[B5] Five More!

I joined with acrabtree, finfin, larkvi and schizmatic for five episodes of Babylon 5. In sum, last night we caught "Babylon Squared", "The Quality of Mercy", and "Chrysalis" from the end of the first season, and the episodes "Points of Departure" and "Revelations" from the beginning of the second. It's interesting to watch the degeneration of the situations on Earth among the distant stars, methinks.

[LINK] It had to be done

pauldrye has just made a mashup of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Xanadu."

Xanawocky

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

[BRIEF NOTE] DDR

Dance Dance Revolution is a remarkably successful synthesis of the interests of the Japanese popular-music and video-game industries. What's more stunning is that this works. Even if I do have two left feet (appropriately enough given my handedness) and although I keep confusing DDR with "Deutsche Demokratische Republik," it still keeps me coming back.

[LINK] The ongoing Europeanization of Cape Verde

Jonathan Edelstein reports that Cape Verde is considering whether or not it should adopt the Euro as its official currency. Greater Europe in the making, perchance?

[BRIEF NOTE] New Frontiers?

I've some questions on seeing the new title The Straight Girl's Guide to Sleeping with Chicks.

1. Is this representative of a new trend, a publicization of a preexisting trend, or a combination of these two factors and if so in what proportions?

2. In a decade's time, will we see similar titles addressed to men?

3. Why now?

David Bowie was right in 1995 in "Hallo Spaceboy": "Do you like girls or boys?/It's confusing these days."

[LINK] Remember that modernizing leader, Musharraf?

Via BBC News:

Pakistani activists have reacted with outrage to recent comments on rape victims by President Pervez Musharraf.

He said that rape was a "money-making concern" and many argued it was a way to get money and a visa to emigrate.

Pakistan's most-high profile rape victim, Mukhtar Mai, told the BBC no woman could subject herself to "such a horrendous experience" to make money.

Women's groups and activists protested in Karachi on Friday, shouting: "Down with chauvinism".

[LINK] The lessons of the Pieds-noirs for Louisiana

Writing in The New Republic, Marisa Katz examines the similarities between the Hurricane Katrina refugees now and thepieds-noirs back in 1962. After Algeria gained its independence, the million-odd French settler community in Algeria fled to France almost in its entirety, hundreds of thousands of traumatized families overwhelming the local supplies of housing and jobs in southern France and meeting a hostile reaction from locals thanks to their reputation as racist reactionaries. Nonetheless, this influx was assimilated with some expected hiccups how. How?

The French model is telling both for its successes and its failures. Once it got its act together, and once it had stemmed the crisis with a crash program of emergency aid, the French government set about building housing, locating jobs, and offering incentives for geographic distribution. The government constructed tens of thousands of new residential units for people who had fled Algeria. It canvassed hundreds of thousands of companies for jobs, convinced them to keep vacancies open specifically for pied-noir applicants, alerted job seekers to the vacancies through a national media campaign, and then paid to get them to interviews. Finally, the government offered additional aid--and later made aid contingent--based on pieds-noirs' willingness to move beyond southern France. Still, in the spring of 1964, only half the Algerian refugee population had permanent housing. And many, particularly those who had worked in agriculture, were still looking for jobs. It wasn't until a boom in the French economy that the pieds-noirs were successfully absorbed. And, even then, economic integration masked social insecurity. More than 50 percent of pied-noir respondents to a survey said they had been received with indifference, reservation, or hostility. They felt ostracized by the metropolitan French--and would for generations to come.

The timely and effective intervention of the state, Katz demonstrates, was critical. Reintegrating refugees on the cheap would never have worked out. The Bush Administration should pay attention to this precedent.

[BRIEF NOTE] Apocalypse Culture

Yugoslavia--its prehistory, the Kingdom and the Socialist Federal Republic, the successor states--interests me. It's the contradiction between the presentation of Yugoslavia during the civil wars of the 1990s and in the general decay of the 2000's as a collection of pre-modern societies, and the Cold War identification of Yugoslavia as a relatively dynamic and liberal Communist society, that interests me. Any polity that was willing to allow Laibach isn't exactly reactionary. Yugoslavia was intimately plugged into the wider world economy, as a destination for tourists and as a source of gastarbeiter, an importer of raw materials and an exporter of finished goods, even as a cultural and political magnet of some import. Why did Yugoslavia's image change so much for the worse? Why did Yugoslavia, suddenly and despite the evidence, get reevaluated as a pre-modern area of the world? The reluctance to see ethnic conflict as an eminently modern and even post-modern phenomenon, I suspect, played a critical role in this.

