Waka Waka– Shakira’s and Zangaléwa’s

I’ve listened to Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” at least 30-40 times in the past week.

Celie and Iris play it over and over and my response to it has passed through various phases.

My reaction:

• Listens 1-5:  This song is sort of dreck.
• 6-10: But very catchy.
• 11-15: Now I’m really getting sick of it.
• 16-20: Oh god, please no, not this again.
• 21-25: [eyeing sharp instruments to gouge out my ears]
• 26-30  Weirdly coming out the other side and starting to kind of enjoy it again.
• 31-40  The song feels natural, inevitable, beyond judgment, part of the environment

They are doing some kind of school dance to the song tomorrow morning, so this may end soon.

The backstory to the song is kind of fascinating.  It’s basically a cover/rip-off of this absolutely great, beautiful Cameroonian song:

Wikipedia explains that

Tsamina or Zangaléwa is a 1986 hit song, originally sung by a makossa group from Cameroon called Golden Sounds who were beloved throughout the continent for the dances and costumes. The song was such a hit for Golden Sounds that they eventually changed their name to Zangaléwa, too. The song pays tribute to African skirmishers (a.k.a tirailleurs) during WW II. Most of the band members were in the Cameroonian Army themselves^[1] and used make up, fake bellies, and fake butts for comic relief.  The song was used extensively in the frontlines by the Nigerian Army during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). It was also popular in some Nigeria schools as a marching song in the 1970′s and 1980′s. The Nigerian Army Band, The Mercuries, based in Kaduna also did cover this song in the 1970′s on live Television appearances.  The song is still used today almost everywhere in Africa by soldiers, policemen, boy scouts, sportsmen, and their supporters, usually during training or for rallying^[1]. It is also widely used in schools throughout the continent especially in Cameroon as a marching song and almost everyone in the country knows the chorus of the song by heart.

What gets fascinating is that the song is apparently — or is sometimes turned into — an anti-militaristic anthem:

The men in the group often dressed in military uniforms, wearing pith helmets and stuffing their clothes with pillows to appear like they had swollen butts from riding the train and fat stomachs from eating too much. The song, music historians say, is a criticism of black military officers who were in league with whites to oppress their own people. The rest is Cameroonian slang and jargon from the soldiers during the war.

According to Jean Paul Zé Bella, the lead singer of Golden Sounds, the chorus came from Cameroonian “sharpshooters who had created a slang for better communication between them during the Second World War”. They copied this fast pace in the first arrangements of the song. They sang the song together for freedom in Africa.

So… it kind of makes sense, a little bit, as an African World Cup anthem — with the literal opening lines, “you’re a soldier, choosing your battles,” turned into a metaphor for football.   To re-deploy it in this way, though, sung by a blonde from Columbia, scrubs it all of its cultural specificity, history, and pointed political significance.

The comments thread on Youtube is interesting; I’ll cite a few:

beautiful. so much better then shakira’s version. shakira is someone i can’t really relate to africa.. but this.. this is perfect.

This song isn’t about ‘singing good’. It’s a chant, a protest song, a empowering tune, a cheer for your cause. You want to hear this from ‘the people’, and not from a individual artist. Shakira’s song is nice, but in a stadium, you just want to scream it.

shakira didn’t do anything wrong – it’s actually even admirable. It’s just that we hate her ignorant fans – but lets get it straight – it’s not her fault who listens to her.

I dislike how Shakira lied, and said that she made up this song. However, I do think that she’s gotten the ORIGINAL song a lot of good recognition. People who actually give a crap about Africa and their culture will definitely pass by here.

Celie and Iris have stayed out of the controversy.  They just listen to Shakira’s version 24/7 and work on their dance.

Now, if only I can convince the girls to dress up for the performance “in military uniforms, wearing pith helmets and stuffing their clothes with pillows to appear like they had swollen butts from riding the train and fat stomachs from eating too much.”   If I do, I’ll be sure to get a photo…

M.I.A. and Ginger Insurgency

Intense new video (almost a mini-movie) for the new M.I.A. song “Born Free.”  (Caveat: nudity and a lot of violence.)

Spoiler alert: it’s sort of derivative of “District 9″ with grittier/ more violent depictions of brutal (and multiracial) U.S. troops terrorizing, beating, arresting, & assassinating innocent civilians… who turn out to have been singled out because they have red hair.  So, it’s a clever and somewhat absurdist re-imagining of racism as directed at red-heads, and an indigenous insurgency (a la the Tamil Tigers) led by outlaw gingers… until you realize/remember/learn that prejudice against “Gingers” is a apparently a real phenomenon in the U.K.

