More reading on Bolivia

A few more links on Bolivia that you may find interesting to read. Some may be a little out of date now - I meant to be writing more this week but have been ill. I’ll keep adding to this as I find more over the next few days.

BOLIVIA:”Twenty Families Are Obstructing Governability” By Franz Chávez. Some background and analysis of possible solutions.

It is precisely this avalanche of votes, the greatest proportion won by a president since the restoration of democracy in 1982, that raises questions for sociology Professor Joaquín Saravia, who told IPS that “The government appears insecure, because it has overwhelming social and political support, but this has not translated into real control of the country, which is alarming,” he said.

The head of the governing Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) parliamentary group, César Navarro, said that democratic changes being promoted by the government are resisted by the elites, who are accustomed to lives of privilege and benefiting from the state.

Elite Backlash, by Nick Buxton. Commentary on Monday’s conflict, including a translation of an account from Bolivia.

What they nearly always fail to mention are any of the following facts:

- that the opposition is led by business elites and big landowners who have spent vast amounts of money, tactics of intimidation, and violence to push the message that regional autonomy will improve people’slives
- despite this fierce campaign and the almost complete absence of central government, the opposition’s popular support is still limited to the cities whilst the central government’s support grows ever more
- that the central government’s nationalisation more than doubled the revenues for the Eastern regions
- that the Right who fought the Constitutional Assembly for a year saying everything had to be approved by two-thirds suddenly don’t want any further popular votes now that two-thirds backed Evo in a referendum in July

Definitely worth reading, this is the reaction of the Center for Juridical Studies and Social Investigation, the organisation whose building and records were destroyed on Monday. “Violent Groups Take Over Human Rights Organization In Bolivia”.

The offices of CEJIS, along with its personnel, were attacked more than 15 time in the last five years. In the last months the institution suffered two attacks with molotov cocktails (in November 2007 and last August). In its 30 years of work, CEJIS has provided legal assistance to indigenous, landless and peasant organizations in the process of titling their lands and territories. It has been a permanent ally of the social movements in the legal codification of their rights in national legislation, and advised and accompanied the progress of social organizations in the Constituent Assembly. This work has implied a permanent risk on the personnel and offices of CEJIS, threatened by the sectors of power that have historically controlled the region of Eastern Bolivia, who now feel menaced by the advance of the rights of the most marginalized sectors of our society.

As always, for ongoing analysis check out Jim Shultz in Blog from Bolivia (in the links to the right). In particular he reported last night on one piece of good news and potential hope for a solution other than civil war:

Tarija’s Governor Heads to La Paz for Negotiations with Morales

The one good piece of news today is that Tarija Governor Mario Cossío announced that he was headed to La Paz this afternoon to open a negotiation on the current crisis with the Morales government. Radio Erbol also reported that Santa Cruz Governor Ruben Costas has endorsed the negotiation effort. “I am completely convinced that this is the last opportunity to begin a process of reconciliation and leave behind the process of confrontation,” Cossio told reporters.

His piece from yesterday (Friday 12th) is worth reading in its entirety.

The Gringo Tambo blog reports on “8 dead in Pando overnight”, giving a brief summary which links to an article in Spanish:

Again according to La Razón, eight people were killed in Pando in “armed clashes” between autonomistas and masistas. Venezuela is threatening to intervene. Brazil and Argentina have said that they will “not tolerate” a coup and that they fully support the Morales government. Meanwhile, Evo is mobilizing military and police troops. No word yet on what is happening today. From what I understand things in Santa Cruz are tense but calm, with members of the UJC still occupying buildings.

Following that, there is more historical background on these clashes from the political scientist blogger Miguel Centellas.

The sad thing here is that these are not military units, which should be the forces (along w/ the police) used to restore state authority. The consequence—assuming they actually do march on Santa Cruz & other opposition-controlled areas—will be a higher casualty count. For all their bravura, Ponchos Rojos (like the UCJ) lack military discipline & training. That means their clashes will be bloody, like the clash in Pando that left at least 8 dead & 80 injured.

Miguel’s summary post from this morning is also very useful, describing the Bolivian military’s reaction to Venezuela’s ‘offer’ to send their army into Bolivia to defend Morales at a time when the US ambassador has been forced to leave the country for interference in Bolivia’s affairs.

 

Beavis and Butthead meets Byron, and it makes a lot of sense

Via Overthinking It (my new favourite blog) I just came across Chris Marcil’s blog following his attempt to read the entire Harvard Classics. Marcil is a comedy writer, better known for penning such pop culture classics as Beavis and Butthead and Frasier than for his knowledge of Cicero, Byron and their ilk. The result is an idiosyncratic combination of humour and intellectual analysis that makes for great reading. For example his thoughtful comments on Darwin are particularly apt at a time when stooopidness seems to be making another attempt to spread beyond the US to the UK.

 

The problem of Bolivia for the radical left

Last night I went over to my friends’ house, and saw TV for the first time in months. She had heard about blocados up in El Alto so was tuned to the news to work out if the rumours were true. But all we saw was reports on Santa Cruz. For the last few months I have been repeating what everyone in La Paz knows - things are calm and peaceful in the highlands because all the violence this year is in the South. But for the first time I actually saw what this looks like.

Each channel we switched to was showing the same thing. Crowds of young men dressed in shorts and t-shirts, some with surgical mask on their faces but many with nothing covering their wide grins, attaching buildings with sticks and stones. The sound of glass breaking and clouds of curling black smoke above, a tear gas canister being kicked down the street by a teenager who gives it one last aim at a small huddled group of riot police. The rocking camera follows the shouting young men into the building, into an office. It picks out groups pulling stacks of paper out of filing cabinets, yanking computer screens off desks, ripping even the chairs and the telephones out and carrying everything into the street. The beam of the camera rests on two young men, perhaps in their late teens but certainly no older than 21, as they lean over an opened computer on the desk, pulling out wires at random. Their backpacks bounce on their backs as they run out to join their friends, and somewhere in my head I wonder whether the bags show they came prepared or just straight from school. Behind them a boy of about 12 is riffling through a cabinet in someone’s desk.

Outside in the street again. Everything is set alight. Desks, screens, telephones and endless stacks of paper make up the bonfire. A shot of the outside of the building, and half its windows are broken. Out of them more paper flutters to the ground through the rising smoke. The crowd is cheering and shouting and suddenly the camera picks out another young man, but this one is in army fatigues. He is curled up on the floor with his hands around his head as a growing crowd takes it in turns to kick him till the blood runs. His uniform is torn, and as he is dragged to his feet and turns to the camera we see a blank expression of fear and utter confusion. His soft brown skin traced with blood stands out in the sea of white faces around him, but like them he is barely out of his teens. The camera cuts to three men marching through the streets, green and white flags held high and one with a gun slung over his shoulder. The crowds part to let them pass through, cheering them on as they hold their heads high and faces stern for the mass of television cameras.

The building being destroyed was a government building responsible for dealing with land reform. In the same day other government buildings were destroyed in the same manner, along with the offices of Entel (a telephone company), and Canal 7 (a television station). Soldiers in Bolivia are conscripts, but the rich can usually buy their way out so they are predominantly young, poor men from the countryside. The young men attacking the building are members of the Santa Cruz Youth Movement, the ‘Autonomy’ movement’s foot soldiers. The green and white flag is the flag of Santa Cruz, in contrast to the red, gold and green of Bolivia.

