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when exploring why Kristof has become a high priest of liberal opinion in America (arrogating the right to speak on almost any sociopolitical phenomenon, provided it involves an easily identifiable victim), we crash into what can be called Kristof’s anti-politics: the way his method and style directly dehumanize his subjects, expelling them from the realm of the analytical by refusing to connect them to systems and structures that animate their challenges
To address this apparent paradox—and to explore what social values, imaginaries, and desires Kristof embodies—I will introduce the concept of the open secret, arguing that elite American discourse is increasingly defined not by ideological obfuscation (where there are secrets that we just do not know), but by an insidious mélange where secrets still exist but also often seem somewhat open, recognized through the side of the eye, becoming things we must know but cannot acknowledge.
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- his reporting allows us to process the trauma of a world of contradictions and incoherencies while concurrently collectively agreeing on an official and comforting narrative: that of progress through the diligent application of universal liberal values. Against Kristof’s double move—opening up the caesura, allowing the pressure to escape, closing it again—the project must become to begin thinking through ways of speaking our open secrets, of holding that caesura open and doing politics in the gap.
- By playing on his audience’s Orientalist, classist, and racist fantasies, Kristof fabricates legible narratives out of snapshots of distant worlds. He then crafts stunningly simplistic solutions to the seemingly irrevocable problems that plague those backwards places.
- Kristof accomplishes this by using a standard and replicated formula: some mixture of (1) a construction of a bestial and demonic Other creating a spectacle of violence; (2) a rendering of the object of that horror—a depoliticized, abject victim, usually no more than a body; (3) a presentation of a (potential) salvific savior figure(typically the West writ large or a Western agent—some teleological process immanent in capitalism or development, the reader himself (who can act by donating money), and almost always Kristof himself as well); and (4) an introduction of potential linkages with larger systems and structures … only to immediately reterritorialize around the non-political solutions and the savior implementing them.
- Besides introducing the Other and the victim, this section has an important additional effect: It serves as a way of silencing. Against the suggestion that Kristof should gloss the details of the horror to get to the point of the story, it becomes clear that those details are the point. As a result, the horror is too great to be responded to politically; politics is callous, insensitive, inadequate, somehow just not enough against this evil. The effect of this technique is to leave the reader stunned, numbed, and disarmed, waiting for something to make this horror go away.
- Enter the third part of the triptych: the witness who plays the messianic role, both for Generose and the reader. Shannon, leading a normal life in the U.S., heard about Generose’s story in a normal way (by watching Oprah), yet she makes the extraordinary and laudable decision to go live in the DRC. Consequently she becomes the true subject of the rest of Kristof’s column, not only the redeemer for the boy and the body left behind as residual but a surrogate for the reader as well.
- a larger point: In Kristof, the victim is wholly constructed and constituted by violence, or more specifically, violence that can be turned into narrative. She (and it’s usually a she) literally doesn’t exist until violence is done to her body and Kristof reports on it; she ceases to exist when violence is cleansed away through the savior’s ritual act. The victim does not continue on and face ordinary problems such as impoverishment or limited access to health care. She has served her purpose, and Kristof is off to report on the next mass rape. So he can use her name and photograph—she doesn’t exist afterward anyway.
- ever momentarily, there is a mention of broader linkages—but only so they can be dismissed. We hear vaguely about the “irresponsible” international community, another state (Rwanda), big business, a global institution (the ICC), but what are the connections between these actors? How do they lead to the violence done to Generose? We don’t know, and Kristof does not encourage us to ask. Indeed, if Kristof believed that the challenges of the postcolonial state—the patterns of extraction that preempt industrialization and economic structural transformation, the destructive geopolitical machinations by states ostensibly defending human rights—were really problems, wouldn’t he spend more time on them?
- I compare this moment to the introduction of a vaccine, where a bit of the virus (politics) is allowed into the bloodstream (the field of vision of the American bourgeois) so that it can immediately be eradicated by the immune system (the reterritorializing power of the comforting American progress-through-charity ideology).
- Keeping readers in a constant state of becoming aware creates an indefinite loop that would be laughable if it were not so productive. And while it produces awareness of abused bodies over there, it resolutely refuses to make readers aware of their complicity in those abuses. The material conditions that reinforce the world’s structural violences apparently do not qualify as awareness-worthy.
- This is the quintessential distillation of the parallax: looking without looking, knowing what not to know. And because we cannot figure this out on our own, we learn when and why to close our eyes from those who are experts at opening and closing them.

