the end of the chat, is teased for how Mélenchon has taken the trappings of revolution away from the NPA, and now the NPA is taking them back, and Besancenot’s points are good: Mélenchon’s popularity are raising awareness for the left in general, but it’s unclear if a career politician is the person needed to push it further, especially since the Front de gauche is nowhere near as skeptical of the PS as the NPA is. Hence the NPA’s call for Mélenchon to join them in opposition after the election, rather than sit snugly at Hollande’s side.
In short, it’s hard to describe how I feel about the “phénomène Mélenchon.” The speech above is a good one, and it affected me, but after some time away from it, again the skepticism grew. But wouldn’t a (hypothetical) vote for him be more useful, in terms of moving the proverbial ball forward, than a vote for Poutou? For Artaud? Either way, these questions are probably best saved for May 7. Today, the point was to focus on Mélenchon’s pedagogy, not drift into leftist brawling, like in this mean-spirited tear down of Besancenot provided by the Trotskyists at WSWS (no, Mélenchon was also not spared). I’m not sure I succeeded.
Even if Mélanchon won’t bring the worker’s revolution, he’ll at least bring the Danse ! Danse ! Révolution !
Tags: Communists, France, Front de Gauche, Guardian, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, neoliberalism, Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, Olivier Besancenot, World Socialist Web Site
One of the neat things about my personal web site, I think, is how it refuses to dump a bunch of information at you at once. Because there are effectively no graphics on the site, it could very easily serve up pages that are nothing but giant blocks of text, which is something I have wanted to avoid.
So, as a result, each page appears as a list of topics, with an arrow pointing away from the topic, suggesting “click here for more information.” And, sure enough, if you click on the topic, via jQuery’s toggle(), automagically appears the contents of that topic. The result is that I give the user just as much text as the user wants. If a topic is done, click to hide it. Or click on the following topic to see both at once.
There are two obvious problems with this approach, however, and they have been annoying me since the page went live a few months ago.
- URLs are fixed. If I want to point someone to, say, my list of publications in the popular press, I have to say “Go to
http://moacir.com/academicsand then click on ‘Publications’ and then click on…” It’s a mouthful. I should be able to just say “Go tohttp://moacir.com/academics/blah blah” and be done with it. That url would give precisely the information I want to give, and it would let the user, then, snoop around the site. - Uses JavaScript. The toggle is neat, but it requires the use of jQuery. If one goes to my site with JavaScript disabled, the pages are useless.
So the goal here was to solve both problems. I wanted it to be the case that, if one clicked on a topic, the toggle would fire, but it would also change the url in the location bar, so that the new url could be copy-pasted in an email. And this url should change if a second topic was opened so that it would be possible to see both topics open at once. And if a topic was closed, that section of the url had to be removed. And, then, I wanted a way to do all this (though minus the AJAX, of course) without JavaScript.
Turns out it was not so difficult, but it’s certainly not the kind of behavior I have seen on the web before, so, below, I explain what is going on. I’m a dilettante when it comes to coding, so if there are unnecessary redundancies, etc., please let me know. I know that, at the very least, the creation of the showmes array could be done with a def block, but I got a bit lazy.
The only solving these problems is at all possible, it seems, is because my website is not a set of static html files, but, rather, a web application. It’s built with Sinatra, a decision I made initially just for fun. Yet now, to add this functionality, I’m glad it’s a choice I made. If I had static webpages, then I would basically need a different web page for every possible combination of shown topics (or utilize extensive mod_rewrite magic?). For a site like mine, that isn’t so bad, but even at my scale, it’s outrageously inefficient. Sinatra, by being an application framework, lets me catch the GET request sent to the server and manipulate it accordingly. The task, hence, can scale, and I just made everything a whole lot easier for myself.
So here’s the previous setup. Each topic had an id that was some kind of string with subhead at the end, and it was of class trigger. The text of a topic had the same string, but with “body” at the end, and the class was toggle. As a result, the original jQuery was stupidly easy. For each element of class trigger, strip subhead off the end of the id, add body, and, when one clicks on that trigger, toggle the toggle-class div with the new id.
$('.trigger').click(function() {
var togglediv = $(this).attr('id').replace('subhead', 'body');
$('#'+togglediv).toggle();
});
Ridiculously easy. No logic needed, no nothing.
So the first step is to change this code to add to or subtract from the url in the location bar based on whether the topic is being shown or hidden. That is, check if a thing is not visible. If it is not visible, add the name to the url and make it visible. If it is visible, hide it and delete its name from the url.