What other images did we see?

Older men with round white faces standing in the plaza talking fast and furious into the expectant microphones. Morales is a dictator he says. We are men and women standing up for our freedom. We will stay here in the plaza all night holding our peaceful vigil. Another reporter shouts out a question and he turns. We go back to the studio, and then cut to another plaza a long way away. Outside the presidential palace in La Paz another crowd is gathered. Trilby hats and darker faces - the men have come from the highlands to the city to tell Evo he needs to use a strong hand against the right-wingers in the South. At the bottom of the screen they are described as ‘indigenous vigilantes’. The camera pans to the large crowd standing on the steps of the Plaza Murillo, facing the palace and chanting “Strong Hand! Strong Hand!”

We cut back to images of youths in the streets of Santa Cruz. They are kicking a police motor cycle in the street, eventually setting it alight. Then we go to an interview with someone who says that the governor of Santa Cruz has been paying the police not to intervene. Another cut to lines of people queuing in El Alto to buy cooking gas. The department of Santa Cruz contains the gas supplies, and their blocados are finally taking affect. There is not enough gas in the cities for people to cook with. A minister appears who says that his aim is to have gas lines connected directly to people’s houses to avoid this problem in the future. He asks for patience for another year - after all, in the previous 25 years of government no-one even considered this idea. I make a mental note that we only filled our gas canister a week ago, but that the previous one had had a leak and run out far too fast. We need to be more careful. My friend sitting next to me suddenly notices the minister is wearing a Che tie.

I’m watching all this with my two good friends: Anna, who is a liberal and a passionate Obama supporter from the US, and her long time boyfriend, Eduardo, a Bolivian anarchist. Anna is furious. Why aren’t they doing anything? What is Evo doing? Why don’t they send the army down there to arrest those men? How can they get away with doing this so blatantly, so publicly? It’s all there on the camera!

We wait, along with the camera men and the crowds looking up at the lights in the windows of the presidential palace, hoping to catch Evo Morales’ speech in reaction. We wait, and nothing happens. We argue backwards and forwards about what he could do, but eventually Anna is frustrated and asks us to turn the television off. We go out to eat.

Over pizza we discuss the options. The governor of Santa Cruz is paying off the police, so Evo should send the army. If he sends the army then he will be accused of acting like Goni, the last president, who sent the army against the crowds of protesters trying to throw him out of office. People died, and Evo can’t be seen to be comparable. Anna thinks the international community should get involved - if the soldiers are from another country then he won’t face that accusation. Eduardo disagrees. He has to use the army. He is the state, and this is what the state does to enforce it’s will - it uses violence. But Evo is reluctant, because he wanted to do be different, or maybe because he knows he is in an impossible position. Could they dialogue?, Anna asks. They say that the last time Morales and Ruban Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz, met, Costas ripped up a cheque Morales was giving him in an official meeting and threw it in his face. He calls Morales a monkey. They say his personal land ownings are larger than the entire department of La Paz. How can you ‘dialogue’ with that kind of racism, that kind of entrenched interest in maintaining the status quo?

Anna is frustrated because to her it makes no sense that there can be no reaction. But for me, and I think for Eduardo, there is something more complicated going on. We all have reached a point of stalemate - Evo can’t react with force against the violence without replicating the reaction of Goni and being accused of being the same.

The images I saw on television were familiar. Riot porn. We on a particular part of the left have seen similar images before and have viewed them as resistance and rebellion. Indeed, in 2003 and 2005, when it was campesinos and miners marching through the streets of La Paz and overthrowing Goni, we cheered it as a great victory of the people over the oligarchs. I still believe it was, but the absolutely crucial problem now is that the oligarchs are using the identical tactics to achieve the opposite politics.

Where does this put us on the left, those of us who have supported Evo? I would never have though I would find myself in the position where I would be distressed by the burning of the government, sympathising with the riot police, and advocating sending in the army. This is a very weird position to find myself in.

The paradox of Bolivia, Eduardo argues, is that we have seen it as a revolution when it is not. I also am beginning to see it as this. Evo took power through the ballot box, and although he is indeed a different type of politician, he sought power through the existing system and became the state. The power of the state comes through the use of violence, and the legitimation of elections. While 68% of the country support Evo, there is still a minority, and if they don’t accept the rule of law then the state has no means to enforce it other than through violence. We believed in Evo as if he were something different, and by his reluctance to send in the army perhaps he is proving he, too, still sees himself as different. He still thinks he is not the state. But he is, and ultimately he will only be able to keep hold of his power by using the weapons of the state.

There is one last piece of pizza, and I let Eduardo and Anna split it. Anna thinks that they should let Santa Cruz burn. If they want to destroy their infrastructure, let them! The international community will not support them, and Bolivia relies on Brazil and Argentina to buy its gas. Isolated and without infrastructure, cut off from their customers, they will soon give in. Eduardo dismisses the idea. They would build new institutions. It would serve as an accusation that Evo was trying to starve the people. Evo wanted to be head of state and he is - now he must act like one and crush his opposition. This is not a revolution - whether on the left or the right, he still has to act like an overseeing power that imposes its will on the minority who don’t agree. Anna gets angry. Anarchism is not a viable solution, she says. You really think that is the answer?

And here is where Eduardo and I are stuck. We believe in anarchism, but support “realistic” alternatives in the belief that it is unlikely that we are going to be able to bring about the kind of world we would rather see. So we supported and still do support Evo. But now the opposition are using the same means of resistance to the imposition of state power that the left used 3 years ago, and we have a problem. Evo is the state - he sought and gained power through the existing systems of electoral politics backed up with the legitimate use of violence. The fact that he gained power through acts of violence that directly challenged the state’s monopoly on violence only complicates the matter further, in that now he is trying to be a state at a time when the legitimacy of the state remains in question.

The cracks are beginning to show. We have supported compromise in order to be realistic, but the compromise is not viable. We have looked to Bolivia as an alternative, as a place where radical and positive change can really come about through the ballot box. We have swallowed all our objections and criticisms to this form of politics in the hope that it would work. Now when that support involves us advocating sending in the army to crush the resistance, when the only way we can convince those who oppose us is through violence, it causes prickles of unease. That unease is only going to grow. Can we - must we - go back to believing another world is possible?

 

Language classes as personal therapy

The last few week have been spent in the slow lane over here on the wrong side of the world. Most days I am taking Spanish classes, going to the gym (well, almost everyday), watching a lot of Buffy, slowly working my way line by line through Strathern’s The Gender of The Gift, and spending too long on the internet. Having realised that my Spanish was not yet up to the task of doing the research I wanted to, I set aside the last month of this year’s trip to taking classes and actually doing all that verb conjugation and vocab practice I don’t usual have time for. Its been oddly peaceful, which is handy because as soon as I get back to Chicago next week the world will explode again.

