Scribblings with Green Chalk

There is a point where relativity cracks: some things just aren’t funny. And if you still think they are, you should run a reality check, you might be dangerously disconnected from the world around you. Sense of humor just ends somewhere, it’s not about “different feelings and responses.”

I saw this pencil sharpener ad two days ago and couldn’t quite believe my eyes: sharpening a pencil as rape and that is supposed to be funny?! Please enlighten me what is amusing about a pencil sharpener in the shape of a woman exclaiming (yes, it’s got sound) “Help!” when you stick in a pencil into its… well, it’s the plastic woman’s vagina (sic!). Is that not rape in some alternative universe of misogynist logic?

Right here, right now it’s a representation and an attempt to satirize rape. It promotes misogyny (among men and women) and tries to condone sexual violence.

One of the comments on Feministing.com linked to the producer’s customer service, and I’ll do the same here. Please write to them, tell them what you think about the product.

When I started Scribblings a few months ago I didn’t think I would ever write about this. I honestly believed that I would be able to leave it out and just move beyond the whole issue. Beyond the remembered sights and sounds, and stories — stories that I once felt defined me, which is to say, soiled me. The greatest challenge of writing about this is for me the fear of lapsing into narcissism. I can almost hear accusing voices saying, “what’s so exceptional about you? isn’t it just wallowing in self-pity?” There is nothing exceptional about me. But I think no one should feel that their life is a story of violence: of violence engendering violence, a hidden dark element in them attracting violence. But when I say no one, I also mean to exclude myself from the scope of those stories.

(more…)

It’s usually them, a distant, vaguely defined group of the abject. We know they’re there, but they don’t have faces. They come to embody the reverse of the norms we live by, clinging to the idea of romatic love, clinging to lust, clinging to the images of family, and clinging to disgust. Useful but useless. Always used.

There is still no language to talk about prostitution and not enough courage to talk about them as people with faces and personal stories. There is no way we could rationally talk about their rights, since most societies choose to pretend they do not exist.

This article about murders of prostitutes in Edmonton, Canada is a glimpse into the larger narrative of hypocrisy and violence, spanning centuries. The article links to the murdered women’s pictures and presents them as mothers, sisters, wives; individuals rather than mere bodies for rent.

I know that it’s a bigger question whether any perpetrator sees the victims of their crimes as persons in their own right. Given the fact that in this case the victims were chosen solely among sex-workers, it does seem like a misogynist crime, attacking a “safe” target: women rejected by society in principle, partly invisible, those no one would stand up for. The families of some of them strongly deny that they were prostitutes, probably some of the relatives only found out about this after they died. The story’s caught up in a spiral of shame. Many, perhaps all, of the families feel stigmatized by the publication of the photos. This is not a truth about their lives they would wish to reveal. Whatever the actual details were, however heinous the deed, there is the troubling connection between the womens’ profession and what happened to them. In a sick and insane way, the perpetrator(s) (?) channeled the desires to penalize the abject. The society left them a niche to operate in by denying sex-workers their rights. If you’re invisible, no one will hear your scream.

I remember watching a debate about sex-workers’ rights on French TV. Among the participants, there were several ex-prostitutes. Not hiding their names nor faces, they spoke openly about their situation and demanded legal recognition of their existence. I don’t know what that led to but I was stunned to see real people speaking up about real problems instead of the usual “experts” throwing theories and hypothesies at each other. And finally talking instead of blushing.

What do their relatives and neighbors feel when they look at the pictures of the dead women? What do you feel?

Those who follow my scribblings on a more or less regular basis (thank you for that), probably noticed that I put up a new page. I want to add to the random ramblings a thread about the idea which, I hope, becomes in the end a good thesis.

From now on some of the posts will be concerned with questions about black feminism, the black feminist standpoint, and the different forms of activism (with emphasis on blogging and internet initiatives).

Please feel free to contribute to the discussion, irrespective of your sex, skin color, nationality, if you are interested in and supportive of black feminism. Misanthropic comments are not welcome.

