Pax Syriana

Ok. Every once in a while I get a glimpse of the "big picture." It's really not that hard to see what's really going on in the world (who has the power, and what they're doing with it). It's there in plain sight. Yet somehow, it's impossible to do anything about any of it. It's like we in the west are a bunch of really well-fed, luxury consuming serfs totally beholden to our overlords, with not even the spark of imagination to think a critical thought about why or how we're being exploited. 


Mostly I don't think about it. But then enough of the evidence and criticism that's out there starts to stack up, and it becomes impossible not to see, even if just a momentary realization. This fall, two works of fiction and a number of on-going news events got to me.

(Mediated) Reality:

• Try following the Julian Assange extradition and rape charge case. Without falling into the whole Cult of Julian trap, I am convinced that Assange's Wikileaks project is on the side of right. Admittedly I haven't done any real research (only the Swedish documentary film, Wikirebels, and this long panel discussion with Slavoj Zizek), and I think I'm probably more of a supporter of the breakout group (led by Daniel Domscheit-Berg), which split from Wikileaks in protest of Assange's leadership, than I am of Wikileaks itself. Nonetheless, I get the sense that with Wikileaks Assange created a new model for regaining control over state-corporate interests, which were just on the bring of locking up total control of, well, everything. It's amazing to see how these state-corporate interests are managing Assange.
• Try following the related case against Bradley Manning. There's a good summary here.
• Or how about examining the ironic scenario in which President Barak Obama, a candidate I supported and voted for, commemorated the sixty-third anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but refused to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a piece of legislation that now makes it legal for the US government to incarcerate US citizens at any time, for any reason... If you (like me) thought Obama was more ethical than his predecessor, you (like me) were sadly mistaken.
• Oh, and in case you thought model social democratic states like Norway or Canada are innocent of this kind of thing, think again. Take a gander at this analysis of the Keystone Pipeline proposal that Canada is keen to implement. 

Fiction:

• I read H.G. Wells' Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time this fall. I could care less about the "critical tradition" that seeks to label the novel either prophecy or satire. That's totally missing the point, which instead is that Wells describes in exacting details the motivations and processes of perpetual global war; this is a playbook that the U.S. and its allies and corporations are following with chilling accuracy.
• Just last night KE and I watched Stephen Gahan's Syriana (2005). Like a lot of the critics, we were confused by the multiple story lines and not quite sure who all those people were, so it certainly wasn't an entertaining film. But by gum it sure hit home. I dreamed the movie, and woke up filled with the sense of hopelessness and utter corruption that it seeks to convey. The movie is an adaptation of Robert Baer's exposé, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism (2003), a book I may have to read. The title of the movie is apparently taken from the diplomatic term "Pax Syriana"; there's an interesting online Q & A session about the film with the director here where he discusses the term, among many other things.

Here's a quote I really liked from the Gahan interview: 

I found the war on drugs to be a war on an abstraction, a war on brain chemistry, a war on human nature. And I find the war on terror to be another war with an abstraction at the heart of its semantics. And I don't think that our democracy exportation project is working very well. If anybody had been with me in Damascus and the Syrian desert in '02 speaking to the Iraqis that I met, they wouldn't have been very optimistic about the democracy exportation project either. I think the war on terror has succeeded in creating more terror, more terrorists, a less safe America and a less safe world. 

Gah! Where do we even start?! And that's not even touching on the rabid responses to the Occupy Movement, to the Arab Spring, and the 99%. It's crazy that all this is happening, and the cause-and-effect processes are as transparent as they are, yet our lives are still so utterly dominated by entitlement, entertainment, and completely irrelevant and counterfactual "issues."

ETA: I need to start a movie list. It starts with The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2000), coincidentally a merciless (and probably correct) critique put together by the late Christopher Hitchens. Kissinger appears to be the mastermind behind the last four decades of US foreign policy, and his legacy was carried on by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz...

O jul med din glede...

This last week three internationally known figures died, Christopher Hitchens, Vaclav Havel, and Kim Jong-Il. Clearly the side of reason of humanity lost in the balance, if you're counting such things. This article by Hitchens on Kim Jong-Il from Slate last year is a nice commentary on both men. To get a sense of Hitchens' strength as a public speaker, check out his no-holds-barred comparison of Christian theology with North Korean totalitarianism here.