My Spanish teacher is a rather nervous young woman. We are getting to know each other quiet well, though I tend to find that’s often the case with such classes: you spend an inordinate amount of time having to talk about your personal life or express your personal opinions. We have argued over Bolivian politics, discussed our views on globalisation, ranged over my thoughts on my colleagues, my family, my love-life, my research and my recipe for moussakka. It makes me a little uncomfortable. (especially the moussakka part)

It doesn’t help that we’ve been covering the subjectivo, something that doesn’t seem to exist in English but is used to express doubt or opinion in a sentence. So I end up with exercises like the following:

Express whether it is/is not important/just/necessary that:
- we have much work
- parents discipline their children
- we help the poor
- children respect their elders
- there is contamination in the air
- that Man is civilised
- the US helps other countries
- the US makes peace with Russia

(Yeah that last one was a bit of a give away about the age of the textbook.)

The pedantic anthropologist in me can’t help but squirm. Alas I can’t give “well that depends on the context and how you define the concept of justness or civilisation” as an answer every time, even if I do use the subjunctivo to say it. I know, I know - they are just exercises. But until my Spanish is good enough to explain the concept of cultural relativism, these exercises are going to be tricky.

The number of personal questions can tend to make you start feeling like you’re in a therapy session. I remember one doomed introductory German course I took as an undergrad where even the basic statements, coming as they did at a rather complicated time in my love life, reduced me to tears. My poor study partner soon learnt to stop asking the marital status question and to stick to asking how many brothers and sisters I had.

Last week we were using a lot of airport based vocabulary, and I ended up trying to convey my airport rant (see a few posts below) in Spanish to my poor teacher. She got an even more confused and blabbery version than I wrote down there, given that it was in Spanglish. Recently airports and the mystic alchemy that is buying plane tickets has been somewhat on my mind though. Having followed the various rules for finding the cheapest fare (look before a tuesday because that’s when the prices go up, don’t use the same website too often for the same fare because they raise the price depending on how often people search for it, check out the secret student discount fares on the secret student website, pick an odd day to fly, stand on one leg bathed in the light of the full moon singing “she’ll be coming round the mountain” backwards while searching) I finally found a flight. And then of course it went up by $100 in the space of the 5 hours I was waiting to hear back from my relatives in the UK.

(Here’s an interesting maths question while we are on the subject. If a flight on Virgin Airlines between Chicago and London is advertised on the first page after searching as $630, but then when you click on the link to buy it, the cost break down on the next page is $288 fare each way, $462.31 tax and $750.31 in total, how much of the original price was tax, how much fare, and how much bullshit?)

But I brought it anyway. Sadly I was too late to make it back to the UK in time, and given that airlines don’t even like to give refunds when its their fault, I don’t think I will be getting my money back. So all I can hope for now is that the funeral can be arranged to coincide with the flight I brought. Its left me a bit up in the air about where I’ll be once I leave Bolivia - another reason to savour the calm here this last week.

The thing about a language class other than a normal conversation is that you the student tend to do most of the talking, rather than the teacher. So they get to learn a lot about you, but its hard to gauge what their personal reaction to your opinions is as opposed to their professional assessment of your grammar. The last class I had ended with a discussion on Bolivian politics in which I asked my teacher to tell me what she thought instead. She started to tell me how corrupt Evo Morales is, and how he is ruining the country, how the poor people in the countryside need to be taught and led because they can’t make decisions on their own in their best interests. Makes me wonder what she thought about my inarticulate replies to her questions on globalisation, international travel and politics. And makes me a bit more reluctant to try and express myself and my personal opinions in the last few classes.

 

“men of this age really want - and need - housekeepers”

Looking for love can be hell. This strangely poignant story of a 67 year old woman working the personals really got to me for some reason. Perhaps because I think she’s still braver than I am.

 

Airlines and taxes

Facebook is usually my networking and gossiping space, rather than for conversation, so I’m transplanting a mini-discussion that got going there over here.

A elderly relative of mine is ill in hospital, generating a stream of emails and phone conversations from me to various family members back home. Sadly they are the horribly practical kind of conversations that go along the lines of ‘will he make it to Christmas, or should I drop everything and come home now?’. This is the kind of situation I have imagined having to deal with ever since I moved abroad, as I suspect every person who emigrates for some period of time does. One of those horrible cases where your normal sense of helplessness is compounded by being unable to do anything from a distance. There’s not much you can do other than send flowers and wait for someone closer at hand to make a judgement call.

Anyway, its looking like things are getting bad, so I started to browse flights last night with the aim of seeing how feasible it would be to go home for a few days before the quarter starts. And that’s what generated my immense shock at the discovery that taxes on flights have gone up an astronomical amount in the last few months. In some cases, the taxes were triple the cost of the flight! A non-last minute flight, even, is looking at being around $200-300 for the flight and $400-500 in tax on top of that. (And before anyone dares say to me that its not that much in pounds, I get paid in dollars. $800 is nearly two months rent, and over half of my termly wages for a graduate student teaching job.)

Partly the reason it seems so bizarre is the intensely annoying policy of not listing the tax as part of the cost. Something that, incidentally, makes budget shopping for anything in the US difficult if you are not particularly maths savy. On all purchases the price on the ticket is without tax, so its always more when you get to the till. Three years later and I still can’t make accurate guesses about how much the tax will be and so still get surprised at the till each time. Very annoying, especially if you are trying to stick to a budget. The only advantage I can see is that at least it makes it more obvious how much of the cost is, actually, tax.

Jim’s joke about my comment on the rise in tax on facebook was that it was socialism. Sadly I think that it probably is not. Tax is a sore point for me. On top of the normally high taxes here in the US, I get the ‘you’re a dirty foreigner tax’, which means that all my stipend and wage cheques in the US are taxed by a third. A third of my already below the poverty line income goes on taxes. And for that I get no health care, no decent public transport, if I had kids they would be in disgracefully bad schools and still have to pay for university, no free public cultural institutions… and so on. I do get a to help pay for a war though. And as a dirty foreigner, of course, I have taxation without representation because I can’t vote. Unlike in the UK, where you don’t pay tax until you reach a (admittedly very low) level of income, and students don’t pay tax at all other than NI, here its the rich who get out of paying taxes.

So yeah. While I’m in favour of taxes, I’m also in favour of them being fairly applied and spent on something other than a war. Each time I look at my pay cheque and my health insurance bill I get quiet bitter about the fact that this is not the case. Taxes alone do not make socialism.

But then back to airfares, because I’ve often heard the argument that I ought to be boycotting air travel because its damaging to the environment and a luxury. No doubt many argue that higher prices will serve as a deterrent and stop people flying so much. Well I disagree. Higher prices when there is no viable alternative will not make people stop travelling, it will just make it harder for poorer people to travel, and generate bigger profits for those in the loop. Travel should not be a luxury, in the same way that communication with the rest of the world (internet, telephones, mail services that work and so on) should not be a luxury. Luddite laments that life was grand when we all lived in our place and thought people from the next town were foreigners are something I will never have much sympathy with. Then again, the howls of derisive laughter over statistics that show Americans hardly ever travel outside their country are rarely balanced by approval that they are saving the environment either.

Air travel should be regulated, because its a disastrous and wasteful mess. But the answer is neither to make it more expensive nor to call for it to be boycotted altogether. I would rather see the moral outrage channelled into generating alternatives that don’t mean we all have to sit in our own backyard the rest of our lives, trapped in the jobs, lives and socio-cultural circumstances that fate happens to have thrown our way.