I will not hold your hand while your trying to sneak into other people’s bedrooms. If your life lacks excitement, I suggest focusing on fearing spiders rather than people you know nothing about. It’s as stimulating for the imagination if not more. Or is “arachnophobia” more difficult to spell than “homophobia”? Yes, we all make our choices, in terms of spelling and bedroom games. But would you find it amusing if someone tried to convince you that the love and passion you feel for your partner is perverse? If they kept asking you where’s the difference between what you feel and paedophilia (another Greek word)? Are you outraged as I say this? Rightly so. I’m just repeating what you said. Now try and do it in front of the mirror. Dear homophobe, proudly embracing this label, you are crudely offensive and incredibly pig-headed. Do you really think you’re so attractive that all the gay people out there are after you? Don’t worry, they are not even remotely interested. More than that: I can assure you that once all the toads and snakes start dripping from your mouth, no one wants you anymore. Forgive me for not rubbing your back when you deliver your tearful tale of personal trauma, but did that person really try to kiss you, or was it your desire twisting the facts? You know, if we appeal to pure logic, heterosexuality should have been outlawed ages ago, taken the staggering number of rapes every day. Don’t want logic? Then let’s listen to irrationality — you are scared. I sympathize. But fear is an issue for therapy and there are good drugs. How long will fear be an excuse for persecution? Why should your fear be so important that the world be organized around it? I will not hold your hand. Stop whining.

This is to friends, wherever on the queer continuum they place themselves, and to common sense in all this narcissistic madness. Happy Thanksgiving.

Thinking is dirty. Let’s outlaw it. There is nothing more violently protested against than thinking. It verges on the obscene, it’s everything our traditions despise. Let’s write manuals against thinking; teach your brain to be moderate — know when one ought to defecate, when to say thank you, and halt right there. Let’s make it new modesty: “don’t you dare show off those gray cells, don’t you dare overexercise them!”

Should someone still be tempted to engage in the outrageous activity, we will make them feel sordid and guilty. Let’s give them a lesson on how to behave, let’s unwind their brains and eat them out with teaspoons. Till all we have is the regular ticking of clockwork people.

That’s just me, reading about yet another brilliant strategy to convert women to embrace “modest behavior” (here). If you had the impression it was about sex, do some dirty thinking, because that’s what it is about. Congratulations on the sophisticated strategy, dear guardians of morals; how noble of you to use guilt and shame as arguments against free thought and choice. How dirty it is to think one is allowed to think.

Remember Jane Eyre and the woman locked up in the little red room? The diagnosis was that sex blew her mind. The treatment: keep the poor dear away from decent people and treat her like an idiot child. The story comes from the times when, as Queen Victoria said, women didn’t have legs, so they couldn’t even mention anything that was underneath the layers of petticoats. What are our times?

The sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick believed that the Roman Empire never ended only we were living an illusion in which time feigned movement, but the world really stood still in 70 A.D. Dick had schizophrenia, but his theory doesn’t sound so crazy to me when I read about people such as Parker, Grossman, and Stepp and their brilliant [sic!] plans to “enlighten the weaker sex.”

Please read the discussion at Feministing.org along with the linked articles, comments, and responses to get a fuller picture of these grand initiatives aimed at reducing women to helpless idiots that need to be protected from themselves. And most importantly, from their sexuality which, as the Good Books out there say, is the source of unimaginable evil.

Are we stuck in the nineteenth century for good? The pseudo-theories in biology and evolutionary psychology’s explanations of every social aberration as result of human development could well have been penned by Charlotte Brontë, they bring nothing to our understanding of the world. They do, however, give us insight into the minds of their makers and the politics to which they subscribe. Is it boredom with historical materialism or some almost religious desire for positive essence in human cruelties throughout the ages that makes them come up with these ideas? Or again, is it the work of the specter of a glorious tradition that never really existed but is romanticized and fetishized into a set of rules imposing “order,” that is, oppression…?

What I find especially heinous is when women do it to women — when they assume the role of mother figures only to patronise and tell other women to “behave.” Where’s the breaking point? When will there be enough of spoonfeding shame and when will our brilliant scientists and reformers find that women have brains and are able to see through spurious claims intended to keep them in “their” place?

Naturally, I cannot say that Ms. Magazine has been present in my daily life. I grew up in interesting times and in an interesting place: politically, geographically, and in terms of social changes. I wish we had our own Ms. (though I value Zadra for its mission, I don’t feel I can relate to its stand on many issues and I do not hear my voice among its voices). I believe it would have helped to carve out a better, more affirmative space for women in Polish culture, without all the nasty ‘traditionalist’ attacks and attempts at ‘re-domestication.’ But I digress.

While a universal orientation can deprive a magazine of a distinctive character and boldness (and Ms. has been criticized for that), Ms. has been reaching towards thinking women from various places and walks of life for 35 years now. Here’s how it works. Thanks for the good writing and simply for being there.

