“Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.”
– Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
Preamble
To the extent that
• Slavery and wage labour are comparable
• Capitalism inherently produces sizeable inequality
And
• Private Property and the pursuit of same has produced in modern man a near necessity to step on his fellow man to achieve “success”
Inasmuch as the United States
• Was formed to “establish Justice,” to “insure domestic Tranquility,” to “provide for the common defence,” and to “promote the general Welfare” of her people, to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”
• Voted in General Assembly of the United Nations in favor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which proclaims that
• “Everyone has a right to life, liberty and security of person” (Article 3)
• “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude…” (Article 4)
• “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.” (Article 23-1)
• “Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.” (Article 21-2)
• “Everyone , as a member of a society, has the right to social security…” (Article 22)
• “Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.” (Article 23-2)
• “Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.” (Article 23-3)
• “Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.” (Article 23-4)
• “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” (Article 25-1)
• “Everyone has a right to education.” (Article 26-1)
And, inasmuch as the United States
• Makes war abroad in the name of “democracy” and “freedom” when millions live in poverty here at home
• Regularly supports and promotes an economic system that alienates the common worker from that he produces
And
• Distances us all from our political leadership, from governmental decisionmaking, from having power over our own lives
I must contend that a better system must be found, must be enacted and must be maintained to create a greater livelihood for a greater number of people. As I wrote in a recent essay, “It cannot simply be from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. We must look past even that Marxist slogan. Instead, in this modern age, with all of the advances we have achieved already, we should be able to make available everything to everyone.” In simpler terms, “for everyone everything.” Call it an impractical dream if you like, but there’s a quotation (attributed to different people at different times) about ambition that is appropriate here: “Aim at the sun and you may not reach it; but your arrow will fly far higher than if you had aimed at an object on a level with yourself.” The point is, simply because some idealistic notion of society is perhaps impractical, is perhaps even impossible is no reason not to aim for it. By aiming for something better than we have, we can do little but improve upon our status quo.
Note: Despite specific reference to our Constitution, to forego American exceptionalism, let me, for the most part, speak universally as much as possible from here on. This is not, necessarily, an argument for the deconstruction of America, her government, her infrastructure, or her people (en masse), but rather a deconstruction and reconstruction of an idea, a promotion of ideal government who cares for her people when they are in need, who provides for them when they cannot provide for themselves housing, food, healthcare and even employment (and, dare I say it, purpose). Consider the following not a call for deconstruction or destruction but a call for creation, a call for action, for positive developments on behalf of mankind, citizens local and abroad, people of all walks of life all across the surface of this earth.
This piece may tend toward cynicism concerning capitalism, negativity toward modern life and the unkept promises of notions like the American Dream, but at its core is a hopeful spirit, an idea of something better than we humans far too often seem capable.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
Food as a Weapon in the Third-World War - Losing Food Sovereignty, Enclosing the Commons, and Losing our Way of Life in the Wake of Mother Culture and Her Civilization
In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, it’s suggested that “any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion” (1). In that book and its sequel, My Ishmael, Quinn refers to our “locking up the food” after the agricultural revolution. This same act went on to become Vandana Shiva’s “enclosure of the commons.” Essentially, civilization decided that man should not necessarily toil in the fields for his food but should work many varied jobs, fulfill many varied roles, and earn money to pay for his food instead. This results, as we will see, in starvation and poverty and death for those who should be making a living… or perhaps simply subsisting on their farming. This results in “food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries” (2). The market economy “proposes its own expansion as the solution to [this] ecological and social crisis it has engendered” (3); when this new system fails, the obvious solution: more of the same. This is only one aspect of what Quinn calls Mother Culture, a counter to Mother Nature that came with civilization, but it is in our modern age possibly one of the most dangerous. Nations do not simply go on expansionist, Imperialist military campaigns anymore, with overt violence, so the war on the Third-World (hereafter referred to as the Third-World War) is fought instead with neocolonial, globalist policies that bring monocultures and fatal agricultural and political policies. As Shiva puts it, “at a time when a quarter of the world’s population is threatened with starvation due to erosion of soil fertility, water, and genetic diversity, chasing the mirage of unending growth becomes a major source of genocide. Killing people through the destruction of nature is an invisible form of violence which threatens justice, peace, and survival” (4). She goes on to point out how editor and author Claude Alvares calls this destruction the Third-World War, “a war waged in peacetime, without comparison but involving the largest number of deaths and the largest number of soldiers without uniforms” (5). We have taken agriculture, fundamentally built on keeping us alive, responsible for growing the human population of the world almost exponentially, and today we use it to control the world, to control its people, to narrow the focus of power to a handful of corporations at the expense of livelihoods and lives, “those who die in the shadow of capital” (6). While Imperialism brought for the Imperialists “railways and roads, it brought new technology, and for some, it brought educational opportunities, for most people in the third-world, however, it brought oppression and poverty” (7). We control the use of seed and allow nature itself to be patented, we mandate the growing of monocultures at the expense of soil, at the expense of water, and when these things result in poverty and starvation, we ignore the Third-World individuals as long as we in the First-World have wondrous choice in the Grocery Store. Food, or the control of it, is a weapon in this new Third-World War, and Food Sovereignty, taking back the Commons, unlocking the food—that is the only way for the Third-World to have any victory.
The most obvious (lately) way we control the world’s food is not some overt action, like when Serb and Muslim sides in Bosnia would interfere with UN relief efforts to each other (8). Instead, what has become obvious—to those paying attention anyway—started quite subtly; farming gradually drifted into the hands of a small group of agribusinesses, agricultural giants pushed their way into Third-World countries—Dole and Chiquita suing their way into Jamaica’s banana market (9), for example—and some of those corporations, like Monsanto, were allowed to patent life (10), and take not only control but also ownership of seed itself. Daniel Quinn suggests that Mother Culture has taught us that “the world was made for us [so] it belongs to us, and we can do what we damn well please with it” (11). And so, when Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser’s canola crop was contaminated with Monsanto’s Round Up ready canola, it was not Schmeiser who sued the contaminator but the contaminator who sued Schmeiser, for “intellectual property theft” (12). Ultimately, Schmeiser was forced to destroy his stored seed on the chance it might all be contaminated with Monsanto’s. Shiva argues that this “robs us of our human right and human duty to be seed savers” (13). W. R. Grace claimed a patent on the use of the neem tree for controlling pests and diseases in agriculture, something that had been going on in India for over 2000 years. After a decade-long campaign, Shiva and more than 100,000 others involved, got the European Patent Office to revoke the patent (14). While this comes across as a success, the fact that it took a decade, the fact that W. R. Grace—and in other cases, Monsanto and others—could get the patent in the first place is key to understanding the trouble here. Humans managed for a long time without agriculture at all; we hunted and we gathered. Eventually, groups of us became more sedentary and started planting seeds for things we wanted to eat instead of just gathering what was around. And, with the agricultural revolution, we let farming be a specialty for some and we locked up the food, made the rest of us earn it through work. Or, as Shiva describes it—though she seems to be referring specifically to a more recent, more capitalist addition to this—we enclosed the commons; instead of letting the world be the world and our farms be our farms, we assigned ownership, we conquered the natural world just as we would conquer the political world in the form of various empires. We twisted the natural order around until we held godlike sway over the genetic makeup of seed and we patented it. But, that wasn’t enough. As with the Grace example above, we started allowing patents on seed varieties and methodologies that already existed. And, we made laws—in India, as Shiva describes repeatedly, in Earth Democracy, but many other places as well; for example, in Iraq, Bremer’s 100 Orders include, in Order 81, material that “deals specifically with Plant Variety Protection (PVP) because it is designed to protect the commercial interests of corporate seed companies” (15)—laws that leave the farmer in no position but to submit to agribusiness. Saving seed, a tradition older really than farming (i.e. organized agriculture) itself, has become illegal in places. In 1997, RiceTec was granted a patent on basmati rice lines and grains, which Shiva points out “has been grown for centuries on the subcontinent” (16). RiceTec’s patent included genes developed by farmers and “allowed RiceTec to collect royalties from farmers growing varieties developed by them and their forefathers” (17). This one took four years to overturn. In Ireland, seed potato growers were disallowed in the early 1990s from trading in reproductive material with other seed potato growers, merchants or farmers (18). In 1994, the Plant Variety Act here in America was amended to “eliminate farmers’ privilege to save and exchange seed and establish an absolute monarchy for the seed industry” (19). And the list goes on. We have made it illegal for farmers to save, store or even sell their own seed. And, Monsanto has even purchased the company—Delta & Pine Land—that developed the so-called “terminator” seed which will simply die after one generation, making farmers even more dependent on purchasing new seed time and time again (20). While some farmers fight—according to Shiva, some 5 million peasants in India have “taken a pledge to continue to save and exchange seed” regardless of any law that says they cannot, such as the Seed Act of 2004 (21)—in the meantime, there are further issues than just ownership.