So lets think of alternatives instead. For a start, everyone who has ever had to do it knows that short distance air travel is ridiculous. It takes hours longer than advertised (a half hour flight involves at least 3 hours in waiting, delays and ’security’), is - like all air travel - hideously uncomfortable and intrusive, and could easily be replaced by a more convenient, cost effective and environmentally sound alternative. If some of those taxes were being spend on developing train systems that made it actually possible to travel across the US by any other means than plane or car, then that would be a viable alternative.

Air travel is hopelessly inconvenient, stressful, and disorganised. It needs to be better organised and run for the purposes of allowing people to move around rather than for making profits. But there we run into that same old problem again, the one that begins with a big ol’ capital C. And we won’t get any closed to S for socialism through boycotts and taxes.

 

Shock report! They’re playing the gender card!

A while ago only a few people were wondering about the whole “should women vote for Clinton just because she’s also a woman”. Now that Sarah Palin thing has happened, everyone’s suddenly got an opinion on it. OMG!! The Presidential election is being reduced to identity politics!!

Er… no shit?

Actually I have been deriving endless amusement from the last few days of Palinarama. You couldn’t have made this woman up if you tried. I’m almost tempted to launch a conspiracy theory that she’s just one big practical joke, and that at some point someone will jump out from behind a curtain and say “Ta da!! Fooled you all!! We just wanted to prove how far we could go - and you all fell for it!”

I can almost sympathise with the Liberal feminists who see her nomination as a personal affront, however. The idea that they will only vote for her because she has the same anatomy is fairly insulting. We should allow, however, that in part she probably was chosen because of her politics. But if your political leanings are not of a kind that allow you to appreciate her as a raving conservative nut job, then that probably isn’t much consolation.

But, yeah, let’s face it. We all know she was chosen because she’s female - and a sparky, perky, pretty ol’ thing to boot! You can imagine the old men in suits sitting around, trying to work out how to out do the Democrats with their Hilary/Obama combination…

“We need to get a woman too.”
“What, really? A woman? Are you crazy?”
“Yeah, like they had Hilary. That’ll make us look really ‘in touch’ and progressive.”
“Shit, you’re right. Hey! We could get a pretty woman. Then we’d be even more progressive!”
“Yeah! ‘Cause women will vote for her because she’s female, and men will vote for her because she’s hot! Great Idea!”
“Lets go get us a woman!! Woo! We’re so radical!”

And the worst thing about it, is that it might just work.

I had a sobering experience last year. A grad student colleague of mine got a much-sort after job she wasn’t qualified for, didn’t need, and didn’t particularly care about because, in a nut shell, she had been flirting heavily for several months with the young, male professor whose job it was to decide who got it. The barely contained ire of my other more qualified, more needy, and more dedicated colleagues spluttered out in frustrated rants over beer, because there was not much else we could do about it.

What I learnt from the whole thing was:

a) That there are indeed still women in this line of work who are able to sleep at night knowing they only got where they are through ‘playing the gender card’, as one friend put it.

b) There are men stupid enough to fall for it.

Both depress me, horribly. In part because I refuse to play along and batter my eyelids to get ahead, in part because I know I will probably not get ahead for refusing to do so. I suspect a similar fear may be behind the irate anger at Sarah Palin from the feminist Liberals.

 

Quote of the day

When asked by a judge at the beauty contest to name the person she would most like to meet, Camille replies, “I would meet Einstein because he never washed his hair, and nobody ever listened to him when he talked about a lot of important things that the military could have used in the United States.”

From a review in the NY Times of the otherwise uninspiring sounding “Queen Bees” reality TV show

 

The curse of the hipsters

The latest edition of Adbusters has an article on hipsters which has generated a bit of a punch up in the world of blogs. The article itself is, unfortunately, drawing comparisons to the Dan Ashcroft character in Nathan Barley, though probably rightly so.

(I was urged to see Nathan Barley by a friend of mine, but couldn’t get into it beyond a few episodes. Perhaps momus is right in that it only appeals to those who are its satirical targets. But then I’m not entirely sure, because I’m getting lost in the meta - if the show is about satirising people who criticise a subculture based on ironic satire, by revealing that they themselves are part of the world they are criticising, would the satirical targets of the show be the subculture or the critics? Anyway. I found the whole thing kind of boring.)

As VoYou has pointed out, Adbusters is itself riddled with contradictions.

(An aside for another post: would Adbusters appear a little less hypocritical if it was based on the internet rather than a glossy magazine designed to lie nicely on your coffee table? Would it appear to be based less in consuming anti-consumerism if you could not consume it in public, but instead only within the privacy of your laptop? I’m wondering if there is something less public about consumption on the internet than in the ‘real world’, that takes away from the performativity so inherent to consumptive practice. Or is there, perhaps, an internet equivalent of the performativity of flipping through a copy of Adbusters in your local coffee shop, nonchalantly adding it to your shopping cart along with the latest Chomsky, or leaving the back issues casually strewn on the sofa when your friends come round? Perhaps adding it as a link to your blog would fulfil the same function in the internet world.)

And those contradictions can’t help but bring on the Dan Ashcroft critiques. But that’s the problem with hipsters. You can’t criticise them because they are so, like, ironic?, right, that any assault can be counter-played with the well, dur, you’re just too uncool and jealous, and you don’t, like, get it. Coz you’re boring. Its like being back in school again.

Luckily, most of us who had to deal with the scorn of the cool kids at school grew up to discover that, a decade later, the cool kids are all still living in the same town they grew up in, and are stuck in dead-end jobs and unhappy marriages. While the geeks, freeks and losers went on to become interesting people who conquered the world.

(I saw Bowling for Colombine last week for the first time. It amused me a lot that the guy who created South Park said exactly the same thing.)

Painfully cool people tend to be painfully dull conformists. But aside from this, K-punk is spot on with his point that there is indeed something more pitiful and pathetic about hipsters than other groups that have come and gone. Its the whiny lament of rich white middle class kids from the suburbs, who think they have a grievance with the world because Momma wouldn’t give them a bigger allowance.

But I’m afraid all my attempts to try and rationalise my intense dislike of hipsters tend to descend into diabolical cursing about their stupid haircuts, pretentious posing, and the fact its impossible to find anything other than shops selling hand knitted iPod warmers in my neighbourhood any more.

 

Hurricanes and spectacle

Hurricane Gustav is coming, and the people in New Orleans are packing up to leave. Its sad that its taken another hurricane to focus our collective attention on New Orleans again. Let’s hope that what we discover in the next few days is that practical and political lessons have been learnt from the disaster three years ago. Really, I hope that that is the case. After 1500 deaths, and thousands of people still homeless and traumatised all this time later, I really, really hope that my normal cynicism will be proved wrong and that this time at least one person with half a brain will be in charge.

Interesting, though, that its coming just before the election. No doubt it will make a nice addition to the spectacle. Though it seems to be mostly McCain that is talking about it so far - no doubt at first pissed that it would deflect from his grand moment collecting the nomination with his Barbie VP by his side, now he’s probably rubbing his hands in glee at the chance to get all sorrowful and sympathetic, and show what a great leader he is in times of trouble. Glen Ford (via ZNet) has some interesting things to say about Obama and Katrina.