Everyone can do it: pick a place on the map, possibly the most distant from your home, and come up with a few crazy ideas about what life there could be like. You can call this game “Inventing the Barbarians.”

What brought me to this conclusion was a post about Kyrgyzstan on one of the wordpress blogs. I sent the link to a friend who is Kyrgyz (the HCA people all know who that is:-)) and then decided to join the discussion myself, having read through all the comments.

I do believe that it was genuine curiosity that inspired the discussion. However, it was nothing more than folk anthropology and, in the end, “Inventing the Barbarians.” Folk anthropology is a temptation we all give in to, when we want to grasp the exotic and lack the information and proper tools to approach it. Yet folk theories should not be treated as anything more than what they are — rules of thumb to be kept within the intimacy of one’s mind. Folk anthropology relies on simplistic distinctions between “us” and “them,” “the civilized” and “the barbarians.” If let out into the world and popularized, it can be very harmful. That is my main reservation toward the kind of writing exemplified by Brownstein’s post. A university professor should be sensitive to how easy it is to get the hate machine going, and the comments he got unfortunately show that his thinking out loud corroborated some of his readers’ own folk theories.

One other interesting issue that the post brought to my attention is how folk anthropology uses sources of information and how it blindly trusts data. The most minuscule scrap of information gains paramount importance, is clung onto and quoted over and over again along with a set of obscure statistics. (All of a sudden, everyone’s forgotten that statistics is the most refined lie.) It becomes an issue of faith, not of interpretation. The New York Times as ultimate authority? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan; I don’t know what my Sunday breakfast would be without NYTimes. But whatever happened to critical reading? NYTimes, like any other newspaper, is tied to the demands of the market. The articles have to cater to the lay public (yet intelligent, yes) that seeks not only information but also entertainment. The writing style has to be pleasing and generalizations need to be formed so as to communicate a point within the limited space of the printed page. NYTimes is not the gospel truth, there are other sources of information out there. Go find them.

Internet and blogging give you the opportunity to talk to the people from the most exotic and distant places. Use it instead of inventing barbarians.

To us all folk anthropologists out there: go out and listen and seek. And think quietly, and think quietly again before you start thinking out loud.

You do know that feeling when you see a homeless person, a sense of shame tinged with indifference. Not that it’s most convenient to look away, or that like Ben Franklin we have absolute control over what happens to us… But how far does ranting and raving go and just how much love for the world and benevolence is there in our personal reservoir?

I remember a friend of mine who, seeing a beggar by the entrance to the Viennese Hauptuni, got into a long tirade over what this country and our demonic capitalism do to people.

I have my fears about waking sleepwalkers, so I let him dream his marxist dream. Maybe I have a heart of stone, but I didn’t see things as he saw them there and then.

It’s becoming my favorite answer that we are all to a greater or lesser extent bound within our perspective. What you are and what you have directs your perception, structures it, and writes between the lines. Embodiment is tough to oppose. You cannot, try as you might, just float out of your body and stand apart with a sense of complete insight and oneness with the world. Yet our pet theories often give us the feeling that through them we are achieving precisely that. This is my pet theory.

And this is how I make sense of that situation from several months ago. My friend, who was an American exchange student, comfortably well off, and a big fan of Marx, saw in the beggar the proof of great social injustice caused by capitalism and the US impact on world economy. While he struggled with outrage and what seemed to me like a bit of self-disgust (for being American), I was somewhere else on the whole issue. An exchange student like him, but with incomparably smaller funds, and, moreover, from a former people’s republic, I did not conceive of the old man’s desperate condition in terms of capitalist oppression. First of all, because capitalism in Austria is not an exact recreation of American models (so “this country” is not “this country” with the intonation and criticism that automatically came to his mind). And, perhaps more importantly, because the old man was not an Austrian ousted to the margins by the state economy’s cruel machine, but an emigrant, most likely from a former communist state. His mumbling didn’t sound even remotely like German. If it were possible to ask him why he came to Vienna, I imagine we’d have heard a story about how he wanted to embrace the cruel capitalist machine. Where it got him objectively and how evil the world actually is remains beyond anyone’s perspective.

If it’s the homeless who really know what homelessness is about, then there are slight chances that the others will be able to go beyond romanticizing homelessness. It’s an ironic footnote to the standpoint theory. Be it linguistic barriers, madness, or aimlessness of storytelling, whatever the reason, it’s not very likely that we’ll get a comprehensive outcast’s view of the world.

