I recently read on BBC News that a Ugandan clergyman, Pastor Martin Ssempa (I actually saw him the other day on TV), decided to show gay pornography to his congregation in an attempt to gain support for a proposed law which would see some gay people facing the death penalty. Apparently, some 300 people gathered at his church to watch it, and the audience included children! He wanted people to "learn" what gays actually do.
Why would someone use these radical measures is simply baffling, to say the least. Equating homosexuality with a pornographic rendering of sexual activity is dishonest and mentally sick. Would he portray heterosexuality the same way?
The situation in Uganda is extreme, but it somehow reflects the general position of those who so vehemently repudiate homosexuality. They tend to concentrate on the sex side of it. It makes me wonder if that is all heterosexuals think about when they fall in love, the sex. Maybe it is. Maybe heterosexuals are so obsessed with sex, they project it on everyone else (no, I don't really think this way, I'm just trying to make a point). Sex is often the corollary of being in love and wanting to get emotionally closer to the subject of your affection through physical contact. Sex is a medium, not a goal in itself. Of course, there's sex without love - and there's nothing wrong with that - but this touches all sexual orientations and is not exclusive to gays and lesbians. It sounds obvious, but not to everybody.
I believe the Ugandan pastor in question should in fact be the one condemned for obscenity and moral corruption. I mean, there were children in that church! What does he expect to achieve with this? I know, to create revulsion at what the nasty, monstrous gays get up to in bed. But how can he possibly justify showing pornography to children? I suppose someone like pastor Ssempa does not use logic very often, nor intellectual honesty. Or maybe he's just crazy and abusive. Likely all of these!
Pastor Ssempa may have been playing with fire too. Maybe some of his audience became titillated by what they saw and will try it later in the secrecy of their homes... if they manage to escape their spying neighbours willing to denounce them to the police (the new law, if passed, will make every single Ugandan, including family members, an anti-gay spy, otherwise they too may end up in jail for collusion. They'll have to build a lot of new jails...).
As US President Obama put it, the projected law is "odious", and what is really upsetting is that some US-based evangelical groups are backing it, and supporting people like pastor Ssempa to promote this agenda of hate. Is that what these groups want for the rest of the world, including in the US? Imprisonment and even the death penalty? These people are crazy, but dangerous because so well organised and funded. Watch out! Human rights is really an ongoing battle.
I hope, almost pray, for this law to be defeated, but I fear that it will be passed - with a few changes to keep international donors "happy" (maybe without the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality", for instance) - but still increasing the punishments for homosexuals in Uganda and basically rendering their lives even more nightmarish than they already are. They really need a merciful god to help them. It's a pity god is always looking the other way when these things happen (I'm an atheist, thus I only believe in human mercy).
Pastor Ssempa's desperate tactics seem to indicate that he is close to a nervous breakdown (or he has already had one). The man needs psychological treatment soon. Hatred of this kind usually indicates a sick mental state.
Saturday, 20 February 2010
Saturday, 6 February 2010
The US and the EU
The BBC said this week that the EU had been snubbed by US President Obama because he didn't show up for the last bilateral summit. Here is what I had to say à propos:
The US has difficulties to understand the EU because it is a concept that indeed is difficult to grasp. Not quite a state, not quite just an institution. It's a bit of a cliché, but the word hybrid is still the best one to describe this project of unity in diversity. Those who want reality to be always described in terms of black and white, will always find it difficult to accept the EU.
People are fast to criticize the EU, but they forget that as an operational concept it has only been in existence for little over 50 years, which is really nothing in the larger historical context, particularly if we take into account what preceded it (xenophonic madness and genocide anyone?).
I'm always amazed that, with our historical baggage, we can actually keep talking and struggling to find common solutions in a peaceful manner among Europeans. Yes, sometimes it results in an awful waste of time and resources, but isn't peace worth the price?
People must reconcile themselves with the fact that the EU is not just work in progress, but also the result of forces pulling in opposite directions: national interests on the one hand and the common European good on the other. Sometimes the result is more unity, sometimes more division, sometimes just diversity. That's who we are.
The EU will never be like the US, or any other country in the world, and that's fine. We don't have to imitate anybody. Our chosen path is innovative, challenging, revolutionary, unique, imperfect. It's good that we keep trying, and those who want out of it, well, they are always welcome to leave and let the rest get on with their vision (it is sometimes a bit tiresome to hear the nagging when no better alternatives are presented, unless of course it's the "free-for-all" pre-EU Europe that they want; or a Europe dominated by a few imperial powers, some of which have clearly not yet gotten used to their more humble place at the table... Well, not for me, thank you!).
