Category Archives: politics

Does Obama Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?

Posted on by
9

34137136.jpg

Barack Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize and the news has taken everyone by surprise. Even the President was unaware that he was nominated, according to his advisors.

So far I see several kinds of reactions to the news.

1. There are those who are unequivocally happy for him and feel he is deserving.
2. There are those who support him but are puzzled by the timing.
3. Then there are those who support him but feel dismayed that he won.
4. And finally, there are those who don’t support him and I actually don’t care what they think. If he’s a Nazi commie for trying to give every American affordable health care, then I’m sure he’ll be viewed as the Anti-Christ for winning the Nobel Peace Price.

I decided to look at the reasons why people are puzzled or dismayed by his selection and to see if they are legitimate critiques. I also looked at the list of previous laureates to see if there are precedents that justify his selection.

Here is a list of what seems to be the most common critiques.

• The Peace Prize should not be awarded to a leader presiding over two wars.
• Obama hasn’t done anything yet. He needs to accomplish something first.
• He’s just a symbol.
• The award was given for promises as yet unfulfilled.
• He’s just a celebrity and got it on name recognition alone.

Who chooses the winner?

Just to put things into perspective, the Nobel Prizes are not awarded by some public international body. Continue reading →

The Moment of Silence

Posted on by
6

CIMG0393_1.JPG

The clearest memory I have of 9/11 actually occurred one year after the attacks. In 2002, I had arrived at Heathrow Airport in London and was waiting for my connecting flight to Leeds. I had just retired from dance and was about to embark on a totally different direction in my life, entering academia in a country I imagined was a cross between a Dicken’s novel and a Hugh Grant movie.

Of course, I was aware that I was traveling on the first anniversary of 9/11. There was much fuss on the news about air travel leading up to that day. But I was more excited about being in Europe for the first time and starting an adventure.

By accident, my brief layover at Heathrow coincided with the exact time of the attacks from the year before. I was groggy from the 14 hour plane ride, the time change, and agitated by the cigarette smoke that seemed to be everywhere. A woman announced over the loudspeakers that in a few seconds it would be the anniversary of the attacks. She asked us to observe 2 minutes of silence to honor the victims.

Heathrow is the busiest airport in Europe by far, and the 3rd busiest in the world. Yet, for those next two minutes everyone stopped working. Passengers from all over the world stopped walking, or looked up from their newspapers. No one said a word. Even the children seemed to understand the gravity of the moment. I didn’t even hear a phone ring until well into the 2nd minute. I was stunned.

And moved. And humbled.

During those minutes, I felt a global energy of good will and empathy directed at Americans. It was like Britain had my back. And many other countries came to offer support and condolences in that brief memorial service. I sensed that the US could enter an era of openness and compassion with the world community. But that good energy would be squandered over the next 6 years through pointless wars, domestic paranoia, and building walls to keep the world outside.

It was an unfortunate path. But I don’t think it’s too late to get back to that other path. I think that the world would have our back again if we let them.

The Visitor

Posted on by
8

the visitor

What began as a movie review has become a meditation on being an immigrant. The actual movie review is at the end.

The Serial Immigrant
Yesterday I spent the afternoon getting my visa extended, shuttling back and forth between the ward office to get the right documents, and the immigration office. Quite unexpectedly, four years have passed since I’d moved to Japan, twice as long as I’d planned. I still feel like I just got here. I still feel like I’m just passing through. But maybe that’s just a feeling out of habit since I’ve moved around so much.  27 times to be exact.

I guess I’ve been an immigrant almost all of my life. The first time was when I was a baby and my family immigrated to the US. I have complex feelings about all that.

It’s a lot more complicated than being an immigrant in Japan, or being an immigrant in the UK. It’s very straightforward outside the US. In Japan, I’m an American here on a spousal visa. In the UK, I was an American on a student visa. Being American provides more privileges. It’s easier to get visas, for instance. My Latin American, Chinese and African friends had to go through more hoops. And I was never questioned about being American.