(I have been trying to catch up on some reading about the election recently, just in case when I get home anyone expects me to take it seriously. My usual response of ‘its all a farce’ probably needs some more backing up. Maybe I’ll blog about it at some point, but for now I’d like to direct you to this rather garish but still very thought provoking site Black Commentator. )

Reminders of Katrina. Will we find out the powers that be still hate black people?

P.S. I was slightly amused by how the corporate media have been shyly praising Cuba’s response to the hurricane. As expected, they evacuated everyone ahead of time and no one died. Again.

 

There’s always something nasty in the woodshed

When I started my field work a few months ago, a good friend of mine told me that during her year of field work she had read more novels than in any other point in her life. Hardly what they tell you in Ethnographic Methods 101, but several other veteran ethnographers I know agreed: when you do field work you have a lot of time on your hands. Unlike the rest of their graduate school experience, where most of them don’t do anything other than study for 10 years straight, the one or two years in the field stand out in the stories I was told as extravaganzas of fiction consumption and loafing about.

Well they all did it a few years ago without the joys of laptop computers and a thriving black market in DVDs. I’ve read a hell of a lot of novels in the last few months, but I’ve also watched an almost astonishing amount of DVDs. (And perhaps only people who know how many movies I watch back home in Chicago already can appreciate what that means.) Although I usually pride myself on keeping up with my movie and novel consumption back in the US, the last few months I have indeed found myself on several occasions with more time on my hands than I know what to do with. A few days ago I even starting doing some sketching again - something I used to do regularly and haven’t had time/energy to do even once in the last three years.

As lovely as it is to catch up on all these lost past times, I quiet like being as busy as I usually am. Reading a hundred novels because you have nothing else to do is fine if you never usually do, but not if you’re lying there thinking of all the other things you’d like to be doing instead. The problem is, that reading novels about the exciting lives of other people is all there is to do, because there really isn’t that much else to occupy you at the end of the day when you’ve already pestered your ‘informants’ as much as you can, and you’re living in a little town in the middle of the nowhere. When I go home to the US in a few weeks and reflect on my time in the field, one of the things I will take with me is a profound reassurance of my long held suspicion that living in the countryside sucks. Its hell!

While holding a good relativist position that my opinion is only that, my opinion, and not something that I would expect other people to share - I still think that I would rather like in a mental intuition than have to live in the country side longer than a few months. That great expanse of nothingness… What else is there to do of a night, other than curl up in bed with a novel/movie and be fast asleep by 9? (Well, those are the healthy options… The high rates of teenage pregnancy, alcoholism and drug taking in rural places only supports my argument here I would guess.)

In recent weeks I’ve found myself reduced to a state of paralysing ennui. I know there are things I could be doing with my time and work I should be getting on with, but something about the quiet and the dullness of a small town just takes all the life out of me. I end up counting the hours till I can go to bed, weighing up the time I can kill be walking to the plaza and buying something - even just a bag of bread - from one of the tiny shops there. At home when I feel restless of an evening I go for long walks through the city, not really caring what direction I’m going but just walking up and down endless streets trying to become lost. I watch the people hurrying past, look in brightly lit windows and imagine the lives inside, hunt out odd architecture or compare how two once identical houses have changed, discover new corners of the neighbourhood I never knew existed - hidden graffiti, gradual changes, strange buildings. I find I can sometimes just walk for hours as it soothes my mood - I always feel reluctant to return home no matter how exhausted I’ve made myself. Feeling all that life around me makes me feel better somehow.

In the small town I can walk as far as the plaza, or maybe down one of the country roads, and all I see are fields. Its so hideously depressing to me that I have begun to invent elaborate timetables and excuses in order to take the 2 hour bus journey back to the city at night. And I don’t think there is anything different between this small town in Bolivia and any other small town or village anywhere else in any part of the world. I’ve got the same chilly feeling of fear on road trips in the US, or during my childhood summers in rural France. My long held aversion to “market towns” in the UK springs from the same sense of doom and foreboding of being trapped in one of these places. I particularly think of a road trip I took with two good friends from Chicago to Virginia last summer, where we drove through an endless landscape where only a single house would stand out against the great expanse of fields. At one point we got utterly lost in a tiny suburban hole, going endlessly round and round the same narrow streets, past the same isolated houses, giggling uncontrollably in our fear of never being able to find the highway that would take us out of that dump again.

I’m sure there are people who love the countryside, and I’m glad they exist because it means I don’t have to. But I wonder how all the romantic glorification of the countryside may make it harder for people born there who like me can’t wait to leave. I remember reading back in school a piece about the industrial revolution that, while acknowledging all the evils it brought, pointed out that it allowed a lot of young people (and particularly young women) from rural backgrounds to leave their families and the rural towns they would otherwise have had no choice but to live in all their lives. While agreeing that conditions were usually very hard, it suggested that some people may have been drawn to urban life and the possibility of not only having a small disposable income of their own (rather than their families) but things other than the local Sunday market and the occasional visiting circus to spend it on. Now I realise there are a whole gamut of problems with this argument, but whenever I hear people lamenting the flight from traditional rural villages to cities - no matter how grim and slum-like they are - a little bit of me can understand the attraction that pulls young people away.

I’m prepared to be slaughtered for suggesting this - as I have in arguments with others before hand on the same topic. But why is it that the countryside is always presented as this idyllic paradise?

And in case you didn’t get the reference in the title: one of my favourite novels that I should really have brought with me this summer is, of course, Cold Comfort Farm.

 

So funny, so wrong…

From a discussion of sexism in Australia…

Then there was the men’s magazine Zoo Weekly, which ran a competition inviting men to send in pictures of their girlfriend’s cleavage, to win them a $10,000 (£4,500) boob job. Following an outcry, the magazine’s editor announced that they were running a new competition, this time to find “Australia’s sexiest feminist”, a contest that was also known as the search “for the hottest girl in sensible shoes”. “If you hate men, we want to see photos of you in sexy lingerie,” read the competition ad.

 

UoC and Milton Friedman

I’ve been told on a couple of occasions by anthropologist friends who work in Chile that I should avoid mentioning the fact that I’m at the University of Chicago when I’m doing field work there. So its with some interest that I’ve been catching up on the latest saga in my home turf. After the last year of protests, meetings and mud slinging over the under funding of graduate students in the Humanities and Social Sciences, we were all rather dismayed to discover that although the good ol’ powers that be can’t afford to give us health care, they can afford to build a whopping great big new centre for the economists. Because those guys are in such a precarious position they need a little extra cash.

Aside from being pissed off at the unfairness of it, though, there are some more fundamental objections to the new centre. There are other departments at the UoC that have great reputations, but all of us carry this collective milestone round our neck that threatens to disrupt and discredit us at any moment: the reputation of the Chicago School of Economics. That the new centre will be actively continuing the work, as well as baring the name, of Milton Friedman has been a bit of a kick in the teeth. Having seen the new president, Robert Zimmer, slip and slide his way through the “negotiations” with the graduate students, however, I suspect he will be equally dismissive and arrogant on this issue. Anyway, there is a lot of info about it here, and a petition doing the rounds which I am coping below.