There is a beggar on Heidelberg’s Hauptstrasse that everyone recognizes. The guy usually has a peaceful albeit somewhat blank look on his face and he’s always sitting with his dog. He’s got a piece of cardboard covered in unsteady handwriting (I never read it) and he wraps his dog up in a blanket. Like many people, when I pass them I can’t help to want to stroke the dog. Thank God I never tried to.

This is what I heard today from my classmate Ricardo. As he was walking down Hauptstrasse a while ago, he saw an elderly man approach the guy and try to lift the blanket to look at the dog. The homeless guy quickly leapt to his feet and punched the elderly man, who staggered and fell down cracking his skull on the pavement. A crowd gathered around them, people yelled at the beggar. And Ricardo said that the beggar yelled back something like: “He shouldn’t have tried to touch my dog.”

Whoever knows what that meant. I’m not up to theorizing about poverty nor madness, nor up to stroking anyone’s dog after this story.

It was at a birthday party a few weeks ago. We were sipping our drinks and then a friend of the birthday girl who I had met only the day before suddenly said, “I have a list,” and smiled in a telling way.

I was curious how the conversation would develop, so I just listened.

“Oh, yeah, sure, everybody has one,” replied one of my two friends sitting at the same table.

“I mean,” he hesitated in spite of the reassurance, probably because I and the other friend didn’t say anything, “it’s just for the record. So that I know who I’d been with when I’m old. To have some sort of perspective.”

Interesting, I thought. Thinking ahead, in case you have Alzheimer. Or were we heading towards one of those aimless debates about cultural differences? The friend who backed him on the list issue was American like him. Pragmatically-minded America with her list of lovers versus old European forgetfulness of past sins and adventures?

“Just for the record, you say? So it’s not like you look at the list to boost your ego?” My other friend (my compatriot, by the way) asked. I just watched and listened.

“No, absolutely not. I don’t conceive of the women on the list in terms of sexual triumph. I do it just to remember who I had an intimate relationship with. That’s all.”

“But if you had to finish the sentence ‘the more names on the list…’” my friend insisted, “what would you add?”

“The more people I slept with,” he replied simply.

“Yes, but that’s redundant. That’s what we know from the first part of the sentence. But what does it imply for you? Would you say, ‘the more attractive it makes me,’ for instance?”

“No,” he denied.

“Come on. Isn’t it that the list is an assertion of your, um, virility?”

“No, absolutely not. But let’s not get into this. You” — he looked at me — “look appalled by the very idea. You think it’s morally wrong?”

“No, it’s not that…” I said but I didn’t finish the sentence. The birthday party didn’t seem to be the best context for the expression of my thoughts on the list. Even though what I wanted to say had nothing to do with moral judgment (that’s what he feared, I guess), I didn’t feel like examining my reactions there and then.

I took the time that elapsed since that memorable conversation to explore the issue in greater detail. Although none of the Europeans I asked particularly liked the idea of listing their past lovers, I don’t want to push the discussion into the shady realm of cultural differences. Furthermore, I am not connecting it to any idea of morality, religious or not. It’s not my intention to evaluate list-making and certainly not to vilify and ridicule anybody. Quite simply, if you’re a guy with a list, I am letting you know what I’m thinking. These are the thoughts rushing through my head as we sit there and you try to explain why you have a list.*

First of all, I don’t believe you when you say that it doesn’t make you feel better about yourself. I bet your list has numbered positions and every time you write down another name you add in your thoughts “and counting…” and feel contentment.

You probably don’t realize this, but the list is an absolute turn-off. Even if you look like a Greek god, even if there was a flicker of mutual interest between us, the list killed it like a fly swatter smoothly flattening a fly. Right now my imagination’s busy with images of you and your list –

…in a grocery shop, when you realize you took the wrong list and begin to wonder whether ‘Rachel’ could mean that you’re supposed to buy tomatoes and ‘Annie’ that cheese is out. And ‘Jim’ perhaps something as surprising as caviar…

…hopelessly searching for your to-do list and pulling out your I-did-list only to be struck by the lame pun…

…lying next to a lover and figuring out a way to turn the quiet moments ‘after’ into a spelling bee, because you want to be sure you get her name right…

…you, old and for some reason bitter, calling up the women on the list to hiss into the phone “I slept with you in 1999.”