$('.trigger').click(function() {
var stateobj = { foo: "bar" }; // Just some data for replaceState…
var pathname = location.pathname; // the current url after 'moacir.com'
var togglename = $(this).attr('id').replace('subhead', '');
var togglediv = togglename + 'body';
var togglepatt = new RegExp(togglename);
var trailslash = new RegExp(/\/$/);
if (!$('#'+togglediv).is(':visible')){
// is the toggle not visible?
// if yes, make the url without double slashes:
if (trailslash.test(pathname)){
history.replaceState(stateobj, togglename, pathname + togglename);
}else{
history.replaceState(stateobj, togglename, pathname + '/' + togglename);
}
$('#'+togglediv).show(); // and now we use show() instead of toggle()
}else{
// so the toggle is visible. Hide it and delete it from the URL
pathname = pathname.replace(togglepatt, ''); // erase it!
pathname = pathname.replace('//', '/'); // and the double slashes!
history.replaceState(stateobj, '-' + togglename, pathname);
$('#'+togglediv).hide(); // use hide() instead of toggle()
}
});
Note that I use the history.replaceState() method. This is so that I can manipulate the location bar without making new GET requests. This is great for creating bookmarkable urls in an AJAXy environment. Because I use history.replaceState() and not history.pushState(), all this clicking around does not change anything if the user clicks on the back button. They will be sent to the previously GETted page.
That’s all the JavaScript necessary, which is great, since I hate using JavaScript. The rest of the work is done in Sinatra.
Once we’ve got this long url with all the shown topics added to it, if we paste the url into a new window, it will break, since the application does not know how to route it. In Sinatra, we’ll handle this by turning everything after the original url into a splat. For now, I’ll be working specifically on http://moacir.com/about/.
The basic route, then, tells Sinatra that we are expecting a splat after /about/ and that the delimiter will be a slash. The splat then becomes an array, called topics. Next we have a hand built array, called subheads, that corresponds to every possible togglename variable from the JavaScript above. Each main route (/about/ and /academics/, for now) will have a different value for this array. The third object will be a hash called showmes. The key in showmes will be one of the subheads, and the value will be either blank or style='display: block;', depending on whether that certain subhead‘s body should be shown or not.
get '/about/*' do
topics = params[:splat].first.split("/")
subheads = ["bio", "name"]
showmes = Hash.new
for subhead in subheads
if topics.index(subhead)
showmes[subhead] = "style='display: block;'"
else
showmes[subhead] = ""
end
end
erb :about, :locals => {:showmes => showmes}
end
The penultimate line tells Sinatra to load the about.erb view and to send showmes to it. Now, in that view, I have lines like this:
<h2 id="biosubhead" class="trigger">Bio →</h2> <div id="biobody" class="toggle" <%= showmes["bio"] %>>
and
<h2 id="namesubhead" class="trigger">Name →</h2> <div id="namebody" class="toggle" <%= showmes["name"] %>>
It’s a bit clumsy, but it freaking works. Since the CSS loaded style for toggle class divs is display: none, I can pass a blank value for a key in showmes, and that means that div will be hidden.
Of course, now that the routing works as expected, this means that I can now add backwards compatibility for browsers which do not support JavaScript. In the original code, there are no anchor tags. The JavaScript toggles based on whether the topic object is of the trigger class. So, the first thing to do is add anchor tags to the topics. But I want to be able to send different anchors depending on whether the topic is to be shown or hidden. That is, if clicking on the subhead should make the topic appear, it will look like this:
<a href='bio/'><h2 id="biosubhead" class="trigger">Bio →</h2></a>
But if the topic is to disappear, it will look like this:
<a href='-bio/'><h2 id="biosubhead" class="trigger">Bio →</h2></a>
So let’s add a second hash in addition to showmes, now called anchors. This hash behaves more or less exactly like showmes does, and we add lines like this in the about.erb:
<a href='<%= anchors["bio"]%>'><h2 id="biosubhead" class="trigger">Bio →</h2></a>
Now we need to trick out the Sinatra code to strip out any parts of urls that include minus signs. So it would turn http://moacir.com/about/bio/name/-bio/ into just http://moacir.com/about/name/. This requires a little bit of clumsy string manipulation, since I have to match the part that includes the minus sign (-bio), strip it, then strip its positive cousin (bio), and then strip all double slashes, as usual.