Forcing farmers to grow certain crops (patented or not) results in monocultures, far from the variety there has been with traditional agriculture. Shiva uses the example of rice in India, how in the various climates of the subcontinent there have been many different strains of rice developed; “there are varieties to fit thousands of ecological niches all over the country, from the temperate high hills of the Himalayas to the tropical lowlands to deep-water and salt-water marshes of the sea coasts” (22). But, now, farmers are growing fewer strains and this lack of biodiversity, combined especially with no more intercropping, means less sustainability. While “genetic diversity provides security for the farmer against pests, disease, and unexpected climatic conditions” (23), this system demands that a farmer maintain a very specific, modern quality to his land to harvest his crops. This involves chemical fertilizers, the use of which “has led to the growing crisis of soil erosion and depleted soil quality” (24), and modern irrigation, both of which damage the land itself, ruining it for future generations of plants and people.
And, these chemical fertilizers cost money, as does modern irrigation, as do modern seeds. So farmers, who used to be able to save their own seeds and let nature (or intercropping) take care of much of the watering and fertilizing, are now paying out of pocket to maintain what should be a subsistence way of life. And, of course, it goes without saying, all this so they can produce far more than ever before, because this is not just subsistence farming but a support system for the whole First-World. These farmers are now producing not for themselves but for export, and putting more money into it than they ever had to before. And, so these farmers are put into debt, find themselves living impoverished lives, going hungry when they are the ones feeding the world. I deliberately have not mentioned NGOs like the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank, the organizations that often drive all of these new policies into these Third-World nations, because while they are the tools we and Mother Culture use to push new agendas, I would argue that they are not themselves the problem but yet another symptom, a self-promoting part of a destructive way of life that it is getting harder and harder to back down from. But, here I must reference the WTO in the case of Lee Kyung Hae. In 2003, the WTO held a meeting in Cancun. Lee and other farmers and peasants from around the world—Lee himself from Korea, where the WTO had forced the opening of “its rice markets to dumping by US agribusiness giants like Cargill and ConAgra” (25)—camped near the site of the meeting and marched upon it on the morning of its first day. They came to a barricade and Lee Kyung Hae, wearing a sign which read “WTO kills farmers,” climbed it and stabbed himself. He had a note with him that read, “I am taking my own life so others may live” (26). Sixteen thousand farmers in India committed suicide during 2004 alone, as “the policies of corporate-driven globalized and industrialized agriculture deliberately destroy small farms, dispossess small farmers, and render them disposable” (27).
Daniel Quinn argues that we “believe profoundly that, however bad things are now, they’re still infinitely preferable to what came before” (28). We have conquered the natural world, mandated that we work for our food, and we are consistently destroying the means by which we get it, but still, we take the Whiggish approach; this is what history has been leading us to, so it must be the right way of doing things. As long as we in the First-World can go to our local grocery store and find a great variety of choices, we don’t take the time to care whose lives were destroyed in getting those choices to us. Vandana Shiva argues that “patents on life and the rhetoric of the ‘ownership society’ in which everything—water, biodiversity, cells, genes, animals, plants—is property express a worldview in which life forms have no intrinsic worth, no integrity, and no subjecthood” (29). I would add humans to that list. This worldview devalues and essentially dehumanizes the Third-World individual, and small farmers, even here in the First-World, are losing the Third-World War. There are those who stand up against the patents, those who still trade seed (like Via Campesina, which states that “food sovereignty is the right of peoples to develop and maintain their own food systems” (30)) even where it has been made illegal, and there are those like the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) (31) who are demanding their legal right to have land and have the use of it, without being dictated to by NGOs or agribusiness corporations. Shiva suggests that “liberation in our genocidal times is, first and foremost, the freedom to stay alive” (32). But, we cannot simply be content with ourselves being alive. We must support the Third-World in this war; when the MST marches onto a piece of land, chanting “Occupy! Resist! Produce!” the individuals must know that they have support around the world. When an Indian or a Korean or even an American farmer, impoverished by debt growing our food, is at the point where taking his own life seems like his only viable option, he needs to believe that we will make it better, that we can take back food sovereignty for farmers, that we can give the commons back to the people, that we will not let life itself be patented and owned by corporations who care more about the bottom line than the lives of billions of individuals the world over. We need to reject Mother Culture, reject the dark recesses dug into our world by globalization, as “the discussion on ‘food power’ consequently not an exception but a symptom of a general global situation” (33). We must demand sustainability over overconsumption, demand a right to sustenance, demand biodiversity, demand nourishment over destruction, peace and life over war and death, demand democracy over corporate greed.
(1) Quinn, Daniel, Ishmael, New York: Bantam, 1992, 138.
(2) Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review, 2000, 43.
(3) Shiva, Vandana, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Cambridge: South End, 2005, 50.
(4) Ibid, 52.
(5) Ibid, citing Alvares’ “Deadly Development,” Development Forum 11:7 (1973), 3. Alvares and Shiva, of course, do not use my hyphenated “Third-World War.”
(6) Chatterjee, Piya, “Teas’s Fortunes and Famines: Global Capital, Women Workers, and Survival in Indian Plantation Country,” The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women’s Poverty, edited by Amalia L. Cabexas, Ellen Reese, and Marguerite Waller, Boulder: Paradigm, 2007, 58.
(7) Isbister, John, Promises Not Kept: Poverty and the Betrayal of Third World Development, 6th ed, Bloomfield: Kumarian, 2003, 99. The hyphen, again, is mine.
(8) Maass, Peter, “Bosnian Factions Using Food as a Weapon; Serb, Muslim Sides Interfere With U.N. Relief Deliveries but for Different Reasons,” The Washington Post 17 February 1993.
(9) Life and Debt, Stephanie Black, director, 2001.
(10) Interestingly, Monsanto points out on its own blog that, “in actuality the first patent on a living organism dates back to 1873 when Monsieur Louis Pasteur was awarded U.S. Patent #141,072 with a claim to yeast. This was actually one of the first food production related patents–the yeast was for beer production to reduce spoilage of the beer.” (http://www.monsantoblog.com/2009/06/19/seed-patent-history/)
(11) Quinn, 63.
(12) Shiva, 94. The Schmeiser case is also a big part of the documentary The Future of Food, Deborah Koons Garcia, director, 2004.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Ibid, 146.
(15) Truong Sun Traveler, “Food as a Weapon – The Rape of Iraq,” Daily Kos 9 April 2008. Citing Global Research (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1447).
(16) Shiva, 147.
(17) Ibid, 148.
(18) Shiva, 149.
(19) Ibid, 150.
(20) F. William Engdahl, “Monsanto buys ‘Terminator’ Seeds Company,” Geopolitics – Geoeconomics 27 August 2006. (http://www.oilgeopolitics.net/GMO/Monsanto/monsanto.html)
(21) Shiva, 151.
(22) Ibid, 98.
(23) Ibid, 100.
(24) Shiva, 100.
(25) Ibid, 77.
(26) Shiva, 76.
(27) Ibid, 120.
(28) Quinn, 221.
(29) Shiva, 3.
(30) Camila Montecinos, “The Seeds of Sovereignty,” New International September 2010, 13.
(31) Raiz Forte (Strong Roots), Global Exchange, producer, 2001.
(32) Shiva, 185.
(33) Peter Wallensteen, “Scarce Goods as Political Weapons: The Case of Food,” Journal of Peace Research 13:4 (1976), 277.