The US has difficulties to understand the EU because it is a concept that indeed is difficult to grasp. Not quite a state, not quite just an institution. It's a bit of a cliché, but the word hybrid is still the best one to describe this project of unity in diversity. Those who want reality to be always described in terms of black and white, will always find it difficult to accept the EU.
People are fast to criticize the EU, but they forget that as an operational concept it has only been in existence for little over 50 years, which is really nothing in the larger historical context, particularly if we take into account what preceded it (xenophonic madness and genocide anyone?).
I'm always amazed that, with our historical baggage, we can actually keep talking and struggling to find common solutions in a peaceful manner among Europeans. Yes, sometimes it results in an awful waste of time and resources, but isn't peace worth the price?
People must reconcile themselves with the fact that the EU is not just work in progress, but also the result of forces pulling in opposite directions: national interests on the one hand and the common European good on the other. Sometimes the result is more unity, sometimes more division, sometimes just diversity. That's who we are.
The EU will never be like the US, or any other country in the world, and that's fine. We don't have to imitate anybody. Our chosen path is innovative, challenging, revolutionary, unique, imperfect. It's good that we keep trying, and those who want out of it, well, they are always welcome to leave and let the rest get on with their vision (it is sometimes a bit tiresome to hear the nagging when no better alternatives are presented, unless of course it's the "free-for-all" pre-EU Europe that they want; or a Europe dominated by a few imperial powers, some of which have clearly not yet gotten used to their more humble place at the table... Well, not for me, thank you!).
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
health
We have been all sick at the start of the year. I had a bronchitis, then Georgie developed a pneumonia, now Jarl has tonsillitis. And the weather continues cold and inhospitable. And there's snow or rain. And lots of grey. And I'm just really sick and tired of all these bugs!
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Aya de Yopougon
It's my favourite bande déssinée. Yopougon is a middle-class neighbourhood of Abidjan, the capital of Côte d'Ivoire. Marguerite Abouet (author) and Clément Oubrerie (cartoonist), have created a universe full of humanity and joie de vivre.
Aya is the central character. She's serious, engaged, intelligent, gracious. A bit like the cricket in Disney's Pinocchio, she's everybody's conscience in Yopougon. "Give a little whistle, give a little whistle..."
It's hard to remain insensible to the characters, their problems, their dreams, their hopes and their achievements. Yopougon seems miles away from my corner in Brussels, but yet I feel it so close, dêh! It's a wonderful way to learn more about Africa and to realise, if need be, that wherever there's people, our love, our hatred, our happiness, our sadness, our blood, are really the same. Cliché? Well, it doesn't make it less true, does it?
I found the BD by chance. I was coming home some time ago and passed by the BD shop in rue vanderkindere. I had never been inside it in all these years of living here. I looked at the cover of tome number 1 and was transfixed. This looked good, my goodness! A real story, with credible characters, in Africa. Not about wars and famine, but about the daily lives of people I could identify with. The drawing was good too. Full of nerve, and colour, and humour. So I bought the whole 4 volumes and came home. I devoured them.
Today, I bought the fifth one in a BD shop in Boulevard Anspach, that happens to be open on Sundays, and the anticipation in the tram coming home was just so nice to feel. To sit on the sofa and open one more tome of Aya de Yopougon and travel far, and feel so close to home.
Aya is the central character. She's serious, engaged, intelligent, gracious. A bit like the cricket in Disney's Pinocchio, she's everybody's conscience in Yopougon. "Give a little whistle, give a little whistle..."
It's hard to remain insensible to the characters, their problems, their dreams, their hopes and their achievements. Yopougon seems miles away from my corner in Brussels, but yet I feel it so close, dêh! It's a wonderful way to learn more about Africa and to realise, if need be, that wherever there's people, our love, our hatred, our happiness, our sadness, our blood, are really the same. Cliché? Well, it doesn't make it less true, does it?
I found the BD by chance. I was coming home some time ago and passed by the BD shop in rue vanderkindere. I had never been inside it in all these years of living here. I looked at the cover of tome number 1 and was transfixed. This looked good, my goodness! A real story, with credible characters, in Africa. Not about wars and famine, but about the daily lives of people I could identify with. The drawing was good too. Full of nerve, and colour, and humour. So I bought the whole 4 volumes and came home. I devoured them.
Today, I bought the fifth one in a BD shop in Boulevard Anspach, that happens to be open on Sundays, and the anticipation in the tram coming home was just so nice to feel. To sit on the sofa and open one more tome of Aya de Yopougon and travel far, and feel so close to home.