The one good reason I can think of for having a list is if you’re diagnosed with VD and need to tell your partners they should get tested. And yet the list somehow implies that you’re constantly anticipating that, even though it’s not necessarily true.

The list, I feel, is like a leech draining it all of spontaneity. Without the risk of forgetting too easily or remembering too well, the passion’s half its worth. The night is placed within your major plan, I can almost see it inscribed on that sheet. There is this looming vision of the adventure turning into a number on a scrap of paper, too strongly reminiscent of a menu from a pizza place and that second before you order. A catalog of who, what, how, and not the haze of whatever happened.

Which is why I’m giving you that skeptical or, as you might see it, judging look. Your list has just annihilated our potential love affair and made you seem to me funny in your obsession of recording, cataloging, and so terribly missing the point.

*I wish to clarify that this is not addressed to the man I talked to that night. I don’t know him too well and also have no reason to criticize him personally. It’s the idea of the list that does not appeal to me.

(Image found here)

I have wanted it for a long time now. Ever since I saw my former advisor’s fridge, covered in magnets from various places, but mostly from Amherst. I want my very own Emily Dickinson fridge magnet, even though I don’t own the fridge in my apartment. I want Emily to guard my cheese, jam, and peanut butter.

This is a note to Gretchen before she goes home for Thanksgiving, so that she knows she’s dealing with an obsession

(Post illustration from jodi’s weblog)

How do we come to desire objects? Logically, it makes little sense to have so much feelings for things that will never reciprocate them. The love of objects is the epitome of unrequited love.

The love of objects is a just a false impression. Even though we tend to believe the opposite is true, when you give it some thought, it’s more fleeting than human relationships. Having a thing means holding onto it, coming up with strategies to keep it where it is, away from the greed of others, from possible thefts and mysteries of misplacing. There’s a lot of effort put into keeping, since there is no connection between the owner and the inanimate possession. A thing has no reason to stay with you. And so, in their essential infidelity, objects ‘lose themselves’ all the time. Or they escape?… Sometimes with assistance. Everyday and everywhere people are looking for wayward objects.

And yet there is desire. Whatever the logic behind the love for objects or lack of it, desire cannot be denied. With objects, it seems, desire is most immediate. In a split second seeing turns into wanting.

You can blame it on adverts, consumer society, that everything has become a commodity (has it?), but can you not feel it? I used to envy people who said they cared little for material objects. They appeared to be above all this. The question is do I want to be above all this and where will I be if I step out of this? Yes, maybe in the ideal realm of greater freedom, but what will my connection to all this be then? Disdain? I’m not sure if I want to walk down city streets and look at friends’ apartments feeling disdain for the rest of my life. Another thing is whether I believe that the people I mentioned really were above loving material objects. I’m not so sure I do.

Regardless of whether we like it or not, it’s not just other people and broadly defined nature that is our surrounding. We place ourselves in a world of objects, and if we cut out desire, we will lose an element of our sight.

You are free to disagree with me on this. However, as I slowly come to terms with the turbulence of the love for objects, I see that there is more to it than vanity. A desired object comes to mean for me something that other things do not. This meaning attached to it makes me see it differently and thus changes also the way I see everything around it. And yes, I might be simply writing amateur philosophy to justify my base instincts. Additionally, it could be an apology of crowd madness or Freudian compensation.

There’s a green sweater on the bottom of this.

Last week was the Long Night of Shopping in Heidelberg. (Yes, another lame spin-off the fabulous idea of the Long Night of Museums.) It was astounding how it worked on people. There were no special discounts in any of the shops, no big sales. And yet everyone was on the Hauptstrasse in a buying frenzy. I didn’t have any big purchase plans and probably if it weren’t for the presence of a friend who is a fashion designer, I wouldn’t have bought anything. And indeed I didn’t buy the green sweater.

I have to admit, though, it was a coup de foudre situation. I saw it and loved it. It made me think of tree leaves in Ithaca (locus amoenus, see how the meanings attach themselves?), Pythagoras’ green chalk, my eyes (I am narcissistic), and I imagined how great it would be to have it and wear it. But reality stepped in after a second of daydreaming: I’m a poor student, as the proverb goes, I should save money for other things and, besides, what I need more is a winter coat, because the zipper broke in my old one. My irrational side still wanted to try it on, nevertheless.