The whole route reads:
get '/about/*' do
if /-/.match(params[:splat].first)
path = params[:splat].first
/-[a-z]*/ =~ path
parttohide = Regexp.last_match(0).gsub(/-/, '')
path = path.gsub(/-([a-z]*)\//i, '')
path = path.gsub(parttohide, '')
path = path.gsub(/^/, '/about/')
path = path.gsub('//', '/')
redirect path
else # as before, but note the addition of the anchors hash
topics = params[:splat].first.split("/")
subheads = ["bio", "name"]
showmes = Hash.new
anchors = Hash.new
for subhead in subheads
if topics.index(subhead)
showmes[subhead] = "style='display: block;'"
anchors[subhead] = "-#{subhead}/"
else
showmes[subhead] = ""
anchors[subhead] = "#{subhead}/"
end
end
erb :about, :locals => {:showmes => showmes, :anchors => anchors}
end
end
Everything looks nice, except for one problem: the Academics page has nested topics! If I request http://moacir.com/academics/presentations/, then it is as good as getting the regular page, since presentations is nested within publishing. Similarly, if I click all those subtopics open and then close the publishing topic, they remain part of the url. Unfortunately, the only way I can think of dealing with this is with more string manipulation that is now hyper-specified.
These two if blocks seem to cover the two situations: ensuring that publishing is in the url if a subtopic is and obliterating all the subtopics if publishing is being closed. The latter can go inside the general /-/.match. For the former, I need an extra twist to the regexp so that while looking for publishing it does not get a false positive from selfpublishing.
get '/academics/*' do # Add this if block if /(poparticles|presentations|selfpublishing|cartography)/.match(params[:splat].first) redirect params[:splat].first.gsub(/^/, '/academics/publishing/') unless /(\/publishing|^publishing)/.match(params[:splat].first) end if /-/.match(params[:splat].first) path = params[:splat].first # Add this if block, too if /-publishing/.match(path) path = path.gsub(/(poparticles|presentations|selfpublishing|cartography)\//, '') end /-[a-z]*/ =~ path # etc…
Almost done…
So it worked with JavaScript, and now it works without. But if I turn JavaScript back on, I lose the AJAXyness that was the point of all of this in the first place. I need to do two things here. First, I name the id and class in the <a> tag instead of in the <h2> tag as before. So what was:
<a href='<%= anchors["bio"]%>'><h2 id="biosubhead" class="trigger">Bio →</h2></a>
is now
<a href='<%= anchors["bio"]%>' id="biosubhead" class="trigger"><h2>Bio →</h2></a>
Then, in the JavaScript, I add a line that strips the href attribute from all trigger class anchors:
$('.trigger').removeAttr('href');
While I’ve got the JavaScript open, I’ll quickly add some logic to the $('.trigger').click() expression that obliterates the subtopics inside publishing:
}else{ // so the toggle is visible. Hide it and delete it from the URL
pathname = pathname.replace(togglepatt, ''); // erase it!
// Add this if() clause
if (togglename == 'publishing'){ // get rid of specific subtopics, too
subtopics = ["poparticles", "presentations", "selfpublishing", "cartography"]
for (x in subtopics){
pathname = pathname.replace('/' + subtopics[x], '');
$('#'+subtopics[x]+'body').hide();
}
}
// etc.…
Finally, I prefer urls without trailing slashes. I think http://moacir.com/academics is more handsome than http://moacir.com/academics/. So I’ll add a general route without the trailing slash. that assumes that everything is hidden. Notice the subtle addition of about/ to the anchors values. This is necessary to maintain the structure when JavaScript is disabled.
get '/about' do
subheads = ["bio", "name"]
showmes = Hash.new
anchors = Hash.new
for subhead in subheads
showmes[subhead] = ""
anchors[subhead] = "about/#{subhead}/"
end
erb :about, :locals => {:showmes => showmes, :anchors => anchors}
end
And, finally, (for real this time) I add some logic to the previous route at the top to redirect if the url ends in a slash at the root level.
get '/about/*' do # Add this if block if params[:splat].first.empty? redirect '/about' end # etc.…
And that’s about all I need to do! Nothing all that tricky, and it gave yet another opportunity to do some serious problem solving while learning just a bit more about Ruby, Sinatra, and jQuery.
Of course, none of this probably works on IE. Life is tough.