The most obvious (lately) way we control the world’s food is not some overt action, like when Serb and Muslim sides in Bosnia would interfere with UN relief efforts to each other (8). Instead, what has become obvious—to those paying attention anyway—started quite subtly; farming gradually drifted into the hands of a small group of agribusinesses, agricultural giants pushed their way into Third-World countries—Dole and Chiquita suing their way into Jamaica’s banana market (9), for example—and some of those corporations, like Monsanto, were allowed to patent life (10), and take not only control but also ownership of seed itself. Daniel Quinn suggests that Mother Culture has taught us that “the world was made for us [so] it belongs to us, and we can do what we damn well please with it” (11). And so, when Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser’s canola crop was contaminated with Monsanto’s Round Up ready canola, it was not Schmeiser who sued the contaminator but the contaminator who sued Schmeiser, for “intellectual property theft” (12). Ultimately, Schmeiser was forced to destroy his stored seed on the chance it might all be contaminated with Monsanto’s. Shiva argues that this “robs us of our human right and human duty to be seed savers” (13). W. R. Grace claimed a patent on the use of the neem tree for controlling pests and diseases in agriculture, something that had been going on in India for over 2000 years. After a decade-long campaign, Shiva and more than 100,000 others involved, got the European Patent Office to revoke the patent (14). While this comes across as a success, the fact that it took a decade, the fact that W. R. Grace—and in other cases, Monsanto and others—could get the patent in the first place is key to understanding the trouble here. Humans managed for a long time without agriculture at all; we hunted and we gathered. Eventually, groups of us became more sedentary and started planting seeds for things we wanted to eat instead of just gathering what was around. And, with the agricultural revolution, we let farming be a specialty for some and we locked up the food, made the rest of us earn it through work. Or, as Shiva describes it—though she seems to be referring specifically to a more recent, more capitalist addition to this—we enclosed the commons; instead of letting the world be the world and our farms be our farms, we assigned ownership, we conquered the natural world just as we would conquer the political world in the form of various empires. We twisted the natural order around until we held godlike sway over the genetic makeup of seed and we patented it. But, that wasn’t enough. As with the Grace example above, we started allowing patents on seed varieties and methodologies that already existed. And, we made laws—in India, as Shiva describes repeatedly, in Earth Democracy, but many other places as well; for example, in Iraq, Bremer’s 100 Orders include, in Order 81, material that “deals specifically with Plant Variety Protection (PVP) because it is designed to protect the commercial interests of corporate seed companies” (15)—laws that leave the farmer in no position but to submit to agribusiness. Saving seed, a tradition older really than farming (i.e. organized agriculture) itself, has become illegal in places. In 1997, RiceTec was granted a patent on basmati rice lines and grains, which Shiva points out “has been grown for centuries on the subcontinent” (16). RiceTec’s patent included genes developed by farmers and “allowed RiceTec to collect royalties from farmers growing varieties developed by them and their forefathers” (17). This one took four years to overturn. In Ireland, seed potato growers were disallowed in the early 1990s from trading in reproductive material with other seed potato growers, merchants or farmers (18). In 1994, the Plant Variety Act here in America was amended to “eliminate farmers’ privilege to save and exchange seed and establish an absolute monarchy for the seed industry” (19). And the list goes on. We have made it illegal for farmers to save, store or even sell their own seed. And, Monsanto has even purchased the company—Delta & Pine Land—that developed the so-called “terminator” seed which will simply die after one generation, making farmers even more dependent on purchasing new seed time and time again (20). While some farmers fight—according to Shiva, some 5 million peasants in India have “taken a pledge to continue to save and exchange seed” regardless of any law that says they cannot, such as the Seed Act of 2004 (21)—in the meantime, there are further issues than just ownership.
Forcing farmers to grow certain crops (patented or not) results in monocultures, far from the variety there has been with traditional agriculture. Shiva uses the example of rice in India, how in the various climates of the subcontinent there have been many different strains of rice developed; “there are varieties to fit thousands of ecological niches all over the country, from the temperate high hills of the Himalayas to the tropical lowlands to deep-water and salt-water marshes of the sea coasts” (22). But, now, farmers are growing fewer strains and this lack of biodiversity, combined especially with no more intercropping, means less sustainability. While “genetic diversity provides security for the farmer against pests, disease, and unexpected climatic conditions” (23), this system demands that a farmer maintain a very specific, modern quality to his land to harvest his crops. This involves chemical fertilizers, the use of which “has led to the growing crisis of soil erosion and depleted soil quality” (24), and modern irrigation, both of which damage the land itself, ruining it for future generations of plants and people.
And, these chemical fertilizers cost money, as does modern irrigation, as do modern seeds. So farmers, who used to be able to save their own seeds and let nature (or intercropping) take care of much of the watering and fertilizing, are now paying out of pocket to maintain what should be a subsistence way of life. And, of course, it goes without saying, all this so they can produce far more than ever before, because this is not just subsistence farming but a support system for the whole First-World. These farmers are now producing not for themselves but for export, and putting more money into it than they ever had to before. And, so these farmers are put into debt, find themselves living impoverished lives, going hungry when they are the ones feeding the world. I deliberately have not mentioned NGOs like the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank, the organizations that often drive all of these new policies into these Third-World nations, because while they are the tools we and Mother Culture use to push new agendas, I would argue that they are not themselves the problem but yet another symptom, a self-promoting part of a destructive way of life that it is getting harder and harder to back down from. But, here I must reference the WTO in the case of Lee Kyung Hae. In 2003, the WTO held a meeting in Cancun. Lee and other farmers and peasants from around the world—Lee himself from Korea, where the WTO had forced the opening of “its rice markets to dumping by US agribusiness giants like Cargill and ConAgra” (25)—camped near the site of the meeting and marched upon it on the morning of its first day. They came to a barricade and Lee Kyung Hae, wearing a sign which read “WTO kills farmers,” climbed it and stabbed himself. He had a note with him that read, “I am taking my own life so others may live” (26). Sixteen thousand farmers in India committed suicide during 2004 alone, as “the policies of corporate-driven globalized and industrialized agriculture deliberately destroy small farms, dispossess small farmers, and render them disposable” (27).
Daniel Quinn argues that we “believe profoundly that, however bad things are now, they’re still infinitely preferable to what came before” (28). We have conquered the natural world, mandated that we work for our food, and we are consistently destroying the means by which we get it, but still, we take the Whiggish approach; this is what history has been leading us to, so it must be the right way of doing things. As long as we in the First-World can go to our local grocery store and find a great variety of choices, we don’t take the time to care whose lives were destroyed in getting those choices to us. Vandana Shiva argues that “patents on life and the rhetoric of the ‘ownership society’ in which everything—water, biodiversity, cells, genes, animals, plants—is property express a worldview in which life forms have no intrinsic worth, no integrity, and no subjecthood” (29). I would add humans to that list. This worldview devalues and essentially dehumanizes the Third-World individual, and small farmers, even here in the First-World, are losing the Third-World War. There are those who stand up against the patents, those who still trade seed (like Via Campesina, which states that “food sovereignty is the right of peoples to develop and maintain their own food systems” (30)) even where it has been made illegal, and there are those like the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) (31) who are demanding their legal right to have land and have the use of it, without being dictated to by NGOs or agribusiness corporations. Shiva suggests that “liberation in our genocidal times is, first and foremost, the freedom to stay alive” (32). But, we cannot simply be content with ourselves being alive. We must support the Third-World in this war; when the MST marches onto a piece of land, chanting “Occupy! Resist! Produce!” the individuals must know that they have support around the world. When an Indian or a Korean or even an American farmer, impoverished by debt growing our food, is at the point where taking his own life seems like his only viable option, he needs to believe that we will make it better, that we can take back food sovereignty for farmers, that we can give the commons back to the people, that we will not let life itself be patented and owned by corporations who care more about the bottom line than the lives of billions of individuals the world over. We need to reject Mother Culture, reject the dark recesses dug into our world by globalization, as “the discussion on ‘food power’ consequently not an exception but a symptom of a general global situation” (33). We must demand sustainability over overconsumption, demand a right to sustenance, demand biodiversity, demand nourishment over destruction, peace and life over war and death, demand democracy over corporate greed.
(1) Quinn, Daniel, Ishmael, New York: Bantam, 1992, 138.
