Not Impressed

So there was this guy who blew himself up in downtown Stockholm yesterday. Apparently he blew up his car as well. I am pretty sure that when you act as a terrorist you are supposed to maximize the amount of damage you cause to your attended targets. This is especially true if you are a suicide bomber, as this man appears to have been. The idea is not just to wreck your own car and injure two witnesses.

Now all the questions are starting to sound like this “did he have an accomplice, like say Al-Qaida or something like that helping him out?” This is where one should be prepared for endless analysis and conjecture. The Swedish media is salivating. My first guess is that this was a lonely (read isolated) young man who thought this was somehow his only course of action. I also have to go by the assumption that he was a nut job. The meaning here is obvious: he failed to do more than make second page headlines after the first evening outside of Sweden. Apparently he was upset about Lars Vilks. Well that is fine, it is ok to dislike someone else’s artwork, but that is in no way a justifiable reason to blow yourself up.

If you don’t like freedom of speech there are plenty of shit countries that one can go live in and please don’t understand me wrong: I don’t like religion, but I believe that these people have a right to believe what they want to believe, but it isn’t allowed to affect others in a physically harmful way. Ever. Period. I believe in freedom of speech and I think it should be protected, and that includes mocking religions. To be honest: if your religion can’t take a joke or any kind of criticism for that matter, then there is something wrong with that religion to begin with.

Another thing that would-be radicals should take into consideration is that when you go around blowing yourselves up like this, it doesn’t do the people left behind any good. Suicide bombing has not solved any problems, instead it has the opposite effect: it makes people like your cause even less. It makes you seem strange. Its even stranger to a computer addicted Western world that can’t understand the fondness a few extremists have with a weird, sullen man in a cave somewhere in what is left of Afghanistan. Think about it, how is your family going to be treated after you kill someone else because of your religion. Terrorism is a way of destroying the societies we live in today, but what they aim to replace it with is so much worse than any of the problems we are currently facing. I just hope the Swedes don’t overreact now, but I won’t be surprised if they do. The Sverige Demokraterna are going to eat it up like jello!

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Neruda for Saturday

From Isla Negra: Memorial de Isla Negra

Exiles! Distance

Grows thicker.

We breathe air through a wound.

To live is a necessary obligation.

So, a spirit without roots is an injustice.

It rejects the beauty that is offered it.

It searches for its own unfortunate country

And only there knows martyrdom or quiet.

-Pablo Neruda “Exiles”

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Friday Post

I am on my second coffee for the day and I do believe its time for a post about that there reading list. I am currently reading Phillip K. Dick´s novel Ubik, which is probably going to take me until Wednesday at the earliest to finish. The story seems fantastic, but I am just not in the reading mood today. I still haven’t gotten a shot at the Franzen novel which I am guessing has to do with the amount of people trying to read it and I just didn’t get to my reservation fast enough. What will probably happen now is that because I have heard so much about the book, I won’t enjoy it and secondly I probably know too much about the story. Here is the reading list with one new addition:

1. Der Kleine Brüder by Sven Regener (finished)

2. The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike (finished)

3. The Handmaid´s Tale by Margaret Atwood (finished)

4. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (considering buying this after all the reviews it got)

5. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (non-fiction)

6. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (orig. Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said)

7. The 158-Pound Marriage by John Irving (finished)

8. Going After Cacciato by Tim O´Brien

9. The Green House by Mario Vargas Lhosa

10. Grimms Wörter by Günter Grass

11. Wait Until Spring, Bandini by John Fante (finished)

12. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick(finished)

13. Ubik by Philip K. Dick

14. The Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick (finished)

15. Porno by Irvine Welsh (finished)

So I finally got around to reading the sequel to Trainspotting, which I consider to be Mr. Welsh’s best novel to date. All in all I am not so impressed. I will admit it was entertaining and all that, but it was quite a departure from the original. By that I mean that Trainspotting was a fantastic story told through remarkable characters, while Porno was the same characters but nine years older and without a great story. Hard but fair.

Tonight I am having dinner with some friends at Lei e Lui in Mitte. It’s the same restaurant that catered my wedding. The food is always fantastic and I am looking forward to great food and seeing good friends. Hopefully I will take some photos.

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FIFA and Wikileaks

So the world cup went to Russia and Qatar. Since those will be the summers when I will supposedly have some money in the bank, it’s too bad that the destination to watch either Germany or Sweden (both?) play is going to be either of these.

Now to be blatantly honest, Russia has some breathtaking nature and to go hiking or canoeing on some of those rivers would be amazing beyond words. It’s the cities (other than St. Petersburg) and the anti-foreign mindset that bothers me the most about Russia. Not to mention the levels of corruption. This is before we even start talking about Qatar! I am guessing it will be the first world cup with tea and coffee as a sponsor, and no beers served on the premises. Fifa goes where the money goes and right now that isn’t in the US, Spain, or England. The only real surprise here is really that China didn’t make a bid, because given the odds they would have had a good chance as well. Bizarre.