From the headline, “Eastern Europe’s Hitler nostalgia,” Michael Goldfarb’s cross-posted article in Globalpost and Salon (where I read it) feels like link bait. And maybe flame/trollbait. The subhead promises an article about “pro-Nazi sentiment” in “Lithuania and Latvia.” What follows is an article dispatched from, and largely about, Poland.1
It’s easy to say about an article on the internet I read on the phone in bed for free in a few minutes that, “well, it’s a bit more complicated than that.” But Goldfarb sets a lofty goal. Despite the specificity of the subhead, the article aims to tackle something general about Eastern European “ultra-nationalism.” And to provide a syncretic account of that, definitionally, one must make a muddle of a lot of things.
So we’re treated to a myriad of examples of “Hitler nostalgia” that initially make sense—the infamous “SS veteran marches,” the hounding of Fania Branstovsky and Rachel Margolis for fighting with Soviet partisans—and then we’re talking about institutionalized Polish anti-Semitism at soccer matches. Then we’re talking about the Latvian vote to only have one official language. And what, exactly is the discussion of the Lithuanian policies regarding the use of Polish orthography on official Lithuanian state documents doing for the argument about being nostalgic about Hitler?
Goldfarb ties the points together in a way I have not before seen by arguing that these “bloodlands,” to use Timothy Snyder’s useful term from his frequently unreadable book, are simply developmentally backward; these “newly liberated nations are only just being allowed to go through historical processes America and western Europe went through in the 18th and 19th century,” namely the “kind of nationalism that underpinned Hitler’s theory of ‘One People and One Reich.’”
I’d believe this astonishingly patronizing excuse more if, first, a ‘One people’ mentality did not seem to be the foundation of all of Western Europe and the US regarding its ‘One [liberal, (ex-)Judeo-Christian] People’ in response to the variously understood Islamic threat. I’d also believe it if it were the case that these Eastern European states did not, actually, enjoy varying levels of independence during the past century—time during which they could do some of the national developing Goldfarb suggests has been denied them.2
Most importantly, I would believe Goldfarb’s excuse if he considered more carefully the provocative opening to the second part of his article:
Historians and sociologists around Europe’s eastern edge all agree: the basic questions of politics in the area have been settled.
All the countries are ruled by right-of-center governments who buy into free-market economics.
Therein lies the answer, though not quite as Goldfarb imagines it. Hitler nostalgia (and ultra-nationalism) are results of (the fantasy of) the permanence of (neo-liberal) capitalism. Consider what a ridiculous statement that first sentence is. Universal agreement on the reached telos of politics. That reads like something out of Jameson or Žižek. And in an era of #Occupy, or of Jean-Luc Mélenchon polling at 15%, it sounds ostentatious in its triumphalism.
It is a serious problem that there is no high-functioning left in Lithuania, at least not one that I can recognize from half a continent away. There is an academic left, Naujoji kairė 95, which, as far as I can tell, has no active political presence. Then there is a political party, Socialistinis liaudės frontas, which seems perpetually in the shadow of its provocative leader, Algirdas Paleckis.3
Yet when the SLF has rallies, they are met by jeering youths who have decided it would be a gas to troll the “halfwits of little Paleckis.” Somehow the kind of behavior that seems appropriate in the US when the Westboro Babtist Church is involved, falls flat and feels astonishingly poundfoolish when transported to a state ravaged by a cratering economy and a political élite running out of ways to implement harsher austerity measures.
I lean on this anecdotal bit a lot, but it’s the first time I’m mentioning it here: over the summer, while in Vilnius, I was talking to a French businessman about my life here in Paris. When I said my apartment was “paid for,” he assumed I was getting state aid. He launched into a whole speech—and this is, mind, from a bourgeois businessman—about how Lithuanians are mortally afraid of the state. They fear that any action of state power is the beginning of communist recidivism, and so the state is abandoned. Mocked. Politicians are all clowns or corrupt or both. This level of antagonism toward the state, of fear, he continued, makes no sense to a French citizen. The French republican understands that the state exists to serve its citizenry, but to also protect it. Etc., etc.
Despite trafficking in extremes, I think my interlocutor has a point. The goal of the ethnic nation of Lithuanians was an independent state. Under such circumstances, the ethnic nation would have the space to “kvetch” (as one of Goldfarb’s Polish academics says), to have a moment of catharsis, to have the pie it had always seen in the sky. But it simply does not work that way. Ethnic self-determination, a relic of the early twentieth century as much as of nineteenth—and certainly far more than of the eighteenth, despite Goldfarb’s claims, was always much messier in practice than in theory, but that obvious fact seems to have been ignored in the excitement over reaching for that pie.
