Outis

Is my hero.

I fully admit this journal is now even less useful to the welcome reader than yesterday’s weather report. That said, and with the events of the last two days on my mind, I would like to note that much of what has been posted in these “pages” has to do with the following two problems:

1) What do you do when the person who is addressing you is lying but you can’t believe they are lying

2) What are political consequences of interpellation – that is, of how we address someone and, especially, someone who is a foreigner.

In the first case, I fully admit to having resisted for a long time the idea that many Americans in positions of power lie. How can we be civic and yet permit the notion that our interlocutors are lying?

The second scenario is less difficult to parse. To that, I can only say thanks to my college professor Georges Dreyfus who taught a seminar on orientalism which had less to do with any particular “failure to communicate” but, rather, failures to communicate, in general, and the political implications of same.

I wish the syllabus for that class was available online – it’s not. Better yet, I wish it was a movie – or a running gag on the Daily Show.

our cameras know when to shoot us at our best and worst.

camera swing on Vimeo

FP Passport has a short, neat summary on the next Secretary General of the United Nations – likely a South Korean but perhaps should have been an Indian. The U.S. is rumored to have made the wrong call.

Oh, and, the other day, when I flew back from Miami, we stopped at Beverly Soon (for the first time) to try their take on soon doo-boo jji-gae. Perfectly fine. But, the real treat that day – which almost brought a tear of joy to my eye – was the sight of the employees – half of them Korean, the other Mexican, all Americans – sitting down for their late lunch.

Guess who was eating bulgogi tacos? The Koreans.

Welcome to the future.

Earlier this week I wrote down a little thought experiment: how is George W. Bush like Fidel Castro?

It was a long list, with links.

But I’m not going to post it here. Because, what I’d like to know, is how many other Cubans in exile have made the same list.