This failure of the critical imagination is a pity, not least because Yugoslavia's experiences remain quite relevant. Take Pedro Ramet essay's "Apocalypse Culture and Social Change in Yugoslavia" in the collection Yugoslavia in the 1980s (Boulder: Westview, 1985), edited by himself. In this essay, he introduces the interesting paradigm of "apocalypse culture," with reference to the Yugoslavian crisis of the post-Tito 1980s.

By 'apocalypse culture' I mean culture which is inward-looking, absorbed in a quest for meanings, and prepared to question the fundamental political and social values of the society. Associated with normlessness and anomie, it is therefore symptomatic of deep social insecurity, and is peculiar to developed societies in decay. Its openness to radically new formulas springs from the sense--whether a belief or (as more usually) merely a mood--that the system in question has arrived at a historical turning point, that it is, so to speak, the 'end of time.' Contributors to 'apocalypse culture' view themselves, thus, as social critics, voices warning of dangers ahead, even as prophets offering new visions and new formulas. There is a degree of this present in all modern societies. What defines 'apocalypse culture' is the peculiar intensity of this introspective brooding, and the centrality it comes to occupy in social debates (3)

A nation going through an apocalypse culture phase, Ramet argues, must be a nation that is at peace but experiencing a crisis of conscience, with a dynamic and destabilizing relationship between different classes and other groups in society and a ruling elite that can't provide any solutions. Apocalypse culture manifests itself in the cultural sphere, Ramet's analysis emphasizing literature but allowing for the inclusion of music and the plastic arts, as well as in the political sphere thanks to "discontent so rampant that critical discussion cannot possibly be suppressed" (4). In the Yugoslavian context, Ramet documents how the established order was called into question by such diverse things as nationalism and rock and roll culture, the collapse of traditional peasant cultures inspiring angst amongst newly urban Yugoslavians and the dead hand of the Yugoslavian communist party inspiring calls for radical reform across the board.

As it happened, Yugoslavia's apocalypse culture resulted in the complete breakdown of the federation, a decade of civil war, the impoverishment of almost all Yugoslavians and the flight of millions from their homeland. That said, this outcome wasn't inevitable--had different people been in power, or different constitutional changes enacted, a prosperous, happy, and free Yugoslavia stretching from the Italian frontier to the Greek might have joined the European Union last year. Apocalypse culture can be enormously productive. Consider, if you would, the cultural ferment that hit Poland in the 1980s, as dissidents and workers united to establish all manner of organizations existing outside of the easy control of the Communist/military state, or perhaps the efflorescence of Argentina now in the wake of economic collapse and the discrediting of that country's elites. When your society's starting all over again, it looks like apocalypse culture can be a good tool for diagnosing and solving your society's ills.

[B5] The Earth Alliance Fact Book

In Babylon 5, the Earth Alliance is a character in itself. Unlike Star Trek's ill-defined and frequently self-contradictory United Federation of Planets, the Earth Alliance is a polity with clear origins, clear chains of command, and clear problems. How are the member-states on Earth accomodated? What is to be done with the colonies? How, exactly, are Earthers reacting to their bizarrely averted obliteration by the Minbari? In Babylon 5, politics matters. That's why one might have thought I'd have been excited to be lent, by thebitterguy, Mongoose Publishing's RPG supplement The Earth Alliance Fact Book.

One would have been terribly, terribly wrong. The equipment described is decent enough, I suppose, though I lack the expertise needed to evaluate the designs. If the designs are as competent as the rest of the supplement, though, the entire book needs to be trashed. The author, one Bruce Graw, managed to write a future history for Babylon 5 that combines a neocon's fantasy about the way the world should be with complete ignorance about what nations are actually like and a remarkable display of stereotypes. The Third World War, on the face of it, makes no sense, while the solution in the early 22nd century to Muslim terrorism (an impermeable blockade followed by a conquest of the entire Islamic world) would be far more likely to end in a crusade than not. Belarus is not a Baltic state, the heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania aside, and the relationship described between the Russian Consortium and its post-Soviet neighbours has little grounding in any likely reality.

Oh. It's best not to mention in much detail the descriptions of the French as ingrates bitter that the United States saved them in all three world wars, the Balkans' miraculous preservation of an anachronistic and not-really-existing heritage of poverty and hatred into the mid-23rd century, the United Islamic Nations' origin in a secret pact signed by terrorist-exporting countries, the reduction of most of the Chinese population into breeding machines/serfs, and the absence of any African or Indian languages apart from Afrikaans and Hindi as optional languages for characters. Next to this, the systematic and massive flaws in planetology and stellar nomenclature in the colonies section come almost as a relief.