Now the Lithuanians have a state that is constitutionally separate from the ethnic nation.4 Efforts to reforge the ties look appropriately out of place, but anachronistic only in their boldness.5 In this way, Lithuania is like a little France. Nominally a republic with no official ethnic basis of membership, it still, just like France, has difficulty living up to that standard.6 But, unlike France, the state is hobbled by pervasively anti-communist electorate. And so the state moves to burnish its anti-communist bonafides by retreating to classic tropes of anti-communism: anti-Semitism, nationalism, anti-Statism, militarization.7
Would a strong state make the “Hitler nostalgia” go away? I doubt it. But reckoning with the political left and considering that it provides more than a boogeyman one must perpetually run from (or puff breasts against) would probably do the trick of bringing both history and politics back to the table, letting us bin the hackneyed Santayana quote.
- If you’re writing an article that presumes to be at least partly about Lithuania, and the only expert on Lithuania you seem to have contacted is Dovid Katz, then your article is going to have problems. I fully agree with Katz’s goals at Defending History, and I’m proud that he has linked to my writing on occasion. But talking only to him stacks the deck. For me, as we’ll see below, what is missing from Goldfarb’s account is an appraisal of the immanent anti-communism in the region (though I can only speak about Lithuania). This line of reasoning is not one I’ve yet sussed out of Katz’s work. It may be as simple as this: for me, contemporary ultra-nationalism and institutional anti-Semitism are functions of anti-communism. For Katz, I think, it’s reversed. It’s not a big difference, in the grand scheme of things, since, after all, our interests are aligned. Basically, I’m perhaps most miffed by the fact that the subhead, again, promises “Lithuania and Latvia,” yet Goldfarb seems to have spoken to mostly Polish academics. [↩]
- It is also certainly the case that national culture did not suffer within the USSR. Snyder makes a compelling case, for example, regarding how the USSR actually allowed a specifically Lithuanian culture to flourish in ways it had never done before in history, even during Lithuanian independence during the interwar period and during the medieval-era Grand Duchy. [↩]
- If I’m more diffident than usual here, it’s since I feel a bit out of my depth, as someone who isn’t politically engaged in Lithuania. But I’ll say just this: I learned about Naujoji kairė 95 not from anything they did, but, rather, from dismissive remarks made about them by columnist Andrius Užkalnis, whose bombastic Reaganophilia is well-documented. Paleckis and his party I learned about clicking about on the internet, but, again, I never read anything good about them. Something like the Guardian article above about Mélenchon, recast in a Lithuanian sphere, is so incomprehensible to me to be basically laughable. [↩]
- The Constitution says that the sovereign in the Lithuanian Republic is the “nation.” The Constitutional Court has decided that, in that line, “nation” means “citizenry,” not ethnic group. And since citizenship cannot be denied based on ethnic grounds, it means that there is a possible future where the “Lithuanian nation,” as far as the sovereign of the Republic, will have no ethnic Lithuanians. I’m fine with that. [↩]
- Consider the Polish orthography issue whenever getting one’s liberal dander up about “English only!” movements in the US. Unlike the US, Lithuania has an official language, and that language is Lithuanian, which does not have, officially, letters like “w” in it. The government, hence, has no obligation to provide the letter “w” on passports, etc. I think the issue is stupid, and I also think the government should let Poles spell their names however they want, but I understand the government’s position. [↩]
- See, for example, France’s own problems with dealing with linguistic minorities despite having an official language. [↩]
- We can add, of course, other tropes, like a reflexive pro-Americanism that lets the CIA use your territory to torture suspects. [↩]
Tags: Communists, nationalism, Naujoji kairė 95, Nazis, Socialistinis liaudies frontas
I already tackled Megan (now) Draper’s (winning) French-Canadianness when she sang “Il était un petit navire” to the Draperinos back at the end of season 4 of Mad Men. Further, the internet already melted down over the subsequent French song Jessica Paré chose to sing for the show, so I don’t need to touch on that. I will plug, however, this brief moment when she utters a “sacre” after Don’s surprise party is ruined.
What I would rather discuss here, briefly, is how bizarre I continue to find it that the character is named “Megan” in the first place. In my head, I imagine they named her before deciding she would become a main character complete with her own French-Canadian identity mirroring Paré’s own. I lie to myself in this way since the idea of a French-Canadian born around 1940 named “Megan” is, simply put, really unexpected.