Chances that this will all be sorted before I start my field work in Chile? Low.

Chances I will be pretending I’m a student at UIC? I’d say they’re pretty high.

For one or more of the following reasons, we, the undersigned, oppose establishment of the Milton Friedman Institute (MFI) in the form that has been proposed (To sign, please go to http://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~amit/MFI/).

1. The scale of the University’s investment in the MFI seems disproportionate to other endeavors in the Social Sciences and Humanities. This is not a center like any other, but threatens to be a flagship that will define the way our University is perceived by the public at large. It is not credible to claim that the MFI bears Mr. Friedman’s name only in recognition of his technical accomplishments as an economist.[1] Rather, it will be widely understood that his political positions are also being celebrated and contributors will expect the MFI to champion, advance, and refine them.

2. In May 2007, the President appointed an ad hoc committee with the broad charge of creating “a major new institute at the University on economics and society.”[2] However, the committee, five of whose seven members teach in the economics department, proposed instead an institute whose stated goal is to provide vast resources to the economics department to improve its competitive position relative to its rivals in the field.[3] The committee’s report ignores approaches to the interdisciplinary theme of “economics and society” that originate in disciplines other than economics or that diverge from the particular approaches of the Chicago School. We welcome the President’s initial interdisciplinary vision, but want it realized in its full breadth.

3. We know of no other unit of the University whose research findings are as predetermined as this one’s apparently are, given the MFI’s stated intention to follow Friedman’s lead in advocating market solutions to policy questions, while regarding the state, NGOs, and all non-market actors with distinct suspicion.[4] Presumably then, to take one example, the question of whether to privatize Social Security would be moot; the only reasonable question is how.

4. The proposal ignores the many critiques of Friedman’s views that have been offered and the problems, including state terror, crony capitalism, declining life expectancy, food shortages, etc., that have arisen where he and his disciples implemented those views (Chile, Argentina, the post-Soviet republics, e.g.). We acknowledge that Friedman’s ideas have been influential, but are uneasy at the prospect of their constituting a new orthodoxy that will define the Institute for years to come. Ongoing critical interrogation of all theories ought be an essential part of this, like any other part of the University.

5. The level of donor/corporate control over this Institute seems unprecedented in University history or policy. It has been announced that donors of $1 million or more will become lifetime members of the Milton Friedman Society, “a highly selective group of contributors who will have special access to the people and work of the Institute.”[5] Establishment of a club where the wealthy gain privileged academic participation does not strike us as consistent with the principles of this, or of any self-respecting University.

6. Such arrangements also suggest increased privatization of the University and the cultivation of a symbiosis between scholars whose theories produce profits for a set of donors who then reinvest in those theories. This seems to us less a “free market of ideas,” than a cartel designed to promote certain academic products at the expense of others that might be intellectually — or morally — superior, but promise less return on investment. The analogy of research sponsored by drug and tobacco companies is not exact, but is too close for comfort.

7. The proposal makes clear that the MFI will engage issues of policy and not limit itself to matters of academic theory.[6] We are troubled by the prospect that it could come to play a role similar to that of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, or think tanks that lack the legitimating imprimatur of great universities.

8. Among the more worrisome details embedded in the proposal is the idea that beyond providing funds for visiting faculty, post-doctoral researchers, and graduate fellows, the MFI will also use its assets to recruit and mentor undergraduates.[7] Given other aspects of the MFI’s mission and profile, we are alarmed at the possibility of selection on ideological grounds and the cultivation of activist cadres, trained at Chicago and networked via the Milton Friedman Society.

Given the serious nature of these concerns, we welcome President Zimmer’s decision to convene the University Senate this fall as a venue for open debate on plans for the MFI. We intend to raise these issues in principled fashion and to propose substantial changes, as we passionately hope — for the University’s sake — that the MFI does not come into being as it is currently envisioned.

[1] Consider the following thought experiment. Would the Economics Department or the University imagine it could raise $200 million by founding a George Stigler Institute? George Stigler was a long-time colleague of Friedman’s in the Economics Department, was also an unambiguous supporter of pure laissez-faire economics and, like Friedman, was a truly distinguished scholar who won a Nobel Prize. But because he limited his publications to scholarly venues, rather than supplementing his scholarship with a free-market ideological crusade, his name would have considerably less value. The additional value of the Friedman name derives from his role as public champion of the free-market doctrines whose adoption in the United States and elsewhere has vastly increased the earnings of the very wealthy. Presumably, it is the latter who will be the prime contributors to (and investors in) the MFI.
[2] A Proposal to Establish the Milton Friedman Institute,” submitted by the ad hoc Committee chaired by Lars Peter Hansen, p. 1, available at http://mfi.uchicago.edu/pdf/mfi.final.pdf.
[3] Ibid., see esp. pp. 3-4.
[4] Ibid., p. 2: “Following Friedman’s lead, the design and evaluation of economic policy requires analyses that respect the incentives of individuals and the essential role of markets in allocating goods and services. As Friedman and others continually demonstrated, design of public policy without regard to market alternatives has adverse social consequences. The intellectual focus of the institute would reflect the traditions of the Chicago School and typify some of Milton Friedman’s most interesting academic work, including… his advocacy for market alternatives to ill conceived policy initiatives.”
[5] “Milton Friedman Society,” available at http://mfi.uchicago.edu/society.shtml. What kinds of access and influence members will have is not made explicit, but those schooled on Friedman’s dictum “There is no free lunch” may be expected to anticipate some commensurate return on their money.
[6] The concern for “policy” appears on every page of the proposal, as in the programmatic recommendation “to create one of the world’s most vital and visible institutes for economic research and policy analysis and evaluation” (”A Proposal to Establish the Milton Friedman Institute,” p. 1, emphasis added).
[7] “A Proposal to Establish the Milton Friedman Institute,” p. 7.

Farming in the desert: the subsistence-based economy of the Tarapaca valley in the North of Chile

 

Why are we still reading this kind of crap?

I have to catch a bus, so don’t have time to rant about this piece of ‘research’ as much as I want to. So here’s the short sarcastic version.

Because the only reason women exist is to have babies.

 

65%

By now you have no doubt heard that Evo won, and won spectacularly. If you haven’t, then take a quick trip over to the Blog from Bolivia for the news. I keep looking at the figures, but its still hasn’t quiet sunk in for me… I mean, this election has shown that he really does have an unprecedented level of support. 65% is… incredible.

To put that in perspective, Labour won at the last election in the UK with 35.3% of the popular vote. Even in the department where Evo has the least support, Santa Cruz, he got more than Labour won with: 38%.

I’m usually a cynical bastard when it comes to elections, verging on support of the eat-your-ballot campaign. As far as I’m concerned anyone who makes it far enough to get their name on a ballot paper has to have abandoned everything that would have made them a decent human, just to get (or to want to get) that far, long ago. But I don’t think I’m just being romantic when I say that this situation feels different, and that Evo is a different type of politician. Sure, he’s obviously still a politician, but for the first time it seems like there really is a choice between two substantially different entities.