When we came back to that shop later in the evening, I couldn’t find my size. So I took a few other things and went to the changing room. And there I saw it, my size, on a hanger, left behind. Or so it seemed, before a woman appeared from nowhere and reached for it. I asked her if she intended to buy it. “Oh yes,” she answered with — it might have been my imagination — a note of condescension in her voice. I felt a sudden surge of violence rising in me. This was a minor irony of life. After all, I wouldn’t buy the sweater anyway. But there were all these cruel things I wanted to say to her in that instant in order to assert my right to the sweater (let’s not forget that I was in love with it): that she is fifty and shouldn’t really be buying clothes like this, while my age gives me an obvious advantage (I don’t even believe in such crap), that she’s here with her husband and I am single for which the sweater would somehow compensate, that I need the sweater for a potential job interview (what job interview?)/ potential date (say what?), etc., etc., etc.

I didn’t say anything and she walked off with my loved one. It was probably the briefest love story in my life. I still find that sweater enchanting but am not even going to check if they have my size again.

For a moment there, it was only me, the object of my desire, and the evil woman who took it away from me. The world stopped. It’s the only kind of unrequited love I find palatable.

jeśli się nie mylę, tak zaczynał swoje listy do przyjaciół Zbigniew Herbert. Podoba mi się, więc kradnę. Moje kochane Zwierzątka, chyba nic z tego nie wyjdzie… z mojego pisania tutaj po polsku. Myślałam na początku, że będę przeplatać, ale nigdy się na to nie składa.

Nie mówię “nigdy”, ale nie chcę obiecywać. Myślę, że ci, którzy mnie dobrze znają, rozumieją lub zrozumieją, o co mi chodzi. Moja czteroletnia wojna z polonistką w liceum sprawiła, że uciekłam od pisania po polsku. Studia w obcym języku też mnie do tego nie zbliżyły. Nie oznacza to jednak jakiejś bolesnej alienacji od języka ani kultury, mimo że chwilowo nie mieszkam w kraju. Nadal lubię polski jazz, poezję, Kazika, humor Grzegorza Halamy, filmy Barei i Poznań. Ale jeśli chodzi o pisanie, postanowiłam na razie pójść kawałek drogą Conrada. (Nie, nie zaciągnęłam się na statek i nie planuję napisać alternatywnej wersji Lorda Jima.) Zobaczymy, co z tego wyjdzie.

Proszę, piszcie, niekoniecznie na temat. Prawdę mówiąc, bardzo cieszą mnie komentarze po polsku, szczególnie gdy mają to szczególne, nieprzetłumaczalne poczucie humoru.

Życzę Wam smacznego Św. Marcina, moje Zwierzątka.

I don’t think I have a temperature anymore, but I still feel weak and my nose is still like a leaking tap. Ergo, I still have a cold. However, this is what I did today: I spent an hour waiting in the wind and rain for a package from my mother. Because my mother had the romantic idea to pass the package through someone traveling to Heidelberg. So I almost froze to death waiting for it at the station and when I finally got it, I saw my tram driving off (it’s Sunday, they go every hundred years). I dragged the package home in the rain… and went to sleep without opening it.

Several hours later I opened it and found — apart from the things I asked for — a neatly tied parcel with… what should I call them?… St. Martin’s croissants(?). Rogale marcińskie, which is the Polish name of this delicacy, is probably the most wonderful thing about the region I come from. It’s St. Martin’s today, which means everyone in Poznań and its environs, is eating rogale…

(Image: mniammniam.pl)

It’s also a delicious beginning of the second year of my emigrant life, which — in spite of the scarcity of rogale — has been good for me so far. And rogale have definitely been worth the epic quest. Ask any poznaniak, they’ll tell you.

PS: It’s also Independence Day in Po(e)land. My chance to wave a flag, if I had one.

Tonight I was at the HCA to help out with our americanist contribution to the Long Night of Academia. We had lots and lots of kitsch decorations: red-white-and-blue bells, ribbons, and flags, of course, flags. And hot dogs, muffins, and marshmallows. After three hours of giving out marshmallows as prizes in the US quiz, I got more than bored with them.

It’s funny to think, though, that it takes so little to represent a place or an idea. What we had there tonight was cliché to the extreme. And it worked. On some level, those simplifications simply do their job. Without denying diversity, there is always place for the almost too straightforward in any grand thought and in any country.