During the 2000s, the French form of “Megan”—”Mégane”—was, in fact, one of the most popular names for newborn girls in Québec. As Louis Duchesne notes, “Megan” became a popular name in the 1970s in the US before fading away in the 1990s. About a generation later, the French form became popular in both France and Québec, though the French popularity cratered once Renault introduced the “Mégane” in 1995. The car is unavailable in Québec, and the popularity of the name continued to climb, reaching heights its American counterpart never enjoyed.
Yet no matter how popular “Mégane” has been in Québec over the past 15 years, it was not on the map as a name in 1940. Hence, I would surmise, its English version, and the name of Don Draper’s new wife, was completely unheard of. Maybe she really is as good an actor as her waitress friends suggest, having invented the whole québécois backstory as part of her long con of Don Draper. (Relax, Mad Men fanatics, I don’t believe in the Megan Draper long con conspiracy.)
Tags: Mad Men, Megan, onomastics, Québec
I was in New York this weekend, and I decided to spend part of Friday afternoon at Zuccotti Park. I had been told that there was nothing going on there, so I expected to see ruins of a political movement in tatters, the kind of romantic fantasy of an unexperienced nostalgia that has yielded us, say, “Tintern Abbey.”
Needless to say, it was not empty. There was a group of people drilling police confrontation tactics like making sturdy walls against the police. There were scattered protestors with small signs and tables set up, and there were cameras everywhere.
The ubiquity of the recording eye was probably what was most remarkable. At least three teams of camerapeople were filming the drills, and then seeming security guards were also filming them. Then pro-Occupyers were filming the security guards, who were also being harassed by other pro-Occupyers. (Very DeLillo-esque.)
NYPD were, simply put, everywhere. Wall St. was completely blocked, Thames St. was closed to house a bunch of NYPD scooters, and Liberty Place was a parking lot for prowlers. Broadway featured police in three different types of shirts, and there was even a man who certainly looked like a police who was in a suit (that would be a fourth shirt, I suppose).
Even during our hour-long stay, there was excitement. Two men came bearing a 20-foot banner reading “OCCUPY WALL STREET.” I imagine they had been warned already by the police about it, since as they tried to plant it near a sculpture, the police immediately batted it out of their hands, and the two young men were cuffed and led away before the livestreamers had a chance to run half the length of the park to capture the skirmish (they had been covering the drills). The efficiency of both sides of the operation was surreal. A theater that has been well rehearsed.
Then I shot a minute’s worth of video of the drummers and police.
I do not have much more to say about #Occupy. There are many who are much smarter than I on this. But I do know that I was not the only person there in a tourist capacity. Tourists photographing Wall Street and the rest of Broadway were encouraged by the protestors to also take a picture of Zuccotti. One man shouted, “no tour of New York is complete without Occupy Wall Street!” and I, obviously, agreed with him. Going to the park was the only real (specific) goal I had of my trip. So this is my little spiel about #Occupy.
Tags: #Occupy, New York, police, Wall Street
A day or two ago, a short typed up note appeared in the elevator ин my building. Usually, if someone has something to sell (like a chair), they will use the bulletin boards on the ground floor. Inside the elevator, the space is more regulated. But this man was persistent:
Cherche jeune demoiselle douce et sensible, pour rêver de réveils matinaux ornés de sourires puisés ailleurs que dans le reflet désespérant de son miroir en ce début de printemps…
(Votre voisin de palier)
Searching for a young, gentle, and sensitive maiden to dream, at the start of spring, of deep smiles adorning her waking up in the morning in place of the despairing reflection offered by her mirror…
(Your floormate)
By the time I saw this message, a response had already been added:
Jeune Demoiseau,[sic]
Accro de réveils matinaux
Je suis à fleur de peau
A la lecture de ton doux mot.Ta Demoiselle
Douce et sensible.Young Squire,
Already addicted to waking up in the morning
I’m overcome like a delicate flower
Blown over from reading your sweet note.Your Maiden,
Gentle and sensitive.