(2) Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review, 2000, 43.
(3) Shiva, Vandana, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Cambridge: South End, 2005, 50.
(4) Ibid, 52.
(5) Ibid, citing Alvares’ “Deadly Development,” Development Forum 11:7 (1973), 3. Alvares and Shiva, of course, do not use my hyphenated “Third-World War.”
(6) Chatterjee, Piya, “Teas’s Fortunes and Famines: Global Capital, Women Workers, and Survival in Indian Plantation Country,” The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women’s Poverty, edited by Amalia L. Cabexas, Ellen Reese, and Marguerite Waller, Boulder: Paradigm, 2007, 58.
(7) Isbister, John, Promises Not Kept: Poverty and the Betrayal of Third World Development, 6th ed, Bloomfield: Kumarian, 2003, 99. The hyphen, again, is mine.
(8) Maass, Peter, “Bosnian Factions Using Food as a Weapon; Serb, Muslim Sides Interfere With U.N. Relief Deliveries but for Different Reasons,” The Washington Post 17 February 1993.
(9) Life and Debt, Stephanie Black, director, 2001.
(10) Interestingly, Monsanto points out on its own blog that, “in actuality the first patent on a living organism dates back to 1873 when Monsieur Louis Pasteur was awarded U.S. Patent #141,072 with a claim to yeast. This was actually one of the first food production related patents–the yeast was for beer production to reduce spoilage of the beer.” (http://www.monsantoblog.com/2009/06/19/seed-patent-history/)
(11) Quinn, 63.
(12) Shiva, 94. The Schmeiser case is also a big part of the documentary The Future of Food, Deborah Koons Garcia, director, 2004.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Ibid, 146.
(15) Truong Sun Traveler, “Food as a Weapon – The Rape of Iraq,” Daily Kos 9 April 2008. Citing Global Research (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1447).
(16) Shiva, 147.
(17) Ibid, 148.
(18) Shiva, 149.
(19) Ibid, 150.
(20) F. William Engdahl, “Monsanto buys ‘Terminator’ Seeds Company,” Geopolitics – Geoeconomics 27 August 2006. (http://www.oilgeopolitics.net/GMO/Monsanto/monsanto.html)
(21) Shiva, 151.
(22) Ibid, 98.
(23) Ibid, 100.
(24) Shiva, 100.
(25) Ibid, 77.
(26) Shiva, 76.
(27) Ibid, 120.
(28) Quinn, 221.
(29) Shiva, 3.
(30) Camila Montecinos, “The Seeds of Sovereignty,” New International September 2010, 13.
(31) Raiz Forte (Strong Roots), Global Exchange, producer, 2001.
(32) Shiva, 185.
(33) Peter Wallensteen, “Scarce Goods as Political Weapons: The Case of Food,” Journal of Peace Research 13:4 (1976), 277.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Her Very Distinctive Looks (1) - The Colonialization of Modeling
Caren Kaplan argues in “A World without Boundaries” that “the Safari ads, generated throughout the early ‘90s, are visually staged to evoke several different ‘imperial’ locations… playing on familiar cinematic and literary representations of wealthy white women in East Africa before formal decolonization” (2). Marie Claire’s safari ads, Jennifer Lynn Stoever suggests “are reminiscent of early anthropological photos and colonial travel shots from the British Empire, intended to illustrate racial superiority and extreme cultural difference” (3) and with them Marie Claire “actually reinscribes the oppressive colonialist mentality” portraying the colonial matriarch “under the guise of modern feminism” (4). Consider then the model Alek Wek, dark skinned, distinctly African, and appearing in the same issues of Marie Claire as these safari ads, but “not allowed to travel in her photo sequences” (5). Wek has only the “global” self the magazine has “constructed for her… fixed in place and marked with the cultural baggage that the West layers upon the Third World” (6). As Jennifer Lynn Stoever suggests in “Under the Western Eyes of Fashion: Marie Claire’s Construction of Global Feminism,” while these other, white, women are objects for fantasy for the women reading Marie Claire, allowing them to imagine they are these worldly women, travelling the globe, experiencing these far off places and far off cultures, Wek remains outside this fantasy. So, one must wonder why Marie Claire includes her at all, perhaps simply as a deliberate counterpoint. Marie Claire’s refusal to allow Wek to be photographed on safari is indicative of neocolonial ideals, specifically, the notion that Africa is still subject to the Western core and the notion that Wek represents some Modernizationist success, brought up from the Third World to be a part of the First.
Backing up, let’s take a look at who Alek Wek is and from whence she came. Alek was born a member of the Dinka tribe in the southern Sudan town of Wau, where, when Alek was still a young girl, civil war broke out. Under British colonialism, Sudan had been divided prior to 1946; the south, with oil and more fertile farmland, was similar to other east African countries (Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda) while the north was more like the Arabic-speaking Egypt. The south was dominated by Catholics and northern Arabs were kept out of positions of power and trade between the two regions was discouraged. In her memoir, Wek says her country “has always been split between the Islamic Arab north and animist and Christian south. They don’t ever seem to mix that well and the north has always seemed to dominate the south” (7). But, in 1946, this changed, when the two areas were merged and Arabic was made the official language, even in the south. The British justified this policy, claiming the south was not ready for exposure to the modern world. They closed the region to the world and a few Arabs who controlled the regions commerce and bureaucracy. The elite in the south, trained in English, were now the ones kept out of power, and those in the south had no control over their own resources but instead were subject to the north. Absent British rule, the northerners were supposed to adopt a federal system but did not, and in 1955 fighting broke out. For the next 17 years there would be much strife and division in Sudan, until finally, in 1972, the Addis Ababa Accord was signed. Ten years later, there would be violence again. Wek says it was “shocking to hear army trucks rumbling through the streets of my little town and to see men in green uniforms… Wau was not my simple home any longer; it was a military zone, with rebels on the outskirts, soldiers in town, and the lawless militias wreaking havoc everywhere” (8). Still, her mother would take the cows out to pasture—her mother, despite globalization, still was fulfilling her role, being productive, not displaced yet from a productive role in society, “rendered disposable” (9). There was also water to bring home from the pump. One day, Alek and her younger sister, Athieng, went with plastic water jugs on their heads went to fetch water. They were delayed, playing with some other children, and had to hurt home as the sun set, “the darkness always [making] the militias hungry for stealing and shooting” (10). After running past army trucks full of soldiers, Alek and Athieng made it home to the welcome sight of their mother’s cows and vegetables. Their parents were hunched over the radio listening to the illegal rebel station. “The announcer was saying that the conflict had spread to Wau” (11). It was war, again, after President Gaafar Nimeiry announced that the whole country would become an Arab Muslim land. Rebel leader John Garang formed the Sudan People’s Liberation Army to fight off northern troops. Hello Magazine describes the situation as it was for Alek Wek and her family in the end: “Along with millions of other Sudanese, her life was turned upside down by the outbreak of civil war in 1982. After their house came under fire from an unknown group, the Wek family fled. When they returned a month later, they found the village ravaged and its inhabitants living in the local school, without amenities or food” (12). The family fled by plane to London, where Alek’s older sister was living, having already applied for refugee status. Alek and Athieng went first, “but it was two years before they were joined by their mother and two more of their nine siblings. The remaining family members were finally given refuge by Australia and Canada” (13). In London, Alek was made fun of at school “for having such long legs, for having such dark skin and a round, African face and short, reddish hair” (14). She “lived the life of a refugee, struggling to make ends meet, cleaning toilets, and sweeping floors and learning a foreign language. She also struggled with psoriasis, a sometimes devastating skin disease that causes the skin to flake, bump or peel. At times, her mother was forced to use a sharp knife to cut flaking bits from her head to her toes” (15). She was discovered by a modeling talent scout at a street fair. She was wary of the talent scout (16) but thought, “I have all of these part-time jobs here and there. Why not get another part-time job that could turn out to be something that could finance my education and pay my rent?” (17). And, so it began. Alek entered the world of modeling, women, or images of them anyway, “commodities to be bought and sold, traded and consumed” (18). Early success was in music videos for Tina Turner and Janet Jackson, but “it was a 1997 Elle cover shoot that made the modeling world appreciate her uniqueness” (19).