 

All is weirdly quiet on the streets of La Paz

Its slightly eerie in La Paz today. I noticed it immediately I woke up. Usually I get woken by the sound on traffic outside, even though I live on the 16th floor. But this morning I was woken at 7:30 by a military style band blasting out a rousing little number, then promptly stopping and leaving behind a deathly silence. Lying in bed listening to the rather disconcerting sound of nothing whatsoever, I eventually got curious enough to drag myself to the window. Outside the streets were deserted - barely a single car and hardly a person on the streets as far as I could see (and from the 16th floor I can generally see pretty far).

Its been like that all day. The only vehicles out are taxis with official looking notices on their windscreens, and they mostly seem to be ferrying officials and journalists between the municipal buildings and the newspaper offices.

I took a walk down town in the afternoon to see what was going on, if anything. Its oddly quiet in the city without any traffic. Nearly all the shops and cafés are closed - the single fast food joint open, Dumbo’s, was packed, while the Starbucks-esque Alexander’s Cafe was still only serving its loyal crowd of American ex-pats sucking on over-priced lattes. The usual Sunday cultural events on the Prado were cancelled, but there was something of the holiday feel in the air as families and couples strolled up and down the street. The parks and plazas were packed with children playing and lovers cooing. Even in Plaza Murillo, where the governmental palace is, there were still the usual crowds of tourists snapping pictures and small children feeding/stomping on pigeons under the doting eyes of their parents.

The peaceful holiday mood clashed somewhat with the high police presence in the city, particularly around places where people are voting. That strange and exotic feeling of being able to meander through the middle of what ought to be a hectic thoroughfare was broken every now and then by a convoy of police on bright red motorbikes racing their way through. Given that (once they have voted of course) no-one has anything better to do today than wander the streets, I guess its not surprising that I came across at least one big fight in the street. Outside a church on the Prado a middle-aged woman in a pink sun hat and holding an ice cream in her hand was berating a group of embarrassed looking young men. As they traded insults a crowd began to form, occasionally heckling or joining in. Two giggling women who looked like mother and grown-up daughter got into the mood by sitting down on the church steps and shouting slogans for either side, much to the amusement of the onlookers. But others were far more serious, not least the women who seemed to have started it. A young man in a MAS jacket seemed to be the prime target of the women’s rage. He got eventually dragged away by his friends to the hooting jeers of the crowd, but by this point enough people had joined in for the argument to continue a good while longer. There was something a little surreal about seeing the peaceful Sunday strollers meandering up the Prado get to the church and suddenly launch themselves into a political street brawl. A few police eventually came by and pulled aside a man still holding the hand of his young son while shouting red faced at the old woman with her ice cream.

By the time I got home an hour or so ago the crowds of reporters outside the municipal building where they are counting the votes had thinned a bit. This morning they had been camped out on mass on the pavement (or, to be more accurate, queuing round the block for the hot-dog stand opposite the municipal building with one eye on the food and one eye on the big gates in case anything happened). What’s going on inside that building will determine whether things remain this quiet over the next few days, weeks and months.

 

Its just a joke…

I’m interested in the debate going on about Katy Perry, the new trying-to-be-Lily-Allen popsicle. Her first two singles are both accused of being anti-gay. The first was called “UR so Gay” and is all about an ex who was too metrosexual for his own good, while the second is called “I Kissed a Girl” and, well, its about her kissing a girl. The musical value of the songs aside, she’s pissed a lot of people off. But the daughter of two Christian Pastors and the latest product of Capitol Records seems herself to be blithely ignorant of the offence she has caused.

This fantastic interview with her and its subsequent discussion in The New Gay magazine is wonderful. As one of the commentators points out

“The interviewer just keeps asking, over and over, “Why are you such a homophobic cunt?”

The subject keeps responding, “The songs are personal, the themes are open to interpretation, I don’t have a government-mandated obligation to be politically correct.”

The songs each play on tropes of homophobia that are common in daily life but considered to be ‘harmless’. The first being the use of ‘gay’ as an insult akin to ’stupid’ or ’sucky’, the second being the idea that (pretty) straight girls kissing is hot as long as its aimed at turning on men. The first is one of my own personal rant buttons, and I have on several occasions got into huge blazing rows over it (most recently with my little sister - the one who also thinks that Muslims are evil). “But I don’t really mean gay as an insult, its just a word. It doesn’t mean gay like that“: the excuse of the fucking ignorant. The second idea that lesbians are hot seems to have a whole lot to do with porn. I always wondered why it was that lesbians were so popular in porn for men, given that you’d assume there would be nothing there for them. But I figured eventually that its probably because most straight men are so homophobic that they aren’t even comfortable seeing another guy naked in porn, so if you just eliminate the guy and put in two women it solves the problem. Which is of course reinforced by the fact that you would never see a butch lesbian, or in fact a lesbian, in ‘lesbian’ porn aimed at straight men. So Katy Perry’s funny little jokes reinforce the idea that lesbians only exist as male sex objects, and that men (gay or straight) who don’t fit in with established sex/gender roles should be punished for it. Catchy!

I was thinking about writing this post last night while in a gay bar in La Paz, and talking to my friend who took me there. My friend, Diana, was pretty uncomfortable but trying really hard not to show it. She had been nervous about whether she ought to mention the fact she was going to the bar, and had kind of ’sounded me out’ on how I would react before inviting me. She is straight but was going because an old friend of hers who is gay was organising the event. Diana’s reaction was really interesting - although she was obviously very uncomfortable and probably quiet unhappy about her friend being, as she called it, ‘abnormal’, she was really trying hard to understand and to open her mind to the idea. She wanted to go to the bar to support her friend in an event she was organising, and I think in general to show her friend that she still supported her altogether. We had a good night out (till the curfew interrupted us) and made plans to see the Miss Gay Bolivia candidate through to the competition next weekend. Diana talked about how dangerous it is to be openly gay in Bolivia - at the gay pride event earlier in the year people attacked and sprayed gas on the people marching. We talked in the taxi home about the Katy Perry song “UR So Gay” and she was far more shocked than I had been.

In a way its a bit like the racist comments I was talking about before. Ed, for example, considers himself to be progressive and would probably describe Diana as homophobic because she is uncomfortable with the idea of her friend being gay. But Ed regularly makes the kind of locker room jokes with his male friends about being ’so gay’, and I can only imagine the look of fear that would cross his face if we had offered to bring him along last night to the drag show in a gay bar. Diana lives in a country where being gay really is considered to be ‘abnormal’ so her opinion is understandable - I think its a bit much to assume that individual people can throw off their habitus overnight after one contact with the ‘liberal west’. In fact it’s this idea that we are more liberal in the west that makes us able to become comfortable with our own prejudice. What makes Diana more tolerant that Ed is that she is actively trying to change her opinion and broaden her mind, and that she understands that such ‘causal jokes’ are part of the day-to-day reinforcement of oppression that keep her friends underground and, at times, in fear of their lives.