Overnight, a third message appeared. I was lucky enough to photograph its incoherence, because shortly thereafter, it had disappeared:
À l’écoute de tes murmures, ô ma douce fleur
Je frissonne ả l’idée bien qu’ondoyante
En ces jours où mon espérance ne reste que lueur
D’une ivresse de ta plume évanescente
Qui se résoud obstinément à trancher mon triste cœur ?Ton éternel demoiseau [sic everything]
On hearing your murmurs, oh my sweet flower,
I shiver at the idea although undulating
In these days where of my hope no more remains than a glimmer
Of the drunkenness from your evanescent quill
Which obstinately resolves to slice my sad heart?Your eternal squire
So it started out desperate, then got a bit funny, and then got weird and redacted.
Tags: France, love, Paris, springtime
A journalist friend once said that he’d never write a certain airline’s name “airBaltic,” because he refused to do their brand management for them. I can’t remember if he chose to call them “Airbaltic,” “AirBaltic,” or “Air Baltic” instead, but the lowercase initial was beyond the pale. In English, of course, proper names are always capitalized, yielding quite a bit of confusion when the proper name intentionally begins with a lowercase letter, be it bell hooks or fIREHOSE.
But how do you talk about entities that benefit from the publicity. In France, a soccer team won promotion to the top league this year whose full name is “Évian Thonon-Gaillard Football Club.” Now, teams in France frequently have complicatedly long names that indicate historical mergers and the like, but here the name is pretty clear: “Thonon” is short for “Thonon-les-Bains,” and it and Gaillard are two towns in the Alps, both along the Swiss border. “Évian,” however, does not refer to “Évian-les-Bains,” a town right next to Thonon-les-Bains. Instead, it refers to the Dannon mineral water that we know in the US as “evian.” Évian-les-Bains have their own team, after all, Évian-Lugrin.
Now that Évian Thonon-Gaillard FC are in the top flight and getting lots of press, the question becomes how to refer to the club. The local Grenoble newspaper offered a few variants to its readers in a poll: “ETG,” “Évian Savoie,” “Croix de Savoie,” or something else. “Savoie” is the name of the region, and the club was known as “Olympique Croix de Savoie 74″ when it was founded (via merger), and the logo retains the white cross on a red field that is the symbol of Savoy. Sports daily L’Équipe refers to the club as “Évian TG.” However, the stadium attendance site Stades et Spectateurs uses the name “CROIX-SAVOIE.” Calling them some form of “Évian” is free advertising. Calling them “Croix de Savoie” is anachronistic and inexact. Personally, I call the team the band of jerks who beat ASSE last weekend.
The example of ETG came up in a discussion on twitter about how soccer teams usually have many different names that are often rather confusing, especially from country to country. In the US, this doesn’t tend to happen. The Boston Red Sox are either “Boston” or the “Red Sox” (or both). Anything else is being literary (“Carmines”) or overly colloquial (“Bosox”). Sure, a term like “Sox” causes confusion when Boston is playing Chicago, but that’s the exception that proves the rule. So I was asked what the convention is in Lithuania, where, among other things, “Žalgiris” can refer to either a basketball team in Kaunas or a soccer team in Vilnius.
One thing even a casual glance at Lithuanian soccer reporting indicates is that there are quotes all over the place when it comes to team names. A team like Ekranas is never called “Ekranas.” It’s always either “„Ekranas“” or “‘Ekranas.’” To know why, we return to the question of how Lithuanian handles a “simbolinis pavadinimas,” or a company’s name that uses (non-standard) words in a non-standard context. For example, “ekranas” means “screen.” When it is in quotes and capitalized, the reader is alerted that the word is being used in a non-standard and proper manner. And these names are always in quotes.
As peculiar as this sounds, we do this regarding works of art in English. We talk about “the novel ‘Ulysses’” (using New Yorker style!) or about “the song ‘Happy Birthday to You.’” In Lithuanian, you’d write things like, “the hotel ‘Hilton.’” Yet if the name itself indicates that it is a company (and what kind of company it is), then quotes are not necessary. So we’d write “American Airlines,” not “airline ‘American’” or “airline ‘American Airlines.’” The examples the Supreme Lithuanian Language Commission gives are instructive, if kind of funny, in my opinion. It’s “UAB Užupio kavinė,” because from the name it’s clear that it is a café. But it’s “akcinė bendrovė „Lietuvos draudimas,“” because the name (which translates to “Lithuania’s insurance”) doesn’t make it clear that it is a company. Either way, the commission agrees with my journalist friend from the top of this post: a writer is not forced by Lithuanian language rules to respect airBaltic’s marketing strategy. In proper Lithuanian, they would be called “UAB oro linija „Airbaltic.“”
Things get even more complicated when trying to figure out how to decline names of companies, but I’ll save those five rules for another post. And then there are the rules for naming companies, which, if I read them correctly, suggest that airBaltic could never have registered that as a company name, had they been founded in Lithuania.