That uniqueness is what separates Wek from the other Marie Claire models, a symbol set apart from the other models (20). Stoever describes how the same issues of Marie Claire that contain these safari ads also treat readers to “dozens of horrific accounts of baby rape, infant genocide, genital surgeries, rape, executions, forced prostitution, starvation, torture, domestic abuse, murder, and sex slavery, all taking place in Third World locations” (21). While “poverty itself is never addressed directly” but instead “used only to set the stage for the more treatable issues” (22), this negative portrayal of the Third World is not necessarily modernizationist; as Isbister says it, “the picture of traditional life painted by the modernizationists is not a negative one… however, it is a poor, subsistence life, a life that has no hope of accumulation, income, or wealth” (23). More befitting modernizationism, these same locations, contrary to this purported reality, seem much less dangerous in the ads. One ad in particular is worth noting: “Good Morning Ms. Anderson” from the “Wild at Heart” photo spread in the March 2003 issue of Marie Claire (24). Stoever describes this photo well, as a “fashionable blonde superwoman graciously taking time away from her safari to enlighten the young African children who gather excitedly at her feet” (25). Stoever suggests that this image and others like it “work to construct and consolidate the authority of the First World woman” (26), neocolonial positioning at work in a seemingly innocent fashion. Africa, despite its rapes and torture and executions is, in this photo, a place we have to go to teach the children, to raise them up out of their squalor, and in another photo, it’s a tourist destination, Ms. Anderson on safari, African natives around her but “never shown meeting the woman’s stare or gazing at her body” (27). These men are props just as the children are. They are Third World natives in need of our help, a thoroughly modernizationist notion; they are “placed in service roles that depict them as socially inferior to the white models” and these images “highlight their economic dependence on Western tourism” (28).
And, it is because of this modernizationist angle that Marie Claire takes that a model like Alek Wek cannot be photographed on these safaris. She represents the proof of the modernizationist view; she is the success story that proves just how much in need of our intervention these Africans are. Because of horrible events recounted in other parts of the magazine, these advertisements come across at first as horribly dishonest, but then the deliberateness becomes evident. When one looks at these two portrayals of Africa from the point of view of a modernizationist, then the two somewhat different views fall in line with one another. Africa is this horrible, backward place, where babies are raped and killed, where genocide and genital mutilation are everyday occurrences and girls like Alek Wek are just waiting to escape. In her recently published memoir, Wek describes her homeland like this: “Based on the stories my parents and grandparents told, it seems that Sudan has always been a violent land. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slave traders came through this territory, capturing Dinkas and others and taking them north to be sold in Arab Countries” (29). Notice: the suggestion of violence goes hand in hand with the invasion of Westerners and the slave trade, something that Imperialism and Colonialism brought in. And, when girls like Alek do escape, they need (supposedly) the modernizationists of the First World to pluck them further out of adversity to walk the runways of fashion, at least in Wek’s case, where “her distinctive looks, so different from the usual catwalk fare, caused a stir in the world of fashion, and garnered a raft of awards” (30). And, she cannot go back there, at least not as a model. She cannot be in Africa, taking cows out to pasture like her mother, or fetching water like she used to do with her sister. Outside of modeling, Wek recently returned to her hometown, along with her mother, and she implies in her interview with Ebony Magazine that this return was a big inspiration or writing her recent memoir. But, as a model, it is necessary that she be portrayed as a part of the First World now, a success story to demonstrate the rightness of the Modernizationist view. If she is back on safari, or back in Africa helping the Africans—never mind that, in her life outside of modeling, Wek is dealing in humanitarian efforts (31)—then the romanticism is gone, the sureness that we in the West are doing things right and Africa is backward and in need of our assistance is gone. Marie Claire needs to keep Wek out of the safari ads, and needs to keep the white women in them, or the balance of the world—since they rarely connect “the struggle of poor women around the world… to larger global economic processes and never [link them] to the politics and consumptive practices of the First World” (32)—as they present it in their activist-oriented pieces would lose much of their fuel. It needs things this way to encourage “women to consider themselves feminists and activists without noticing how closely their fantasies resemble colonial exploitation” (33).
(1) This is what Alek Wek’s success in the industry comes from, according to Askmen.com. It also gets more specific: “These are characterized by her long, lean legs, her very dark skin, radiant smile, and closely cropped hair,” but points out that counter to much of the content of this paper, “At the peak of her modeling years, she refused assignments that specifically requested dark models, all in an effort to satisfy her wish to be treated equally and not differently.” Of course, this was after she was well known and could be more picky.
(2) Caren Kaplan, “A World without Boundaries,” With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture, Lisa Bloom, ed. Minneapolis: U of MP, 1999. 140. This quotation specifically refers to Ralph Lauren’s advertisements for Safari perfume but I am deliberately misusing “safari” here because the Marie Claire ads discussed in Stoever are very much the same as those Ralph Lauren ads.
(3) Jennifer Lynn Stoever, “Under the Western Eyes of Fashion: Marie Claire’s Construction of Global Feminism,” The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women’s Poverty, Amalia L. Cabezas, Ellen Reese, and Marguerite Waller, eds. Boulder: Paradigm, 2007. 50.
(4) Ibid, 41.
(5) Ibid, 48.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Alek Wek, Alek: My Life from Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel, New York: Amistad, 2007, 7.
(8) Wek, 25.
(9) Shiva, Vandana, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Cambridge: South End, 2005, 130.
(10) Ibid, 26.
(11) Ibid, 27.
(12) Hello Magazine, “Alek Wek” Profile, http://www.hellomagazine.com/profiles/alek-wek/.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Wek, 134.
(15) Lynette R. Holloway, “Alek Wek from Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel,” Ebony (September 2007), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_11_62/ai_n19480182/.
(16) This brings to mind Vandana Shiva’s suggestion that “the sex industry” (not to necessarily equate the sex industry with modeling, of course) “is often the only survival option left to women who are economic refugees in the globalized economy” (130).
(17) Holloway.
(18) Shiva, 130.
(19) Askmen.com, emphasis mine.
(20) This brings to mind Aimé Césaire’s assessment of colonization (or my use of colonialization instead) as being equal to “thingification” (42), or here vice versa, this objectification of Alek Wek as distinctly colonial in nature.
(21) Stoever, 51.
(22) Ibid, 45.
(23) John Isbister, Promises Not Kept, Bloomfield: Kumarian, 2003, 33.
(24) This photo can be seen on page 50 of Stoever’s chapter.
(25) Stoever, 48.
(26) Ibid, 50.
(27) Ibid.
(28) Ibid, 47.
(29) Wek, 7.
(30) Hello Magazine.
(31) Wek’s profile on fashionmodeldirectory.com says she “has done a variety of work for charitable causes including World Vision (for which she is the spokesperson), the U.S. Committee for Refugees, Fashion Targets Breast Cancer campaign, New York City Special Olympics, Sudanese relief through UNICEF, London Refugee Week, Roots (in Brooklyn) and DIFFA (Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS).” http://www.fashionmodeldirectory.com/models/Alek_Wek/
(32) Stoever, 45.
(33) Ibid, 53.
