[BRIEF NOTE] Now really, Hillary

Since the office of the President of the United States of America is probably as close to that of Planetary President as I'll see in my lifetime, at least until the office of the President of the European Commission becomes more prominent, like many Canadians I've been paying a reasonable amount of attention to the Obama-Clinton race. I've tended to lean towards Clinton, on the grounds of her legal education and indirect experience with policy-making. She's also wrung a bit of sympathy with me, on the grounds that I think that some of the criticism of her is based on the perception that she's acting in an unfeminine manner, and gender-related prejudices like misogyny and homophobia are pretty similar (and Andrew Sullivan can just shut up). As for Obama, I'm worried about the let-down that his followers will experience when they realize that, shock!, Obama would have to behave as an actual politician when he's in office. A President Clinton, then, would please me.

But doing it this way?

Mrs Clinton activated the entire might of her campaign machine to exploit the remarks, which she called “demeaning”, “elitist” and “out of touch”. Aides handed out “I’m not bitter” stickers and surrogates took to the airwaves to fan the flames.

It emerged on Saturday that Mr Obama had, before an audience in the liberal bastion of San Francisco, tried to explain his trouble winning over white, working-class voters, the fabled “Reagan Democrats” who will be crucial in the general election.

He said: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Mrs Clinton seized on the comments, believing that Mr Obama had at last committed an error big enough to change the dynamic of their race.

“The people of faith I know don’t ‘cling’ to religion because they’re bitter,” she said. “People embrace faith not because they are materially poor but because they are spiritually rich.

“People don’t need a president who looks down on them. They need a president who stands up for them.”

In a clear attempt to further appeal to working class voters, Mrs Clinton downed a beer and a shot of whiskey yesterday at a campaign stop in Indiana.

1. Even if she is trying to appeal to working-class voters, I find Clinton's attempt to align herself with the American working classes as a woman of the people terribly unconvincing. She was wife of a man who was first the Governor of Arkansas then President of the United States then a public speaker commanding hundreds of thousands of dollars per experience, and has a pretty decent career of her own. It just strikes me as a bit silly, that's all.

2. About equally silly is the decision of both Obama and Clinton to campaign on culture wars grounds since their positions on said are pretty similar. A manufactured fight over something that neither person actually disagrees with strikes me as pointless, and potentially dangerous if it weakens the Democratic Party enough for the Republicans to take over.

Thoughts?

[MUSIC] t.A.T.u, "All the Things She Said"

I have to confess that I like t.A.T.u.

"Andy Warhol paints Debbie Harry on an Amiga" (Watch on YouTube)

I shouldn't have to confess this, not because this is shameful, but because it's perfectly good music. Back in January 2004, while I was visiting an HMV store on an overnight trip to Ottawa, I took a look at the store's singles rack and noticed the CD singles for "All the Things She Said" and "How Soon Is Now>". They were cheap, and so I bought them, and took them home with me, and played them (not without some ribbing from friends), and found out that their music was actually pretty catchy. I'm not alone in this: In 2005, Michael Idov at Slate praised the group and their music.

The band t.A.T.u. was a product that one could only sell, or buy, once. Even as the goth-chipmunk ardor of their 2002 single "All the Things She Said" was steadily denting stateside radio playlists, it was safe to assume there would be no competing teenage-lesbian Slav duo that year. Lena and Julia took the waning Britney-vs.-Christina debate and resolved it as only a reeling post-socialist mind would--Both! Making out! In a way, they formed the ultimate, albeit belated, punch line to the 1990s: liberation as political correctness as farce. Not bad for two girls in Catholic-school uniforms, especially considering there are no Catholic girl schools in Russia. The highbrow reaction was a mix of bemusement and horror, with Gary Shteyngart doing the requisite hand-wringing in The New Yorker. His conclusion: The girls were in need of deprogramming, and the duo's manager, Mr. Shapovalov, was a man capable of mesmerizing Mesmer.

One small detail spoiled the otherwise immaculate picture of corrupted youth, hair-raising exploitation, and proto-capitalist greed run amok: " All the Things She Said" was a terrific song. Tightly constructed by craftsmen unknown and given a steely sheen by the celebrated producer Trevor Horn, the killer single ostensibly about same-sex lust was, in fact, a valentine to all of us who like a bit of a challenge with our pleasure. In an era when one good hook is enough to hang an album's worth of filler on, "All the Things She Said" contained at least five distinct parts, each catchier than the other. What's more, it drew freely from disparate sources, both above- and underground: goth rock, industrial, sleek '90s techno. In short, it was a ubiquitous hit that also doubled as a hip discovery—a phenomenon that hasn't recurred until Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone."

So there.

Also in Slate, in 2003 Rob Walker lambasted t.A.T.u. in his "The underage sex project with a hit record". Of course t.A.T.u.'s lesbianism was nothing more than an attempt at a succès de scandale that succeeded beyond anyone's dreams. There's no better example of lesbianism marketed for heterosexual men than the "All the Things She Said" videos, with its scenes of two attractive teenage girls making out in their schoolgirls uniforms as the rains falls, falls and drenches them both and their outfits as people watch.