On top of my favorites’ list of those straightforward elements of American life are the mailboxes (I just found a website of a firm manufacturing them in Germany, so I’m not the only fan). In Europe, they’re mostly unnoticeable. Not to mention, smaller. In the States, they’re like separate actors in the landscape. It’s endearing how out-of-place they look. If I tried to condense my memories of Ithaca into a single image, it would be that of a baffled deer nuzzling a mailbox.

But quite apart from my favorites’ list, beyond my liking and not liking, is the US flag. It’s everywhere. In Europe, you can see national flags on courthouses, city halls, or on national holidays. More and more often they’re accompanied by the flag of the EU. I personally have a problem with how the American landcape is cluttered with flagpoles. Is it due to some inexpressible yet profound need to connect with the symbol? Perhaps it’s something that I cannot grasp because, coming from Central Europe, I have an inherent fear of nationalism? Let it be a proof of my discomfort that after a few hours I just had to get rid of the picture of a flagpole I took in NYC from the blog header. Too uncanny for my taste.

On the other hand, I like it how the flag is used and abused. People tear up and stain thousands of them every day, since they’re on napkins, paper cups, T-shirts.

There’s a whole lot of them in the HCA trash tonight.

If you wanted to know about the Democrat-Republican debate in Heidelberg, you should have been there in that huge crowd. I didn’t feel like suffocating in there and the Republican was late anyway.

This wasn’t inspired by any madeleine moment. Nor by yesterday’s grammatical misunderstanding. No eurekas of the past, no linguistic crimes. This is just a moment in my ongoing thinking process. Although if I had to name a particular turning point, it would probably be reading Toril Moi’s “‘I Am Not a Feminist, But . . .’: How Feminism Became the F-Word” (PMLA Vol. 121, No. 5 — for the more curious among you). Before that article I imagined that the backlash I noticed in Poland was merely a local phenomenon. Yet another wave of Catholic resurgence, yet another dirty trick orchestrated by the far right. It’s been a little over a year now since I left the country and am trying to trace why I thought so. I blame it all on idealism. Trying to believe in positive change, I tend to overestimate my findings. But there is always another rude awakening.

Or let me put it differently. Though certain ideas may seem old and used up, they still persist. In spite of all the confusing talk about ‘post-feminism’ and equality won and established, the reality fell behind in the chase with newspapers. The world is not as fast as thought. We are not blasé post-modern in everything. This never happened. What did happen was that theory (in humanities, I cannot speak for other fields) turned so theoretical that it wasn’t about anything much but itself. Reading it is similar to reading old science fiction — to those visions of the year 2000 when we no longer need dentists. Remember that? I don’t and neither does my dentist.

But was the theory madness the reason why so many people today consider feminism obsolete? Or am I getting it all wrong and running into a conspiracy view? But I see things that really scare me. The invention of the young conservative woman, for instance. Who pulls her strings and whose voice is it when she opens her mouth to announce that feminism is evil and that renewal will come through ‘traditional values’? It’s a wild interpretation of Pascal’s claim that most of the mess in this world comes from our inability to sit quietly in our rooms. If women sat quietly in their rooms appreciating traditional gender roles, so the argument goes, there would be less mess in the world. So feminism’s obsolete, no?

Perhaps in a parallel world, where all the edges are smoother and everyone’s benevolent, this is merely a question of perspective: there is no problem when so many people don’t see it. Here and now, I conceive of this as a blind spot blotting out the view. The struggle for gender equality began to seem so familiar that it ceased to be treated seriously. Instead, it became common to approach it as a fad. Moreover, as a fad that is long passé. It’s in that smirk followed by “so you’re a feminist,” in all the nonsensical debates about ‘militant feminism.’ (How frustrating and vacuous all this talking is is best explained here and here.)

If I did realize these things before, only needed to recognize their gravity, what is then the change? What’s with the initial disclaimer? Maybe I’ve known too many women who believed that they were stupid and said it aloud, and too many who never dared to speak in class. Or, on the most personal level, I’m annoyed with myself for not being able to cope with my own extroverted nature all these years, with always trying to guess what is ‘appropriate’ and advisable. Not that I follow those rules, but still I know where the bit is even if I refuse to hold it between my teeth. Sitting quietly in your room, M. Pascal, you can become your own worst enemy, even if only out of boredom. This moment in my thinking is when I feel thinking alone is not enough. Browsing on-line, I mostly found organizations asking for donations and that is not the kind of activism I mean (who will pay my rent?). Any ideas on what I could do?