 

Under curfew

So I was out earlier this evening at a support gig to raise money for the costumes for a drag queen contestant in Miss Gay Bolivia 2008, and discovered that there is a curfew in place tonight! We had just finished enjoying a rather fine belly dancing act from Miss Jubilación, when the bar owner came round to inform everyone they had to leave by 11. At that hour all bars, clubs and restaurants across the city had to be closed by law. What’s more, by midnight a city wide curfew would be in place, so no pedestrians, cars, buses - nothing! - allowed on the streets. The election is on Sunday, but it seems the government is taking no chances. Damn it, the populace will be sober when they vote, and sober for two days beforehand while they think about it!

I asked my friend about the election - apparently its not mandatory to vote, but if you don’t it becomes very difficult to get anything done bureaucracy wise. I’m not sure exactly what the deal is, but as she explained it you get some form of ID card when you vote that you then have to show whenever you interact with things like banks or the government or employers. So to miss out on voting and not get the card means being screwed until the next election comes around.

At a rough guess, I’d say that its likely no bars at all and few shops are going to be open tomorrow, so I think I’ll get some beers in for the weekend. And while I’m at it I might stockpile on some food in case there are any blockades. There’s a chance that things in Bolivia could get ‘interesting’, so to speak, over the next few days. Thought to be honest no-one seems to know what’s going to happen. Everyone I ask throws their hands up in the air - the only thing certain is that its bound to be worse in the South where anti-Evo sentiment is vicious, rather than here in the highlands where he has most support. But I just found out what the big fancy government building right next to my apartment that they have been renovating for the last two months is: its the municipal building where they count the votes.

So that’s nice to know, it being so close and all.

As we left the bar to enjoy our last hour of freedom walking the streets, we were reminded by the bar owner that we had to walk in pairs only. No groups allowed on the streets for reasons of security - and a group counts as more than two. In a devious act of rebellion we celebrated our last hour of freedom by walking in a pack of six.

 

I heart La Paz

Today is Bolivian Independence day and its a big fiesta. In celebration, I’ve been thinking about all the things I love about La Paz. Here in no particular order is my top 5 reasons to love this city:

1) The traffic zebras. The first time I saw these guys I had no idea what they were doing. Dressed up in big zebra costumes (or occasionally as other furry four legged friends), they dance, juggle or strut about in front of the cars and buses at traffic lights. Sounds weird? It’s genius. La Paz like many cities used to have a problem with people not obeying traffic laws. Traffic police didn’t seem to be working, so someone came up with the idea of the traffic zebras. If a trigger happy taxi driver or over zealous bus driver tries to jump a red light, the traffic zebras pounce on mass and *mock* the driver into stopping. Its easy to shout abuse at a traffic cop and look tough, harder to argue with a teenager dressed as a zebra and save face, especially when everyone else starts to laugh at you too. It worked - no one runs down a zebra. They have expanded recently into other forms of traffic control, but with the same tactic - tough-guy drivers that want to break traffic rules may not fear the police, but they do fear a crowd of watching pedestrians and drivers laughing at them as they are clowned at by a zebra.

2) An honest war memorial. The memorial to the unknown solider in La Paz used, I think, to be the usual kind of marching, earnest young thing, off to die gloriously for his country. Now the memorial shows the solider dead on his face in the dirt.

3) Active street art. La Paz is covered in street art and commentary, from graffiti to murals and everything in-between. For some reason a lot of the graffiti all over the city is written in a beautiful copperplate handwriting. As someone once told me, graffiti is the sign of an active political life in a city. And La Paz certainly has that in abundance. Some of the graffiti stays around for years as a reminder of struggles past - I came across some anti-Goni slogans a few days ago. Others become the focus of protracted exchanges between different paint wielding commentators, and whole conversations come and go on the street for passers-by to see. There are also a large number of official murals, one of which has been in the process of being painted on the main street down town over the last few weeks.

4) Its possible to buy anything under the sun on the street. Walk long enough and you’ll eventually find a little old lady selling it. From the latest season of your favourite TV show to ironing boards, from dolls house furniture to military grade binoculars, school books to love potions - whatever you need someone will be able to sell it to you. And they will probably have all the above in the same stall.

5) The Prado on Sunday mornings. The Prado is the main street downtown, a long avenue that runs right through the centre of town. Every Sunday morning they shut down the busy traffic running in two directions and the street turns into a pedestrian cultural zone. Bandstands appear with classical, folk, and rock/pop music evenly spaced out so as not to disturb each other. Chairs are arranged for the fairly considerable audiences that arrive to listen. Whole sections are turned over to children’s activities - bouncy castles, go-cart racing, skipping competitions, puppet shows, drawing and puzzle areas, story telling and so on. Its all free, and whole families turn up to join in. Booths appear from various cultural organisations - the Hari Krishnas rub shoulders with the likes of the Bonsai society, Origami makers, and old Aymara men reading coca leaves. People wander up and down the length of the Prado all morning, watching and being watched, listening to the music, taking it easy. By mid-afternoon it all closes back down again for the week.

Of course there are many other things I could mention, but that’s just my selection for today.

 

Enjoyable propaganda

I’ve got addicted to the HBO series The Wire in the last few days. While I was ill this weekend and home alone in the house in the countryside, I watched the whole first series while wrapped up in a pile of blankets in front of the electric fire one afternoon. Now I’m nearly done with the second series as well, though its not as good as the first.

If you’ve never heard of it - and I hadn’t till some of the guys here kept going on about it - The Wire is basically a cop show. But though I usually hate cop shows, this one’s got a sense of humour and a good plot that makes it very watchable. It shows both sides of a police case - the detectives who are all either corrupt or drunks but have heart, and the empire of drug dealers they are trying to catch. The story goes back and forwards from one perspective to another, and portrays both as sympathetically or negatively as the other. The name comes from its main preoccupation - the story is basically about the cops discovering the use of surveillance and wire tapping. It starts with them still writing reports on type writers, and follows them through the amazing discovery of how they can bring down criminal masterminds by looking at their phone records, tapping their phones, and - eventually in the second series - learning what text messages and GPS are. Somewhere near the end of the second series there is a big plot lurch forward when they realise they can track someone’s phone number and then get all their records if they know the place and time that they sent a single text message. This seems like fairly obvious stuff to me, but that’s probably because of the company I used to keep. To most people who watch it I guess it is quiet a revelation that so much can be learnt from tracking phones. The plot briefly explored the misuses of the wire tapping (the two ‘dumb cops’ listening in to a suspect having phone sex), but mostly it concentrates on everything that can be gained from such technology. The major obstacles are the oppressive and corrupt senior officers that don’t believe in the power of the wire and keep trying to close the investigation. The fact that the bad guys are obviously bad, and the audience knows this, means that there is never a more in depth questioning of the use of such technology.

Of course, its not surprising that a series like this comes at a time when the US and most other governments are flinging privacy laws out the window as fast as they can, and making it easier and easier to spy on anyone, anywhere, anytime. I never really like cop shows partly because I hate that thinly veiled attempt to get us to think the old copper is just a good guy really, and if he does turn you into a bloody pulp in a cell one night, its probably for your own good. The Wire is not so blatant as, say, 24, in pushing the message, and its refreshing in this day and age to not only have some non-Muslim bad-guys, but to also have the occasional snide remark about the effects of the ‘war on terror’. As far as propaganda goes, its well written and pretty entertaining propaganda, with just enough self-awareness to make it more than palatable.