It’s not as straightforward to be American in the US if you’re a person of color. In subtle ways, I’m actually considered more American outside the US than in the US. The best example of this is being asked, “where are you from” by fellow Americans. In and of itself, it’s a harmless question, friendly even. But if you’re asked this question at least once a week your entire life, as happened to me, it becomes very irritating, and even takes on a menacing dimension.

And here’s the exchange every time. Keep in mind, this is a conversation with a stranger, someone I’d just met.

Stranger:  “So where are you from?”
Me:  “I’m from Los Angeles. How about you?”
“I’m from (some city). What I meant was, where are you REALLY from.”
“Oh, a small college town in L.A. County.”
“No, really.”
“Yeah, I’m really from L.A.”
“Well, what’s your nationality?”
“I’m American.”

Then I’d be hit with more persistent questions, with questions about my “ethnic heritage”, where my parents were born, etc. And I had one of these exchanges at least once a week. With a stranger! Americans are chatty and we strike up conversations with strangers all the time. So that this would happen so often is not so odd.

Curiously, my white friends who were recent immigrants from Russia or Germany, for instance, were rarely, if ever, asked these questions. And they often spoke with heavy accents.

The Embedded Anthropologist
The message that I got from those hundreds of the same conversation was that a lot of white folks really didn’t see me as a true American, and they were going to reinforce their views on me, casually in the checkout line.

Of course, I felt a lot of anger and frustration. But after a while, I decided to look upon the experience in a more detached way, as an anthropologist observing 20th century American attitudes.

I started recording each encounter, noting the place, time, who I had the exchange with, and the conversation itself. Later, I expanded it to include logs of more overt racist incidents directed at me. I even created a form that I filled out. This made it a lot more interesting and helped me to process the experiences in a constructive way.

the visitor

The Visitor
The day before getting my visa extended, I watched a wonderful movie that dealt with issues of immigration. This quiet movie is the best film I’ve seen in the last few years.

The film centers around four characters. Walter Vale, played in an unnervingly honest way by the restrained Richard Jenkins, is a widowed professor who is just going through the motions of living. He meets Tarek and Zainab, illegal immigrants who are squatting in his New York apartment. Both Haaz Sleiman and Danai Jakesai, who play the couple, provide nuanced performances. Haaz, in particular, is literally the beating heart of the movie.

Tarek, a djembe player, and Walter, who is drawn to the drums, form an unlikely friendship, as Tarek teaches Walter how to play. When Tarek is arrested and detained by immigration authorities, Tarek’s mother, Mouna, played with gravitas by Hiam Abbass, comes to New York looking for him. Suddenly, Walter finds himself the intermediary between the government (or in this case, a private contractor detention center), and his new friends.

It’s a film rich with irony. Walter is a professor who studies developing countries but probably never had contact with people from those countries. Even though he’s suddenly surrounded by immigrants, he is the visitor that is out of place and without direction.

Thomas McCarthy, the writer and director, has created that rare movie that resonates on both the personal and the political without caricature or demagoguery. Not only is it a story of a lonely man who finds a way to connect with other people and finds ways to be responsible to them, it’s also an allegory of post-9/11 politics. Not only is it narratives of immigrants who are seeking promise in America, it’s the tale of how American-ness is being reconstructed into narrower definitions.

Even though the themes seem heavy, the movie has many light moments. And despite the less than happy ending, it’s strangely uplifting. Most important of all, T and I are still talking about it. It’s still resonating, so much so that it broke my month long writer’s block.

The Aquariums of Pyongyang

Posted on by
1

400000000000000053726_s4

The Aquariums of Pyongyang (2001) is an autobiographical account of a boy who spent 10 years in a North Korean labor prison camp, his subsequent release, and how he defected to South Korea.