The sensationalism doesn't change the fact that this is a rather important development in the context of Russian society. The history of gay rights in Russia seems to be very much one of ups and downs. Liberalization after the Bolshevik revolution was soon followed by repression and recrminalization in the 1930s, with another thaw starting in the late 1980s in the glasnost' that produced, in 1993, the repeal of anti-sodomy laws. Post-Soviet attempts to organize the gay community on the Western model failed in the 1990s for any number of reasons, however, and the Russia's GLBT population seems to be fragmented and depoliticized in a manner not entirely different from that of pre-Stonewall North America. It strikes me as rather important that people in Russia are willing to buy two and a half million copies of the debut album of a lesbian-themed pop muic group. What will happen in Russia when the t.A.T.u generation reaches adulthood?

This brings us to a wider theme, touched upon in 2003 article in The New Yorker. Shteyngart did, as Idov said, lambaste the group's manager for his cynical manipulations of two teenage girls. He also made the point that the existence of a pop music group like t.A.T.u. is a signal that Russia is a normal society. Thirty years ago, deep in the stagnation of the Brezhnev era, would t.A.T.u and its associated sensationalistic media industries have ever been thought possible?

[BRIEF NOTE] After Nepal ...

Nepali politics, increasingly unstable after the 2001 massacre of the main branch of the Nepali royal family by the crown prince himself dead by his own hand, after the abolition of the monarchy have gotten still more interesting with the sweeping electoral successes of Nepal's Maoists at the polls, as per Dhruba Adhikari ("A Maoist in Nepal's palace") at Asia Times

The political party comprising former members of the Maoist insurgency (1996-2006) succeeded in garnering support sufficient to leave its democratic rivals far behind. The scoreboard on April 10 placed the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoists) on top with 119 of 240 seats in the first-past-post segment of the poll. The nearest rival, the Nepali Congress, was trailing with 34 seats while the moderate communist party, Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML), stood third with 31 seats.

Pre-poll estimates had put the Nepali Congress ahead of others, expected to be followed by the UML. The Maoists were expected to be reduced to an unenviable 50 seats. But all such predictions failed, to the pleasant surprise of Maoist leaders. On the contrary, their party looked set to win a majority of the 335 seats filled through proportional representation of the electoral system. The remaining 26 seats in the 601-strong Constituent Assembly are to be occupied by government nominees.

"We have achieved more than what we expected," Baburam Bhattarai, a senior Maoist leader, said in a newspaper interview published on Monday. Since his party was emerging as the leader among the three main contestants, it would be logical, he said, for them to head the next coalition government whose job is to assist the assembly to draw up a constitution that replaces the one promulgated in aftermath of first pro-democracy movement of 1990.

Coming so soon after the abolition of the Nepali monarchy, many Nepalis seem to fear that the Maoists might launch a creeping takeover and radicalization of Nepal, slowing expanding their power beyond the limits set out in Nepali law. Consequences for the people of Nepal aside, M K Bhadrakumar 's article "Nepal triggers Himalayan avalanche" suggests that a radical Nepal could seriously destabilize neighbouring areas of South Asia.

The poorest country in South Asia has suddenly catapulted itself to the vanguard of democratic reform and political transformation in the region. India, which basks in the glory of its democratic way of life, at once looks a little bit archaic and tired in comparison. After 60 years of uninterrupted democratic pluralism, vast sections of Indian society are yet to realize the potentials of political empowerment. The Nepalese people have come from behind and overtaken the Indians in expanding the frontiers of "bourgeois" politics.

Politics in India still meander through alleys of caste and parochialism and eddies of religious obscurantism and Hindu nationalism. The upper-caste Hindu elites in Nepal used to share social kinships with the Indian political elites. The Maoists have upturned Nepal's entrenched caste politics. The Indian electorate is yet to explore in full measure ideology-based secular political empowerment, which is the bedrock of democratic self-rule. Unsurprisingly, India's main opposition party, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which thrives on Hindu fundamentalism, has been stunned into silence. It feels let down that a country that it dearly cherished as the world's only "Hindu kingdom" has taken to secular democracy with such panache.

The Maoist government will proceed to dismantle the pillars of Nepal's feudal structure and will take recourse to radical economic and political reforms based on distributive justice and egalitarian principles. That is bound to catch the attention of impoverished Indians in the sub-Himalayan belt sooner or later. The Indian states (provinces) bordering Nepal are notorious for their misgovernance.

There is also Bhutan. An isolated Buddhist monarchy that has received quite a lot of redeserved praise for the monarchy's stage-managed introduction of democracy, Bhutan has a large Nepali population produced by the long history of Nepali migration. Nepalis might even constitute the majority population of Bhutan, although the regime's manipulation of census results makes it difficult to know what exactly is going on there. Growing state-directed nationalism aimed against Nepali traditions produced a wave of political protest among Nepalis towards the end of the 1980s, this wave ending in the expulsion and denationalization of upwards of one hundred thousand ethnic Nepalis. To these day, different governments are still trying to arrange for these refugees' resettlement.

What will happen when Bhutan's ethnic Nepalis, repressed by their government because of their ethnic and religious traditions, start to get ideas from their radical ethnic metropole? Nepal's monarchy has fallen; depending on the monarchy's skill sets, Bhutan's might not be too far behind.