Saturday, 30 January 2010
Friday, 29 January 2010
Division Street America
The title is from a book by Studs Terkel (1912-2008), a best-selling American author and journalist who lived in Chicago. It's a book of interviews published in 1967, in the midst of one of the hottest periods of XX century cultural transformation in the US; the civil-rights movement is one good example of that transformation, to mention just one major thing.
It's a book about Chicago, and it's part of my evolving love affair with this town. It's a great selection of testimonies, by people from all walks of life, and a fascinating way to get inside America, and inside a city that shaped so much of what we know about the US as a whole; free-market capitalism, sky-scrappers, post-Bauhaus functionalist architecture (by the German-born Mies van der Rohe), the industrialisation of meat production and its consequences on civilisation as we know it, racial zoning laws and Black ghettos, labour and anarchist movements, the birth of urban sociology, the invention of futures and derivatives in agriculture, gangsters (remember Al Capone?), the melting pot, the Blues, anti-Vietnam war protests, a new concept of community work with Jane Addams and Hull House. NYC, move over!
Part XXI, called The Inheritors, a series of interviews with young people, opens with the following lines by Lucky Miller, aged 19, "I love life. I only wish some of it would come my way". Ah, Lucky you, to make poetry so easily!
It's a book about Chicago, and it's part of my evolving love affair with this town. It's a great selection of testimonies, by people from all walks of life, and a fascinating way to get inside America, and inside a city that shaped so much of what we know about the US as a whole; free-market capitalism, sky-scrappers, post-Bauhaus functionalist architecture (by the German-born Mies van der Rohe), the industrialisation of meat production and its consequences on civilisation as we know it, racial zoning laws and Black ghettos, labour and anarchist movements, the birth of urban sociology, the invention of futures and derivatives in agriculture, gangsters (remember Al Capone?), the melting pot, the Blues, anti-Vietnam war protests, a new concept of community work with Jane Addams and Hull House. NYC, move over!
Part XXI, called The Inheritors, a series of interviews with young people, opens with the following lines by Lucky Miller, aged 19, "I love life. I only wish some of it would come my way". Ah, Lucky you, to make poetry so easily!
Monday, 25 January 2010
butterflies in a powerpoint
And what if butterflies came flying into your powerpoint? Then what? Would you leave the office with the softness of flowers in your eyes? Would you cross the street and see a river? Would you caress the walls? Would you sleep inside a tree? Would you?
Just imagine, you are doing a powerpoint presentation. The world is grey. And suddenly butterflies burst into your powerpoint presentation. Then what? Would you carry on oblivious? Would you flutter your eyelids? Would you sing a love song to your boss? Would you kiss the geranium in its pot? Would you make a bed of twigs? Would you become like light? Would you fly? Would you hold my hand? Would you?
Imagine a butterfly, then two, then three, then four, then five, then six, then seven, then many, invading the screen, one after the other, running, flying. Then what? Would you scream? Would you go outside and lay on the grass? Would you eat a sandwich? Would it be Times Square in New York? Would you become a neon light? Would you sigh? Then what? Then what? I know, I know. What good is there in telling? No good, no good at all. Just butterflies, butterflies, butterflies inside your eyes, into your life, in your powerpoint presentation. Everybody mesmerized. And alive. Alive. Alive. Like in a dream.
Today, I watched with Jarl a short film called Futures & Derivatives by Arthur Halpern of the USA. It lasted 18 minutes. And I agree with Caetano Veloso when he sings that Americans bring lots of happiness to this world. Just 18 minutes. Oh, wow!
Just imagine, you are doing a powerpoint presentation. The world is grey. And suddenly butterflies burst into your powerpoint presentation. Then what? Would you carry on oblivious? Would you flutter your eyelids? Would you sing a love song to your boss? Would you kiss the geranium in its pot? Would you make a bed of twigs? Would you become like light? Would you fly? Would you hold my hand? Would you?
Imagine a butterfly, then two, then three, then four, then five, then six, then seven, then many, invading the screen, one after the other, running, flying. Then what? Would you scream? Would you go outside and lay on the grass? Would you eat a sandwich? Would it be Times Square in New York? Would you become a neon light? Would you sigh? Then what? Then what? I know, I know. What good is there in telling? No good, no good at all. Just butterflies, butterflies, butterflies inside your eyes, into your life, in your powerpoint presentation. Everybody mesmerized. And alive. Alive. Alive. Like in a dream.
Today, I watched with Jarl a short film called Futures & Derivatives by Arthur Halpern of the USA. It lasted 18 minutes. And I agree with Caetano Veloso when he sings that Americans bring lots of happiness to this world. Just 18 minutes. Oh, wow!
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