The book is especially timely since two American journalists were sentenced to a similar fate this past week. The survival rate at one of these camps is less than 50%. The prison conditions, according to the Kang Chol-Hwan, the author, are medieval and brutish.

Kang came from a wealthy Korean family from Japan and was part of the movement of voluntary repatriation of Koreans from Japan to North Korea in the 60’s and 70’s. As was the fate of many of those families, due in part to political struggles within the pro-North Korean organization in Japan, many families from Japan were imprisoned for re-education. The “guilt” of one person tainted the entire family and thus even children and the elderly are sentenced as one group.

Kang recounts a privileged life in Pyongyang, where only the elite lives, and the jarring transition, with no explanation nor trial, to prison life. He provides a rare glimpse of both the upper echelon and the lowest of North Korean society. One thing that struck me was the arbitrary and casual widespread use of imprisonment to control the populace, as many of his acquaintances had been in the camps at some point in their lives.

This corresponds with what we know outside the book. For instance, the entire 1966 World Cup North Korean soccer team was sent to the camps for partying too much after a huge upset over the Italians, and losing badly in the next game. And the current number two in North Korea, Kim Jong Il’s brother-in-law, was sent to the camps due to a power struggle. If national sports heroes and a powerful member of the ruling family can be sent to the camps, then anyone is game.

After a decade of surviving on roots and rats, and inhumanely cruel labor in harsh weather conditions, Kang and his family were released. He made his way to South Korea and is now a celebrated journalist there. That was during a time when there were few defectors. He enjoyed government support, free education and notoriety.

Now that thousands make the dangerous journey to South Korea every year, the North Korean community is now mostly neglected second-class citizens. In my readings of interviews of these refugees, a central theme of their narratives is an utter distaste for the Kim Jong Il regime. They have been the regime’s bitterest critics, often advocating hard-nosed dealings with the north, running counter to the South Korean trend towards engagement and some would say, appeasement.

Whatever strategy you support in dealing with North Korea, the massive violations of human rights must be in the calculus.  And Kang gives a harrowing personal perspective to make sure you put the suffering millions into the equatioin.

Another Project for Obama

Posted on by
3

Barack Obama is about to be inaugurated today as the first African-American president so I thought it would be a good time to point out an irony of today’s events.  The inauguration is happening in a city where more than 300,000 African-American citizens don’t have the right to be represented in Congress. Actually, it’s almost 600,000 people who don’t have representation, 57% of whom are African-American.

Because it’s not a state, but rather a federal district, Washington DC doesn’t have Senators, and it’s lone US Representative doesn’t have voting power in the House of Representatives.  There are 4 states with fewer than 700,000 people, all of them (Alaska, North Dakota, Wyoming and Vermont) have more than 95% White folks.  They each have 2 Senators and 3 Representatives.

The history of Washington DC makes this injustice even more poignant.  The capital was built by slaves.  In fact, the large black population is due to the fact that DC was a major hub of the slave trade.

Back in the 80’s Jesse Jackson lobbied to have Senate representation for DC, virtually guaranteeing two black Senators.  Before Barack Obama, there were only 4 black Senators.  Ever.  Obama and his recent replacement increased that number by 50%.

The mayor of Washington DC has limited power, since decisions by the municipal government has to be approved by a federal committee, dominated by southern whites.  Consequently, schools and other public services are chronically underfunded.

There are other US territories that don’t have federal representation, like Puerto Rico and Guam, but they don’t have to pay federal taxes and are not subject to federal laws.  Residents of Washington, on the other hand, pay more taxes than 19 states.  That’s a lot of taxation without any representation.

It’s ridiculous and egregious that the people who live in the capital of the self-professed beacon of democracy, cannot elect officials to represent them.  Whatever the legal hurdles are that are needed to correct this glaring mass discrimination, needed to be done yesterday.  I know there are many pressing issues that the new administration needs to address, but securing voting rights for half a million people is so basic that it needs to be on the top of the list.