Backing up, let’s take a look at who Alek Wek is and from whence she came. Alek was born a member of the Dinka tribe in the southern Sudan town of Wau, where, when Alek was still a young girl, civil war broke out. Under British colonialism, Sudan had been divided prior to 1946; the south, with oil and more fertile farmland, was similar to other east African countries (Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda) while the north was more like the Arabic-speaking Egypt. The south was dominated by Catholics and northern Arabs were kept out of positions of power and trade between the two regions was discouraged. In her memoir, Wek says her country “has always been split between the Islamic Arab north and animist and Christian south. They don’t ever seem to mix that well and the north has always seemed to dominate the south” (7). But, in 1946, this changed, when the two areas were merged and Arabic was made the official language, even in the south. The British justified this policy, claiming the south was not ready for exposure to the modern world. They closed the region to the world and a few Arabs who controlled the regions commerce and bureaucracy. The elite in the south, trained in English, were now the ones kept out of power, and those in the south had no control over their own resources but instead were subject to the north. Absent British rule, the northerners were supposed to adopt a federal system but did not, and in 1955 fighting broke out. For the next 17 years there would be much strife and division in Sudan, until finally, in 1972, the Addis Ababa Accord was signed. Ten years later, there would be violence again. Wek says it was “shocking to hear army trucks rumbling through the streets of my little town and to see men in green uniforms… Wau was not my simple home any longer; it was a military zone, with rebels on the outskirts, soldiers in town, and the lawless militias wreaking havoc everywhere” (8). Still, her mother would take the cows out to pasture—her mother, despite globalization, still was fulfilling her role, being productive, not displaced yet from a productive role in society, “rendered disposable” (9). There was also water to bring home from the pump. One day, Alek and her younger sister, Athieng, went with plastic water jugs on their heads went to fetch water. They were delayed, playing with some other children, and had to hurt home as the sun set, “the darkness always [making] the militias hungry for stealing and shooting” (10). After running past army trucks full of soldiers, Alek and Athieng made it home to the welcome sight of their mother’s cows and vegetables. Their parents were hunched over the radio listening to the illegal rebel station. “The announcer was saying that the conflict had spread to Wau” (11). It was war, again, after President Gaafar Nimeiry announced that the whole country would become an Arab Muslim land. Rebel leader John Garang formed the Sudan People’s Liberation Army to fight off northern troops. Hello Magazine describes the situation as it was for Alek Wek and her family in the end: “Along with millions of other Sudanese, her life was turned upside down by the outbreak of civil war in 1982. After their house came under fire from an unknown group, the Wek family fled. When they returned a month later, they found the village ravaged and its inhabitants living in the local school, without amenities or food” (12). The family fled by plane to London, where Alek’s older sister was living, having already applied for refugee status. Alek and Athieng went first, “but it was two years before they were joined by their mother and two more of their nine siblings. The remaining family members were finally given refuge by Australia and Canada” (13). In London, Alek was made fun of at school “for having such long legs, for having such dark skin and a round, African face and short, reddish hair” (14). She “lived the life of a refugee, struggling to make ends meet, cleaning toilets, and sweeping floors and learning a foreign language. She also struggled with psoriasis, a sometimes devastating skin disease that causes the skin to flake, bump or peel. At times, her mother was forced to use a sharp knife to cut flaking bits from her head to her toes” (15). She was discovered by a modeling talent scout at a street fair. She was wary of the talent scout (16) but thought, “I have all of these part-time jobs here and there. Why not get another part-time job that could turn out to be something that could finance my education and pay my rent?” (17). And, so it began. Alek entered the world of modeling, women, or images of them anyway, “commodities to be bought and sold, traded and consumed” (18). Early success was in music videos for Tina Turner and Janet Jackson, but “it was a 1997 Elle cover shoot that made the modeling world appreciate her uniqueness” (19).
That uniqueness is what separates Wek from the other Marie Claire models, a symbol set apart from the other models (20). Stoever describes how the same issues of Marie Claire that contain these safari ads also treat readers to “dozens of horrific accounts of baby rape, infant genocide, genital surgeries, rape, executions, forced prostitution, starvation, torture, domestic abuse, murder, and sex slavery, all taking place in Third World locations” (21). While “poverty itself is never addressed directly” but instead “used only to set the stage for the more treatable issues” (22), this negative portrayal of the Third World is not necessarily modernizationist; as Isbister says it, “the picture of traditional life painted by the modernizationists is not a negative one… however, it is a poor, subsistence life, a life that has no hope of accumulation, income, or wealth” (23). More befitting modernizationism, these same locations, contrary to this purported reality, seem much less dangerous in the ads. One ad in particular is worth noting: “Good Morning Ms. Anderson” from the “Wild at Heart” photo spread in the March 2003 issue of Marie Claire (24). Stoever describes this photo well, as a “fashionable blonde superwoman graciously taking time away from her safari to enlighten the young African children who gather excitedly at her feet” (25). Stoever suggests that this image and others like it “work to construct and consolidate the authority of the First World woman” (26), neocolonial positioning at work in a seemingly innocent fashion. Africa, despite its rapes and torture and executions is, in this photo, a place we have to go to teach the children, to raise them up out of their squalor, and in another photo, it’s a tourist destination, Ms. Anderson on safari, African natives around her but “never shown meeting the woman’s stare or gazing at her body” (27). These men are props just as the children are. They are Third World natives in need of our help, a thoroughly modernizationist notion; they are “placed in service roles that depict them as socially inferior to the white models” and these images “highlight their economic dependence on Western tourism” (28).
And, it is because of this modernizationist angle that Marie Claire takes that a model like Alek Wek cannot be photographed on these safaris. She represents the proof of the modernizationist view; she is the success story that proves just how much in need of our intervention these Africans are. Because of horrible events recounted in other parts of the magazine, these advertisements come across at first as horribly dishonest, but then the deliberateness becomes evident. When one looks at these two portrayals of Africa from the point of view of a modernizationist, then the two somewhat different views fall in line with one another. Africa is this horrible, backward place, where babies are raped and killed, where genocide and genital mutilation are everyday occurrences and girls like Alek Wek are just waiting to escape. In her recently published memoir, Wek describes her homeland like this: “Based on the stories my parents and grandparents told, it seems that Sudan has always been a violent land. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slave traders came through this territory, capturing Dinkas and others and taking them north to be sold in Arab Countries” (29). Notice: the suggestion of violence goes hand in hand with the invasion of Westerners and the slave trade, something that Imperialism and Colonialism brought in. And, when girls like Alek do escape, they need (supposedly) the modernizationists of the First World to pluck them further out of adversity to walk the runways of fashion, at least in Wek’s case, where “her distinctive looks, so different from the usual catwalk fare, caused a stir in the world of fashion, and garnered a raft of awards” (30). And, she cannot go back there, at least not as a model. She cannot be in Africa, taking cows out to pasture like her mother, or fetching water like she used to do with her sister. Outside of modeling, Wek recently returned to her hometown, along with her mother, and she implies in her interview with Ebony Magazine that this return was a big inspiration or writing her recent memoir. But, as a model, it is necessary that she be portrayed as a part of the First World now, a success story to demonstrate the rightness of the Modernizationist view. If she is back on safari, or back in Africa helping the Africans—never mind that, in her life outside of modeling, Wek is dealing in humanitarian efforts (31)—then the romanticism is gone, the sureness that we in the West are doing things right and Africa is backward and in need of our assistance is gone. Marie Claire needs to keep Wek out of the safari ads, and needs to keep the white women in them, or the balance of the world—since they rarely connect “the struggle of poor women around the world… to larger global economic processes and never [link them] to the politics and consumptive practices of the First World” (32)—as they present it in their activist-oriented pieces would lose much of their fuel. It needs things this way to encourage “women to consider themselves feminists and activists without noticing how closely their fantasies resemble colonial exploitation” (33).
(1) This is what Alek Wek’s success in the industry comes from, according to Askmen.com. It also gets more specific: “These are characterized by her long, lean legs, her very dark skin, radiant smile, and closely cropped hair,” but points out that counter to much of the content of this paper, “At the peak of her modeling years, she refused assignments that specifically requested dark models, all in an effort to satisfy her wish to be treated equally and not differently.” Of course, this was after she was well known and could be more picky.
(2) Caren Kaplan, “A World without Boundaries,” With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture, Lisa Bloom, ed. Minneapolis: U of MP, 1999. 140. This quotation specifically refers to Ralph Lauren’s advertisements for Safari perfume but I am deliberately misusing “safari” here because the Marie Claire ads discussed in Stoever are very much the same as those Ralph Lauren ads.
(3) Jennifer Lynn Stoever, “Under the Western Eyes of Fashion: Marie Claire’s Construction of Global Feminism,” The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women’s Poverty, Amalia L. Cabezas, Ellen Reese, and Marguerite Waller, eds. Boulder: Paradigm, 2007. 50.
(4) Ibid, 41.
(5) Ibid, 48.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Alek Wek, Alek: My Life from Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel, New York: Amistad, 2007, 7.
(8) Wek, 25.
(9) Shiva, Vandana, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Cambridge: South End, 2005, 130.
(10) Ibid, 26.
(11) Ibid, 27.
(12) Hello Magazine, “Alek Wek” Profile, http://www.hellomagazine.com/profiles/alek-wek/.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Wek, 134.