E.g. this blog Gingerism, “documenting the existence of gingerism in mainstream society;”

This British comedian Catherine Tate’s show’s episode about a victim of prejudice and abuse being offered refuge at a shelter for Gingers:

“I am what I am!… The people in the village spit at me, the children throw dog matter in the letter box, and you’re telling me to accept myself!  It’s just not fair!”

“I know, Sandra; but at the end of the day there will always be those who can’t bring themselves to accept people who are…”

“You can’t say it.”

“… Ginger.”

OK, I guess this is a much more widespread meme than I realized:

In modern-day UK, the words “ginger” or “ginga” are sometimes derogatorily used to describe red-headed people (“ginger” is not often considered insulting; the abbreviation “ginge” is much more commonly used derogatorily), with terms such as “gingerphobia” (fear of redheads) or “gingerism” (prejudice against redheads) used by the media. Some have speculated that the dislike of red-hair may derive from the historical English sentiment that people of Irish or Celtic background, with a greater prevalence of red hair, were ethnically inferior. Redheads are also sometimes referred to disparagingly as “carrot tops” and “carrot heads”. “Gingerism” has been compared to racism, although this is widely disputed, and bodies such as the UK Commission for Racial Equality do not monitor cases of discrimination and hate crimes against redheads. A UK woman recently won an award from a tribunal after being sexually harassed and receiving abuse because of her red hair; a family in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, was forced to move twice after being targeted for abuse and hate crime on account of their red hair; and in 2003, a 20 year old was stabbed in the back for “being ginger”. In May 2009, a British schoolboy committed suicide after being bullied for having red hair. The British singer Mick Hucknall, who believes that he has repeatedly faced prejudice or been described as ugly on account of his hair colour, argues that Gingerism should be described as a form of racism. This prejudice has been satirised on a number of TV shows. The British comedian Catherine Tate (herself a redhead) appeared as a red haired character in a running sketch of her series The Catherine Tate Show. The sketch saw fictional character Sandra Kemp, who was forced to seek solace in a refuge for ginger people because they had been ostracised from society. The British comedy Bo’ Selecta! (starring redhead Leigh Francis) featured a spoof documentary which involved a caricature of Mick Hucknall presenting a show in which celebrities (played by themselves) dyed their hair red for a day and went about daily life being insulted by people. The pejorative use of the word “ginger” and related discrimination was used to illustrate a point about racism and prejudice in the “Ginger Kids”, “Le Petit Tourette” and “Fatbeard” episodes of South Park.

As a member of a family full of red-heads, I deplore this senseless bias!

“We spent as much money as we could”

Weird/ surprising Victorian lit reference of the day: a line from Great Expectations as epitaph for the American reconstruction effort in Iraq:

At the end of his narrative, Mr. Bowen chooses a line from “Great Expectations” by Dickens as the epitaph of the American-led attempt to rebuild Iraq: “We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us.”

This is really mind-bending: Pip and Herbert Pocket, living beyond their means at Bernard’s Inn, miserable but pretending they’re having a great time, as an analogy for the American occupation of Iraq.  Pip as a figure for the U.S. in its indebted, improvident ways.  So does this make “the Avenger” (Pip’s personal servant, whom he despises) the Iraqi resistence?  Or, I suppose a better analogy would be to the Iraqi forces working with the Americans.

What the Frack?: Battlestar Galactica

We’ve been making our way through the first season of Battlestar Galactica.  I’d heard good things about it, but I’m not the biggest filmed sci-fi fan and it felt like a big commitment.  What finally inspired me was running into an old acquaintance who has pretty hip/smart taste who declared that he believes it may be the best t.v. show ever.

Not sure I’d go that far, but it’s definitely excellent.  It’s overwhelmingly a post-9/11 narrative: a comfortable, complacent way of life suddenly shattered; nothing will be the same; life in wartime; our way of life threatened by “others” who may be infiltrating our world; a return to wartime/military ways of thinking and feeling that had felt decades out of date, with the rise to prominence/call out of retirement of old military heroes; the enemy is like us but different/evil; strains of religious fundamentalism and old prophecies.

And of course, interrogation scenes.  There’s a painful one of the interrogation of a Cylon in which the interrogator gives a free rein to the most violent methods on the grounds that, of course, “he’s not actually human.”  The Cylons are, basically, robots who have “evolved” and surpassed human beings; one of their talents is the ability to mimic perfectly human form.  So they are not-human but human; the most interesting twist is that there are Cylons who have been placed as embedded spies in the human world and do not yet know that they are not human.

So, one of the clever aspects of this remake is the way this hoary sci-fi kind of plot is in effect re-purposed as a post-9/11 allegory.  It could be read as quite “conservative” in its literalization of the instinct that “the enemy is not really human” — certainly the interrogation scenes are disquieting in this way — although I tend to interpret it as self-aware in smart ways.

