Frogs for Snakes

From NPR — libraries might just be the next big pop-culture wave. After we’re done with cupcakes, of course.

Early on, many people predicted that the Internet would revolutionize communication, empowering to the people and thereby threatening  totalitarian regimes with the power of democracy.

It turns out that may not be the case. On NextGov.com, Aliya Sternstein cites research by Foreign Policy blogger Evgeny Morozov, who reports that he has grown skeptical of the Internets ability to foster democracy, noting that totalitarian regimes have used social networking sites to increase censorship: “The Web has given dictators the ability to mine contents of social networking sites to identify dissidents and to pay bloggers for spreading propaganda.”

This morning I bumped into this article [will open a new tab/window] in the Washington Post reporting on political consultant Drew Westen’s attempts to help Democrats use language morely likely to appeal to voters’ emotions, and so more likely to persuade them to vote accordingly. Also this book review, from New Scientist, of Flipnosis: The art of split-second persuasion, revealingly titled “How to get others to do what we want”.

Yesterday I read “Crisis of Legitimacy” on Talking Points Memo, which ascribes citizen anger at the federal government to a sense, clearly exemplified by the Tea-Partiers but widespread, that we are wallets-and-votes only, existing only to enable the will of the pow that be, without a voice of our own–at least not one being listened to.

For several years I’ve been tracking and trying to articulate my feeling, arounsed as much in local politics as in national, that the common interest of the citizens is no longer a category of thought in politics, that politicians cannot conceive of a political arena not constituted by competing interests. So their “difficulties”, the scorn with which we view them, stem from their view of life as a content of competing purposes rather than a collaborative effort of common purpose, which is more like how the rest of us see the world.

As Ruskin said: “Beware the fury of a patient man.”

According to a post on the tech blog Slashdot:

“Classical music is being used increasingly in Great Britain as a tool for social control and a deterrent to bad behavior. One school district subjects badly behaving children to hours of Mozart in special detention. Unsurprisingly, some of these youth now find classical music unbearable. Recorded classical music is blared through speakers at bus stops, outside stores, train stations and elsewhere to drive away loitering youth. Apparently it works. Detentions are down, graffiti is reduced, and naughty youth flee because they find classical music repugnant.”

I don’t need any convincing– the local Sprouts market has been playing loud ’60s rock and roll to get me to shop at Sunflower since they opened. Face it–Freddy and the Dreamers, bad then (IMO), haven’t aged all that well.

According to the BBC, the French Immigration Minister yesterday rejected a man’s citizenship application because he forced his French wife to wear a head-to-toe Islamic veil, citing naturalization law that requires anyone seeking citizenship to “demonstrate a desire for integration.”

France officially does not recognize race or ethnicity, holding that citizens are simply and completely French. The argument against the veil, presumably, is that requiring the veil deprives a woman of rights and so violates the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, on which the republic is founded.

Although their refusal to recognize ethnicity seems to have caused them some problems, notably in their official inability to treat a poorly assimilated group differently from a well assimilated one and so tend to their specific integration needs, the general attitude is laudable: We are French, not hyphenated-French.

We think, or we thought, that the U.S.A. had been better at integrating our immigrant population into mainstream culture than most of Europe, but recent acts of home-grown terrorists should cause us to reconsider how good we are at it.

And we should also wonder if the conflict between the values of a liberal, secular culture and fundamentalist, religious one aren’t just intractable.