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The Wikileaks “scandal” seems to be dominating the headlines in most of the western countries, or at least in the countries where I read the newspapers. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t quite get what the big deal is. Please open your diplomacy and international affairs textbooks to page 1: every nation looks out for its best interests 100% of the time. While the descriptions of the heads of state may have been cruel, it wasn’t as if we didn’t assume that this was how the leaders view one another. The real scandal here is with those who act outraged and pretend as if the USA is some sort of beacon of enlightenment. Its not and never has been. We really should accept that, it would be so much healthier than believing the American religion.

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Book Review: The Handmaid´s Tale by Margaret Atwood

In our society today we can look around us and see the obsession that our fellow humans spend on conspiracy theories and the fear of a new totalitarian society. People like Glenn Beck spend hours of their time trying to convince followers that a person like Barack Obama is a socialist who will, if given the chance, turn the United States into a Third Reich or a Stalinist Communist land. Whether or not one takes such arguments seriously or not, the point that fear mongers are allowed so much time to spout them is what is worrisome. As citizens we should be involved in our democracy and take good care in understanding what our politicians are advocating for. That is a significant departure from lying and pretending that something sinister is at work when the reality is otherwise. Case in point: the 2010 midterms where the democratic party lost their majority in congress, proving that democracy is just as alive and well as it was before. I bring this up as an example to show that paranoid thinking is easy to indulge in today, mainly because fact checking often seems to be virtue long forgotten by today’s media. The inability to fairly consider differences of opinion and the conservative American principle of rejecting other countries ideas because they are too “European” is where we are today.

Now onto the dystopian novel that is The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood paints a picture of an American society where a group of fundamentalist Christians have taken over the United States government, using the excuse that society has become too liberal and too free to be able to carry on. This sect, or better put paramilitary organization, of fundamentalists quickly goes about turning the US into a theocracy in many ways reminiscent of present day Iran, though as the book goes on even more extreme in substance and action. Women, within the first couple of weeks of the take-over, have their rights taken away. All the things that women’s suffrage fought long and hard for vanish almost over night. This fundamental aspect of the story then draws our focus away from the more historic aspects of what such a take-over would imply and takes us to the narrator, who relates her experience of the oppression. She doesn’t attempt to be a hero; in fact all she really wants is to have her husband and child returned to her. At times, she even appears to accept the new political regime of oppression as it is and instead looks to her survival first. To be fair in many ways Atwood is more exploring the way women have been oppressed through time, than she is the practical implications of a Theocracy. This is one of the strengths of the novel.

One of the parts that had the biggest impact on me was the idea that a society like this is only truly capable of coming about when the elements needed for its realization are already in place. Christianity historically has not always been very favorable to intelligent and strong women, despite what the more recent teachings of the church would lead us to believe (and they have made significant strides in some of these areas). Still there remains in American and in Europe this nostalgia, it’s fair to call it sexist, that things were better previously in the organization of the “traditional” gender roles. Then again, this is itself the most common fallacy in the appropriation of history by fundamentalists and conservatives: things were actually better before and we were happier without our current freedoms. Its one of the ideas, expressed by the oppressors in the novel, that there are two types of freedom: “freedom to” and “freedom from.” The kind of freedom we had in the liberal USA in the book was freedom to and what they are given by the fundamentalists is freedom from. This is a typical argument we can spot today in the arguments of those who want to tell women how they should dress: that requiring women to cover up gives them freedom is the most normal argument for heard for the veil. Going along with this is the notion that women are to blame for the horrible treatment they are often afforded by men: they dress provocatively and that is why men rape them. This horrible idea doesn’t deserve further explanation as it never has and never will hold any substance.

Atwood also deals with a very important topic in the idea of the control and possession of a person’s body by others. In the case in the book, the women of the Republic of Gilead have lost their ability to choose sexual partners (and preferences) and are either forced into arranged marriages or used to produce offspring for those at the top who are unable to do so for a variety of reasons. Perhaps this is the greatest fear that Atwood expresses: the fear of losing control of ones body. The narrator can accept the significant changes to her society, but what she has the most trouble with is that others want to control her body and dictate how she should care for it. The other idea expressed somewhere in the midst of this is that the men in our society were unhappy with the way things were going: that they no longer felt satisfied with their lives. That such a problem would necessitate oppression is laughable and disturbing all at the same time: and yet it’s been a kind of rationalization used by oppressive regimes before. The notion that those who impose repression are doing it for our best is as old as humanity itself.

For those who have not read the novel I don’t want to write too much more and destroy it for you, but I do on the other hand want to recommend it as a reminder that we should remain active and not give fundamentalism or false historical narratives about our nation’s past the chance to gain ground in our society.

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