(15) Lynette R. Holloway, “Alek Wek from Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel,” Ebony (September 2007), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_11_62/ai_n19480182/.
(16) This brings to mind Vandana Shiva’s suggestion that “the sex industry” (not to necessarily equate the sex industry with modeling, of course) “is often the only survival option left to women who are economic refugees in the globalized economy” (130).
(17) Holloway.
(18) Shiva, 130.
(19) Askmen.com, emphasis mine.
(20) This brings to mind Aimé Césaire’s assessment of colonization (or my use of colonialization instead) as being equal to “thingification” (42), or here vice versa, this objectification of Alek Wek as distinctly colonial in nature.
(21) Stoever, 51.
(22) Ibid, 45.
(23) John Isbister, Promises Not Kept, Bloomfield: Kumarian, 2003, 33.
(24) This photo can be seen on page 50 of Stoever’s chapter.
(25) Stoever, 48.
(26) Ibid, 50.
(27) Ibid.
(28) Ibid, 47.
(29) Wek, 7.
(30) Hello Magazine.
(31) Wek’s profile on fashionmodeldirectory.com says she “has done a variety of work for charitable causes including World Vision (for which she is the spokesperson), the U.S. Committee for Refugees, Fashion Targets Breast Cancer campaign, New York City Special Olympics, Sudanese relief through UNICEF, London Refugee Week, Roots (in Brooklyn) and DIFFA (Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS).” http://www.fashionmodeldirectory.com/models/Alek_Wek/
(32) Stoever, 45.
(33) Ibid, 53.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
For Everyone Everything
“When did the Preamble or the Constitution include the government meeting the people’s needs for housing, transportation and health care?”So asks Mike Opelke on The Blaze (“Blaze Exclusive: Socialist Mantra Hidden in Grade School Chants” 2 March 2011). For those who don’t know, The Blaze is “a news, information and opinion site brought to you by Glenn Beck and a dedicated team of writers, journalists & video producers.” But, it doesn’t matter necessarily who, specifically, asked the question.
See, the problem, or rather one of the problems with the Right is that they think, apparently, that promoting the “general welfare” means raising an Army and heading off to wars abroad to "protect our freedoms" and all the bullshit that goes along with that... Nevermind that the founders didn't even want a standing army. Nevermind that such a thing, if these wars were even protecting us... at all, would fall under "common defense." One has to wonder what they think the “general welfare” is? They love to quote the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and all that, as if that defines what America is about… well, not that it doesn’t, but it’s the Constitution that defines our government, how it should work, what it should do for us. And, one of those things, right there in the preamble, is to “promote the general welfare.” It’s in there with “establish justice,” “insure domestic tranquility,” and “provide for the common defense.”
Anyway, Opelke’s issue (and that of other folks to the right of center) is that, supposedly, “school children around the country” are chanting—strangely, he doesn’t suggest they are being forced—a socialist mantra. That mantra: “The People’s basic needs must be met in a country. Needs for housing, education, transportation, and health care overseen by our government system.” Apparently the notion that people’s “basic needs” be met is a horrible idea.
How dare a grade school, or anyone for that matter, suggest that the general welfare might include housing or education or transportation, right? And God forbid anyone try to include healthcare... and that's just going on "general welfare." There's also "justice" and "domestic tranquility," but, of course, neither of those is served by people having homes or knowledge or a way to get to work or to even have work, or being able to see a doctor...
How about a new approach--call it socialist if you like, but then I might have to mention our roads and our water and our military for that matter, if you're so against socialism—an approach that actually values the individual instead of demanding that the individual pull himself up by his damn bootstraps and go be entrepreneurial or whatever and become a CEO, become rich, live the American Dream... or else. I mean, who do these poor people think they are, getting union jobs and demanding better pay? If you just went out like the American Dream told you to and made your own damn way, you wouldn't be needing to make demands because you'd be self-employed, self-sufficient... well maybe not self-sufficient; that wouldn't be very capitalist of you.
This new approach: the government exists to promote justice, i.e. to renounce, discredit and disallow racism and sexism and other forms of discrimination, to ensure that those who commit crimes (and not just those who can't afford good attorneys) pay the price as our society sees fit. Also, that housing access is equal, that access to education and jobs and transportation is equal, that access to healthcare is equal.
This new approach: the government exists to promote domestic tranquility, and what makes us more tranquil than having access to the necessities of not just life but now modern life, i.e. access to an education, access to housing, access to food and clean water, access to, again, healthcare?
This new approach: the government exists to promote the general welfare of all of its citizens, i.e. that, as Alexander Hamilton argued in his "Report on Manufactures," 5 December 1791, "the object to which an appropriation of money is to be made" or for which a law is to be passed (I would add), "be General and not local," that the government not promote, directly or indirectly, one portion of its peoples over another, be it certain corporations, be it certain races or creeds or religions.
This new approach, put simply in perhaps some very socialist terms: for everyone everything.
We've come to a point where I can understand the sentiment of some graffiti in 1968 Paris: “mankind will not live free until the last capitalist has been hanged with the entrails of the last bureaucrat.” You know, down with the capitalist pigs and whatnot.
Partisan politics, capitalist agendas, militaristic notions of protection... It's time to try something new, or maybe simply something closer to what the founders had in mind in that preamble.
It cannot simply be from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. We must look past even that Marxist slogan. Instead, in this modern age, with all of the advances we have achieved already, we should be able to make available everything to everyone.
For everyone everything.
See, the problem, or rather one of the problems with the Right is that they think, apparently, that promoting the “general welfare” means raising an Army and heading off to wars abroad to "protect our freedoms" and all the bullshit that goes along with that... Nevermind that the founders didn't even want a standing army. Nevermind that such a thing, if these wars were even protecting us... at all, would fall under "common defense." One has to wonder what they think the “general welfare” is? They love to quote the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and all that, as if that defines what America is about… well, not that it doesn’t, but it’s the Constitution that defines our government, how it should work, what it should do for us. And, one of those things, right there in the preamble, is to “promote the general welfare.” It’s in there with “establish justice,” “insure domestic tranquility,” and “provide for the common defense.”
Anyway, Opelke’s issue (and that of other folks to the right of center) is that, supposedly, “school children around the country” are chanting—strangely, he doesn’t suggest they are being forced—a socialist mantra. That mantra: “The People’s basic needs must be met in a country. Needs for housing, education, transportation, and health care overseen by our government system.” Apparently the notion that people’s “basic needs” be met is a horrible idea.
How dare a grade school, or anyone for that matter, suggest that the general welfare might include housing or education or transportation, right? And God forbid anyone try to include healthcare... and that's just going on "general welfare." There's also "justice" and "domestic tranquility," but, of course, neither of those is served by people having homes or knowledge or a way to get to work or to even have work, or being able to see a doctor...
How about a new approach--call it socialist if you like, but then I might have to mention our roads and our water and our military for that matter, if you're so against socialism—an approach that actually values the individual instead of demanding that the individual pull himself up by his damn bootstraps and go be entrepreneurial or whatever and become a CEO, become rich, live the American Dream... or else. I mean, who do these poor people think they are, getting union jobs and demanding better pay? If you just went out like the American Dream told you to and made your own damn way, you wouldn't be needing to make demands because you'd be self-employed, self-sufficient... well maybe not self-sufficient; that wouldn't be very capitalist of you.
This new approach: the government exists to promote justice, i.e. to renounce, discredit and disallow racism and sexism and other forms of discrimination, to ensure that those who commit crimes (and not just those who can't afford good attorneys) pay the price as our society sees fit. Also, that housing access is equal, that access to education and jobs and transportation is equal, that access to healthcare is equal.
This new approach: the government exists to promote domestic tranquility, and what makes us more tranquil than having access to the necessities of not just life but now modern life, i.e. access to an education, access to housing, access to food and clean water, access to, again, healthcare?
This new approach: the government exists to promote the general welfare of all of its citizens, i.e. that, as Alexander Hamilton argued in his "Report on Manufactures," 5 December 1791, "the object to which an appropriation of money is to be made" or for which a law is to be passed (I would add), "be General and not local," that the government not promote, directly or indirectly, one portion of its peoples over another, be it certain corporations, be it certain races or creeds or religions.