We got Grandma Suzy into the show on her visit last month.

I’ve been amused by the show’s neologism “frack.”  This is a substitute for the obvious curse word, as in “what the frack.”  What’s funny about it is that it comes across as a bleeping-out of “fuck” for network t.v., sort of like when Sex and the City or the Sopranos ran on non-premium t.v. they absurdly dubbed out the curses: “I’m gonna kill that [twerp]“, etc.  But I suppose the idea is supposed to be that in this futuristic society, “frack” is the form into which the original term has evolved.  (Since contemporary human society is the ancient, mythical past of the Galactica humans.)

But — doesn’t that mean that “frack” is to “fuck” as Cylon is to human?????

End of the Southern Strategy?

Two NY Times articles today suggest that the Southern Strategy — the Republican party’s coded appeals to racist working-class whites to peel them away from the Democrats — may now be dead.

Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally. By leaving the mainstream so decisively, the Deep South and Appalachia will no longer be able to dictate that winning Democrats have Southern accents or adhere to conservative policies on issues like welfare and tax policy, experts say.

That could spell the end of the so-called Southern strategy, the doctrine that took shape under President Richard M. Nixon in which national elections were won by co-opting Southern whites on racial issues. And the Southernization of American politics — which reached its apogee in the 1990s when many Congressional leaders and President Bill Clinton were from the South — appears to have ended.

“I think that’s absolutely over,” said Thomas Schaller, a political scientist who argued prophetically that the Democrats could win national elections without the South.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have “become a Southernized party,” said Mr. Schaller, who teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “They have completely marginalized themselves to a mostly regional party,” he said, pointing out that nearly half of the current Republican House delegation is now Southern.

Wow.  Could this really be true?  It’s been an infuriating constant in my adult consciousness of national politics that the prejudices and whims of racist Southerners have always exerted a disproportionately determining influence on elections.  And this electoral dynamic has surely allowed this racism to flourish, since it in effect normalized it and rewarded those who practiced it.

It didn’t occur to me until someone else pointed it out that McCain’s obsession with Obama’s “socialism” was linked to this tradition, since “redistribution” of wealth has often been code for “giving money to black people.”  I had been bemused at why on earth working-class folks would be upset by Obama proposing to raise the taxes of people earning more than a quarter million a year.

What a great thought, that racists in Mississippi who believe that an Obama victory may mean that that there will “be outbreaks from blacks” will be marginalized and mostly ignored in national elections.  It’s very satisfying to look at the “racism map” that shows the relatively small Southern region that supported McCain more strongly than it did Bush in 2004.  (Satisfying to see how self-enclosed and cut off that region is from the mainstream, not Sarah Palin’s “real America” in the least.  And of course, satisfying and a relief to see that Indiana is definitively not part of that region.)

Here’s a related Op-Ed piece.

Ice Cream Social

Everyone’s feeling kind of happy and giddy.  Last night we went to an “ice cream social” at Obama headquarters downtown for volunteers.  It was nice.  The building they’ve been in used to house Tortilla Flats, but then (Steve tells me) they sold their liquor license and later lost all their business and gave up.  So the Obama folks took over the building, and now it is going to be destroyed next week.  They had paint and markers and were drawing and writing on the walls.  Celie and Iris really liked that — made a bunch of heart people and flowers, and wrote their names.

We ran into someone we know, a retired prof, who has been volunteering for the campaign since the summer of 2007!  It was cool to reflect that Indiana went blue because of all the people like him.  We found out that a number of other people we knew were also canvassing in Bedford on Tuesday.  Maybe it made a difference.

Let’s see, what else to say.  Iris and Celie were most interested in Obama’s line about Malia and Sasha having “earned that puppy.”  Possibly they are trying to figure out how they too can earn a puppy.  (Focus on earning the two kittens you already have, is my advice.)  I missed this, but apparently Sarah was watching Obama’s acceptance speech on tape with the girls and Iris cried: “because he’s just so good,” she said, overcome by all the emotion.

In a way, thinking about Malia and Sasha in the White House is one of the most surreal things.  So amazing that they will be the first children of the country.  I hope they can manage to enjoy it.

“Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus”

Wow.  Just soaking it all in now.  What a great day.  And an especially nice fillip of frosting on the cake that Indiana went blue!

I’ve seen saying/thinking that some crazy stuff is going to be coming to light about the McCain campaign and Palin in particular.  Here are some choice bits from Newsweek:

NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin’s shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain’s top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family—clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent “tens of thousands” more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast,” and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

Sounds like “class warfare” in the Republican camp.

Canvassing for the last time [ed. correction: in 2008!]