Mar

2012

Egypt and the aid backlash: Lessons for the rest of the world | a paper bird

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Feb

2012

"Conservation in a New Nation" - YouTube

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Feb

2012

Why World Bank and NGOs fail | Egypt Independent

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representatives from civil society assumed the role of development “experts,” out of a belief that public policies are the job of technical experts with superior academic degrees and activists with expertise in work with local communities of the poor and illiterate.
epresentatives from civil society assumed the role of development “experts,” out of a belief that public policies are the job of technical experts with superior academic degrees and activists with expertise in work with local communities of the poor and illiterate.
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- Besides their inability to conceive the major transformations Egypt is undergoing, civil society organizations are also dangerously heedless to the failure of the “state of experts” over more than two decades of authoritative development hegemonized by governmental and international bureaucracies (including the World Bank itself).
- ome might ask about the role that the World Bank and its civil society organizations should properly play. The World Bank is a financial institution; its primary role is to lend money and to achieve development. It is an institution that should not exercise politics, even though all of its work is translated into policies — how paradoxical!

Feb

2012

Can Bolivia become a green energy superpower? | Dan Collyns | Global development | guardian.co.uk

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Jan

2012

Fossil fuel subsidies and global warming: We could cut the climate change problem in half simply by abolishing inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. - Slate Magazine

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Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency is telling you exactly that. In data released this month as part of the IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook report, he shows that in 2010 the world spent $409 billion on subsidizing the production and consumption of fossil fuels, dwarfing the word’s $66 billion or so of subsidies for renewable energy
In no case do these subsidies make sense.
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- f roughly half of what needs to be done can be achieved simply by eliminating economic distortions—economic distortions that would be unwise even if there were no concern about pollution—then the whole framework of a trade-off between prosperity and sustainability is largely misguided.
- At the end of the day, pure laissez faire can never meet the world’s environmental challenges. If you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you need to cap them and then you need to reduce the cap. But a surprisingly large step toward that target can occur by simply allowing the market to do its work by removing the subsidies that encourage lavish and inefficient consumption of fossil fuels.

Jan

2012

Bill Gates pushes ‘green revolution’ for small farms in developing world - The Washington Post

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Jan

2012

In Detroit, a Fresh Wave of Hope - NYTimes.com

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Jan

2012

AFED

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Jan

2012

Urban planner David Sims explodes myths on Cairo’s dysfunction | Al-Masry Al-Youm: Today's News from Egypt

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Despite our griping, Sims argues that Cairo actually functions quite well. Like any massive urban center, the city has problems, but they are far less debilitating than those of other equivalent global metropolises.
The irony of Cairo is that its relative functionality is not the result of enlightened government intervention. In fact, for the past half century, the most heavily-inhabited parts of Cairo — as opposed to the virtually empty desert developments — have developed almost entirely independent of government plans. Sims describes this as “order without design.”
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- he 11 million inhabitants of Cairo’s ‘ashwa’it have benefitted from virtually no government investments, whereas the 800,000 largely elite suburban inhabitants out in the desert have seen countless millions poured into their communities.
- t a time like this, the city can turn away from the discredited state-led social engineering that promoted the failed desert cities, and instead embrace a people-oriented approach that invests in real, inhabited communities.
- a people-oriented approach needs to improve the existing reality, rather than impose impractical imaginary solutions.

Jan

2012

The 'new look' of Cairo train station | Al-Masry Al-Youm: Today's News from Egypt

www.almasryalyoum.com/...605701

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As a result, the original neo-Mamluk style has effectively been replaced with a style that is ostensibly pharaonic but which actually seems closer to that of Las Vegas casinos or Abu Dhabi glass malls.