This new approach, put simply in perhaps some very socialist terms: for everyone everything.
We've come to a point where I can understand the sentiment of some graffiti in 1968 Paris: “mankind will not live free until the last capitalist has been hanged with the entrails of the last bureaucrat.” You know, down with the capitalist pigs and whatnot.
Partisan politics, capitalist agendas, militaristic notions of protection... It's time to try something new, or maybe simply something closer to what the founders had in mind in that preamble.
It cannot simply be from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. We must look past even that Marxist slogan. Instead, in this modern age, with all of the advances we have achieved already, we should be able to make available everything to everyone.
For everyone everything.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Barry Soetoro (my "after-dinner-speech")
7:24pm, 4 August 1961, a grand conspiracy is put into effect. A child is born in Kenya, 
But, during the Presidential Primaries in 2008, rumors of the truth begin to circulate, subversive emails calling for us to stop this usurper from coming to power.
This usurper’s name: Barry Soetoro… you might know him better under his conspiratorial alias, Barack Hussein Obama II. A Los Angeles Times op-ed, “Behind the ‘Birther’ Blather,” this past Wednesday, 16 February 2011, cited a PPP poll that “found that 51% of likely Republican primary voters believe that Obama was born outside the United States.” And, 11 states’ legislatures have introduced “birther” bills to challenge Barry’s eligibility in 2012. But, despite even these official attacks on his citizenship, he is still our President.
Today, I will explain how this Kenyan boy has pulled the wool over our eyes, I will show you how we can join the Birther Movement in applying the constitution to get him out of office, and then I will show you the implications of all this.
First, an explanation:
Here is Barry’s real Birth Certificate:
Nevermind that Mombasa was part of Zanzibar at the time, not ceded to Kenya until December 1963. Nevermind that Kenya was not the “Republic of Kenya” until December 1964. And, nevermind, of course, that this document, submitted as evidence by Dr Orly Taitz—orlytaitzesq.com, the “World’s Leading Obama Eligibility Challenge Web Site”—was pronounced a forgery of this Australian document.
Oh, and nevermind the name, Barack Hussein II. As I’ll show you in a moment, his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro filled out an Indonesian school application with the boy’s real name.
But, first, here is Barry’s real Birth Certificate:
Again, ignore the name. And, ignore the fact that, yeah, Mombasa wasn’t part of the British Protectorate of Kenya for another two years. Look at the footprint—it’s black—this is clearly the Birth Certificate for our usurper President.
Now, if you saw the Associated Press’ article “Final Nail in Obama’s Lack of US Citizenship Coffin,” 1 April 2009 (which they conveniently emailed rather than bother publishing), you know that Americans for Freedom of Information released Barry’s transcripts from Occidental College, where he received financial aid as a foreign student from Indonesia. Americans for Freedom of Information’s website, amfoi.wordpress.com, points out that the organization “is a completely fake organization that recommends hypotheticality to anyone looking to avoid the IRS,” but, if it shows up in one’s inbox, it has to be true.
And, here’s all the proof we need:
Note the name at the top, Barry Soetoro… ignore, of course, the listed birthplace of Honolulu. The key here is we all know that filling out a school application has legal auhority over any… birth certificate, no matter how many birth certificates one has.
But, what does all this matter, as long as Barry won the election? Here’s the thing. In this country we have a Constitution. It’s this long boring document that lays out how our government works and what it takes to be President. Now, while it doesn’t specifically rule out Kenyan “slash” Indonesian boys who may or may not be Muslim (Hussein… really? It’s like they wanted us to suspect him of something.) and may or may not be black, depending on the racial math one uses, Article I does say that only a natural born citizen can be President. And, this is where the Birther Movement gains the higher ground…
See, according to attorney Mario Apuzzo—who because of similarities to a certain author’s name, I will hereafter call the Godfather—in his essay entitled, “The Framers Used Emer de Vattel to Define a Natural Born Citizen,” Before It’s News, 2 November 2010, the framers used Emer de Vattel to define a natural born citizen… the essay title kinda nailed it. Anyway, as the Godfather points out, de Vattel defined a natural born citizen as “those born in the country, of parents who are citizens” in the Law of Nations, Book 1 Chapter 19 Section 212. De Vattel further suggests that if one is born of a foreign father, then his birth country “will be only the place of his birth, and not his country.” He mentions only two paragraphs later, section 214 that “there are states, as, for instance, England”—where we got our common law, I would add—“where the single circumstance of being born in the country naturalizes the children of a foreigner.”
But, nevermind that last part. Since Vattel wrote that first part before the framers used the phrase natural born citizen, and an English translation of his French book was not available at the time, they had to have been copying him. Besides, if a law existed before our Constitution, we have to follow it. Why write a Constitution if not to ignore it whenever we find something that predates it?
So, let’s say, for argument’s sake, all these birth certificates are fake—well not this one:
For argument’s sake, let’s say Barry was born in Hawaii. His father was a British subject, born in Kenya, so by de Vattel’s standard, Barry might qualify as a 14th Amendment citizen of these United States, but not as a natural born citizen, so not Constitutionally eligible for the position he has usurped.
There are two obvious implications to all this:
First, we have a foreign president who has taken office without constitutional right to do so. And, this from a grand conspiracy to—if you listen to Glenn Beck, who did a whole week-long exposé on his hard-hitting news program this past November—destroy America from within… see George Soros and his Shadow Party are using the Cult of Obama to, achieve some sort of, um, socialist, Marxist, Jewish, fascist, communist, Muslim plot—the one started back in ’61 when Barry’s parents signed their newborn up for his future presidency and maybe even Antichrist-ed-ness… It’s a word.
As Joy Tiz put it in “George Soros: International Man of Misery,” Canada Free Press, 18 February 2009: “it’s important to understand that George Soros doesn’t want to ‘change’ America. He wants to destroy it.” A nefarious conspiracy by Kenyans, Indonesians, Muslims, Jews to take down America, begun with a simple newspaper announcement and compounded with fake birth certificate after fake birth certificate. Here, by the way, is the real one…
…nothing suspicious there.
Strangely, the second implication is even scarier. For you see, if Barry was born in Hawaii, if Soros isn’t trying to destroy America, then there is something wrong with all of us that allows for ideas like this to keep going. Brian Montopoli points out, in “Who Are the Birthers?,” CBS News, 23 July 2009: “conspiracy theories often flourish in the wake of traumatic or game-changing events—the September 11 attacks, the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination—and the election of America’s first black president has been no exception. Almost as soon as Barack Obama emerged as a serious candidate for the presidency, rumors about whether or not he is really an American began popping up online.”
The question we have to ask: does our kneejerk reaction stem from racism, from some Cold War remnant fear of socialism, or are we all simply so insane that when something happens we don’t like, there has to be a conspiracy? Montopoli quotes Michael Barkun, expert in conspiracy theories, saying, “there are people who firmly believe that the truth is always hidden, that whatever is presented as public knowledge is necessarily false.” He says, “conspiracy theories are [actually] comforting. They give us a feeling that we have secret knowledge, we know how the world really works.” Of course, they also make us believe some crazy stuff; according to an Onion poll, 22 September 2010, one in five Americans believe Barack Obama is a cactus.
Today, we’ve seen how the facts, or lies, of Obama’s birth have lingered, we’ve seen that the Godfather may have a point and there may legitimately be some constitutional issues involved, and we’ve seen the implications of this conspiracy… even if it is just a crazy theory. While even MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called for Obama’s birth certificate, 27 December 2010, Dr Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health confirmed in USA Today, 28 July 2009, that she has “seen the original vital records maintained on file… verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii.” Then again, Fukino’s last name, transliterated back into the original Hawaiian is… Fuck if I know.
The point is: no Kenyan boy can pull the wool over our eyes if we are onto his plan… unless, we are all so stressed by the economy, so damaged by the shadow of 9/11 and wars abroad, by Jersey Shore, by partisan politics throwing the blame around like a hot potato, that we don’t know how to see what’s real. Maybe we can only see, not what we want to see, but whatever illusion best fits a world so out of our control that it’s easier to believe that a socialist conspiracy has put a foreign usurper in the Oval Office than it is to accept that maybe America just isn’t on top anymore.
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