We did one more day of canvassing, this time in Bedford IN.  It was another gorgeous day (we saw a reading of 80 degrees on the way out in the afternoon!?) and Bedford, or the neighborhoods we were in anyway, is a pretty pleasant town.  Very few people were home, so it was mostly just sticking those doorknob flyers on the front doors saying “Vote today!” with information on the polling location.  Many of our first houses already had flyers, so we called back to the base to be sure there hadn’t been an error.  They told us to look more closely and we’d see that we had new flyers: they were exactly the same except ours said “Vote Today!” and the ones that were already there said “Vote Nov 4!”  So, there was obviously a lot of duplication of the effort.

There was one very disturbing incident.  Three dudes were coming out of a house and starting to get into a pickup truck.  One said, “you guys votin’?” in a way that seemed probably mocking.

Me: “yeah, we’re canvassing.”

Dude: “for who?”  Me: “Obama.”  Dude: “Good deal…”

Me: “have you voted yet?”

Dude: “I can’t vote, I’m a convicted felon.”

Then as they got in the truck one of them said the N-word very loudly.  We sort of half froze and muttered to each other, did he say that?

Kind of creepy on a deserted street, especially in the context of the convicted felon comment.

Otherwise, though, Bedford was lovely, no complaints…!

Can’t believe this is almost over!!

p.s.  From what I understand, convicted felons can in fact vote in Indiana, so he was just making excuses.

Canvassing in Southern Indiana: college towns are for wimps

My mantra this weekend was “college towns are for wimps.”  Steve and I were going canvassing in Bedford, about 20 minutes south of Bloomington.  When we got to the home base 15 minutes late, though, all the downtown Bedford packets were gone, so it was either semi-rural Bedford, with a lot of driving in between stops (and possibly scary dogs on the loose, that went through my mind, anyway), or the downtown of another town a bit further south, so we chose the latter.

This place felt very economically depressed.  It was Sunday, so that may have been part of it, but it also felt semi-abandoned, with a lot of empty houses.  We were amazed to discover, when we started to get hungry for lunch, that there seemed to be no restaurants of any sort in town — when we asked someone where to go, he mentioned a McDonald’s and Arby’s on the highway and a Subway several miles back towards Bloomington.  (We ended up getting Fishwiches at McD’s at 1:45 or so — they tasted really good by then.)

Steve and I canvass according to whiffleball rules: you keep batting until you make contact, i.e. speak to a human being.  There were a LOT of not-homes or, in some cases, a quickly raised blind and then not a peep.  So you could sometimes ring the bell for 6 houses in a row before you finally got your contact with an actual voter.  We decided that part of the reason the information in our packets often seemed to be way out of date was likely that no one may have canvassed for a Presidential candidate here for decades.

Best line of the day was at one of the first houses.  A lady in her 80s was chatting by her front door with a younger man.  When we asked for the name on our list, she cheerfully informed us, “oh, she’s probably in jail — she’s a felon.”  She went on to explain, “she married my grandson a long time ago.  The whole family loathed and despised her.  When they got divorced, our hearts rejoiced.  You know why she’s on your list?   Every time she goes to a dentist or something, she puts down THIS address right here.  I’m sure she’s in jail.”

When we’d first approached and asked if she were an Obama supporter, she said “that dirty old man?” which we found really confusing.   She did turn out to be for Obama.

Most disheartening exchange of the day was a guy who said “I am voting, but not in the Presidential race.”  He said “if that’s the best America has to offer, we’re in trouble” and went on to explain, “I’ve heard a lot of things, like that Obama’s a Muslim and that he might put the country under Muslim law.  Now, it may not be true, but….”   I felt I had to say, “you know, that really is not true, he’s not a Muslim, that’s just an invention people are spreading to raise suspicions about him” (even if in saying that I felt as if I was at some level buying into his logic that Muslim= bad; didn’t feel I had the luxury of making a more nuanced point).  He kind of nodded and said something like, “maybe so, but there’s a lot of it out there.”

Difficult to know how to interpret this.  Was he really saying, “yes, it may be lies, but hey, it’s out there?”  Perhaps he meant to be saying something more like, “well, you say it’s lies, but I’m not sure.”  Anyway, it was depressing, though I chose to take an optimistic view that this guy would have been a sure Republican vote in any other year.

There were actually more Obama signs and enthusiastic Obama supporters than I expected.  More Obama than McCain signs for sure.

We’re going to Bedford itself on Tuesday for one final shift.  Really would like to help (in our tiny way) to push Indiana blue.

Charles Meets Obama

What a sweet story.  Only five more days until we can all start to rub our eyes and awake from Rove’s dream (as my uncle Ben put it to me recently).