Tags: branding, football, France, language, marketing, trademarks
As far as I can tell, there are three men named Corentin (it’s a Breton name) who are memorialized in some way in (slightly greater) Paris: Corentin Cariou, Corentin Celton, and Corentin Cloarec. Cariou has a métro station and street named after him. Celton, a métro station and hospital. And Cloarec, a street.
Corentin Cariou was a communist councilman to the council of the 19th Arrondissement. Appropriate for his name, he was born on the edge of the earth, in the coastal village of Loctudy in Brittany. In his early 20s, speaking barely any French and being illiterate, he leaves the life of the sea to go to Paris, where he gets involved as a syndicalist. Long story (on Wikipedia) short, once the Communist party is made illegal during the Daladier government, Cariou is arrested. He escapes in early 1940 to Brittany, regroups with his wife and child, and returns to Paris to undertake clandestine operations. In late 1940, he’s arrested again by the Vichy government. Once the Soviet Union declares war against Nazi Germany, communists are freed to participate in a war previously considered “imperialist.” But repressions against communists in France continue, and now Cariou is under the watch of the Germans. In response to an attack on a German sentinel in the 19th Arrondissement, the Nazis decide to kill 20 “communists and Jews” in their custody. Cariou is among them, and he is shot in a forest on 7 March 1942.
Corentin Celton was, like Cariou, also born on the edge of the earth, this time in the village of Ploaré, which no longer exists. He also left behind the life of a fisherman to move to Paris, where he also got involved with the SFIC, the French faction of the Communist International. After working in the hospital that now carries his name, he began a bunch of union-related administrative posts. In 1939, he returns to work as a nurse in the army. After being demobilized in 1940, he continues working as a nurse, but increasing legal anti-communism forces him underground. In 1942, he is caught using a false identity, and after initially being sentenced to three years, a second hearing changes the sentence to death. The Nazis execute him outside of Paris on the antepenultimate day of 1943.
Corentin Cloarec is the occasion of this post, since the street bearing his name is only two blocks away from me. A Franciscan monk at the Couvent de Saint-François in the 14th Arrondissement (and right beside the street now named after Cloarec), Père Corentin is charged with providing support for the Résistance in the Denfert-Rochereau area. After being named in a list of Résistance members given under torture, the monk is visited by two young French members of the Abwehr, who shoot him. He dies before he is able to get medical attention. Thousands attend his funeral. A Franciscan who was working as an interpreter for the Germans had advance knowledge of the execution and tried to warn his fellow brothers, but it was, obviously, in vain.
Saturday, walking down rue du Père Corentin, I saw that a sign for the supermarket G20 had had some editorial content added. The G20 has two entrances, from both sides: one on rue du Père Corentin (which takes one straight to the organic section) and the “main” entrance on avénue du Général Leclerc (another man with a history relating Paris and World War II). The sign that was augmented announces that there are two entrances, one from each street, and it points to the entrance on rue du Père Corentin. In a bit of coincidence, the sign sits right beside a memorial to Gustave Pommier, a 26 year old man from the countryside, who, as a lieutenant in the FFI, was killed in a raid on a Nazi garage. That area near the plaque features, these days, both a large Citroën garage and an RATP garage for buses.
The editorial content is what’s interesting here, though. First, “Pére [sic] Corentin” is circled, and someone has added “FUSILLÉ pendant que PAPON BOUSQUET etc. FAISAIENT CARRIERE eux.” Father Corentin was shot while Papon, Bousquet, and others were making their own careers, then. So the first comment serves is a pedagogical moment reminding the reader of the situation of Père Corentin’s martyrdom while collaborators like Papon and Bousquet (and do read their Wikipedia entries!) were just cutting their teeth on selling out their countrymen. It’s a little historical gift, I suppose, to people walking down the street.
The second remark, however, I suppose is written by a different hand, and its target and means are much more acute. “FUSillE SANS ROLEX lui,” it reads, pointing to the plaque for Pommier, suggesting that, as for him (Pommier), he was shot without his Rolex on. Its mode is both historical and especially critical, considering the geography (and toponymic issues) at hand.
Not all those shot by the Nazis should be considered equally.
Tags: Communists, France, memory, Nazis, Paris