I do think that the passages describing Earth's contacts with non-human civilizations and the Psi Corps are decent. This leads me to the conclusion that Graw just isn't good at writing about normal human beings and their societies, about the way that they interact with each other and with wider social groupings on a regular basis. This is a problem for a writer who is actually competent, but it's more of an issue for his unfortunate readers. I feel sorry that thebitterguy had to actually pay money for this.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Walloon Language versus La Francophonie

The French language as it now exists is the product of centuries of regulation by the French state. Whether monarchical or republican, the French state has always been quite aware that language is a critical area of culture that can be managed by the state, with benefits naturally accruing to the state. Eugen Weber in his Peasants into Frenchmen described how the schools and conscription of the Third Republic worked together with mass media to produce a nationally consolidated and homogeneous body; almost a century later, France took advantage of Québécois assertiveness and post-colonial Africa's desire to establish multilateral relations amongst themselves to create la francophonie.

As INED noted in February 2002, the result of this centuries-long process of state intervention in language, within the confines of metropolitan France, has been to establish a population far more homogeneously Francophone than ever before: The languages of earlier immigrants (Poles, Jews, Italians) have faded, the languages of more recent immigrants (Arabic, Kabyle, Portuguese) are following suit, langue d'oïl non-standard dialects and all of the dialects of Occitan being only slightly more vulnerable to attrition than full-fledged regional languages like Breton, Basque, Flemish, and Alsatian. This homogenization of France might well be the most important event in the linguistic history of 20th century western Europe.

France remains the central player in the Francophone world, thanks to its moderately large population and its high level of development. That said, where French sovereignty stops the French language continues to display a certain diversity. In Africa, French may be less solidly implanted in former Belgian colonies like Congo-Kinshasa and Rwanda than in formerly French colonies Côte d'Ivoire or Senegal, and it remains unlikely that French will ever become as dominant in any African countries as Portuguese in Angola. Nonetheless, African French remains a vital branch of the French language, evolving of necessity outside of the purview of France. Looking among first-language speakers, the Frenches of Québec and Acadia remain vibrant and distinct, though Léandre Bergeron's 1980 "Dictionnaire de la langue québécoise is agreed to make an argument that's a bit too strong. The standard French spoken by the Belgians and the Swiss is much closer to the French standard than anything spoken outside of Europe, as one would expect given geography and history. This is a bit surprising in the case of the Walloons, for they have their own language.



The Walloon language descends, like the other langues d'oïl, from the Romance dialects imported into what was once the north of Roman Gaul. Heavily influenced by German in its lexicon and its syntax (compare Walloon on foirt ome (a strong man) with French un homme fort, and the construction Cwè çki c' est di ça po ene fleur (what is this flower?) with German Was ist das für eine Blume?), a distinctive Walloon tongue was recognized as early as the 16th century. Unfortunately, as Jacques Marchal observes at his excellent page on the Walloon language, from the 17th century on Wallonia's educated elites wrote and spoken in French. Fluency in Walloon collapsed sharply in the first half of the 20th century, creating a situation where the future of Walloon as a spoken language is threatened on the time-honoured pattern of language decline everywhere.

Then the rest of the population saw that there was no social future outside French, which was the sole language in Walloon schools; all parents began raising their children in French (or often in a dialectal form of French more or less inspired by Walloon). Now, the extremity of the functional deadend is near, with some people claiming that Walloon should be reverred only as a relic of the past, a literary language or, at best, "the language of the heart", but not of everyday speech.

Ethnologue estimates that as of 1998, a bit more than a million people out of a total population of some 3.35 million people in Wallonia. There is a notable Walloon language movement, with the Union culturel wallon leading efforts to introduce Walloon into the mass media and education. Unquestionably, Walloon's search for official status is aided immeasurably by Wallonia's independence from France; had Wallonia remained French territory after 1815, doubtless it would have met the same fate as Picard.

Even so, considering the inverted age pyramid of Walloon speakers and Walloon's apparently weak penetration outside of folkloric circles, a certain skepticism regarding this language's fate seems merited. Québécois and Acadian Frenches are likely to survive thanks to their distance from la métropole while African French can soon count--if it can't already--on sheer weight of its numbers. Wallonia exists in a borderless Europe, outnumbered twenty to one by their southern neighbours. The Walloon language faces even worse numeric odds. La Francophonie may yet triumph in Belgium.