In this season of more people--both known and unknown--dying than I like to think about, it is comforting to be preparing for Christmas with a very eager 7-year-old in the house. Last year I figured out that waiting until Christmas Eve to put the tree up (the Norwegian way) just didn't cut it with me. I didn't feel like Christmas was even here before it was over. I missed having a pile of presents to admire. It made no sense to put up the tree in a rush on a day otherwise filled with cooking and socializing. So I insisted that we put the tree up a week before Christmas this year, and I'm so glad we did! There was a little tree growing in an unfortunate spot in our yard, so KE cut it down, and E and I decorated it yesterday. Here's the result:

Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but we like it. It's great to have a small tree, since then we only use a few of our most beloved ornaments, and don't feel the need to fill in with mass-produced stuff. There are ornaments (and crazy plastic icicles!) from my Dad's childhood and paper heart baskets made by KE's mother, who died in 1970. E got really into it, and was thrilled to see a small pile of packages. He was particularly intrigued by the gift labels, and upset that the biggest package didn't have one. Being a take-charge kind of kid, he quickly took matters into his own hands:

That says "FRA MAMA ÅG PAPPA TIL EIVIND HILSEN MAMA ÅG PAPPA" (roughly translated: "from mom an dad to Eivind from mom an dad"). I love watching him grapple with language!

Today I finished up the last task of grading, and did the last bit of gift shopping. I'll do a little work tomorrow and Wednesday while E is in school, but otherwise I'm going to go into vacation mode. I've been doing a little desultory knitting with the Peer Gynt yarn my colleague gave me. My dying experiment was in one sense a failure (I didn't get blue or purple), but in one sense okay, since I'm always happy to have black yarn. I decided to start making a traditional Norwegian Fana pullover for E with it. I've gotten to just below the star pattern on the body:

That should look pretty good on a red-headed kid. I'm not really aiming to finish this by Christmas, though theoretically speaking I think I could. My main focus now is just to relax and get my head readjusted before the new term starts. I'll be having a totally different type of semester, with virtually no teaching (only about four guest lectures plus a couple of conference presentations). It's going to be all about a job application and finishing my cabin book manuscript.

Not sure how much I'll be posting, so have a very jolly Christmas and enjoy the solstice! For those of us up here in the far north, it's wonderful to think that after Thursday the days will be getting longer again. Now if only we would get proper snow...

Festivitas

Okay, I'm finished with my pity party, and feeling a bit more on top of things after making it through E's birthday party preparations. I'm trying not to let the fact that one kid complained to me "This is the most boring birthday party EVER" get to me. I know that E had a grand time, and, as far as I could gauge, the other six boys were having fun too.

I had fun making "godteposer" (the little gift bags of candy that kids always get at birthday parties here). I decided to give in to the Christmas season and came up with this:

Contents: pepperkaker, Smørbukk caramels, brente mandler, and miniature candy canes.

Eivind requested brownies instead of cake, so I stacked brownies on a plate and stuck candles in the pile. It wasn't elegant (and I totally cheated and used Betty Crocker boxed mixes!!! Don't tell my Mom!), but combined with vanilla ice cream it was pretty popular. We didn't have any planned activities, and for the most part, it seemed to work out great (the killjoy kid being the exception). The boys (yes, I'm afraid it was all boys) E invited are super sweet and enthusiastic. One of them had a notebook and pencil along with him (his mother tried to get him to leave it behind, but he insisted), and he wrote down all sorts of useful information, like the names of the guests who had arrived. Forfatterspire? They're all so quirky and smart and unedited at this age, that it's really fun to observe them. Two of the dads (whom we know pretty well, but who didn't know each other) stayed for coffee and we adults had a nice time chatting too.

I had been really stressing about this birthday party, so it's a big relief to have it squared away.

Sukk

Blah. Not a good day to look at other peoples' glowingly fabulous blogs. Nothing went right today. Off to bed.

Minneord

My Grannie died on Saturday at the age of ninety-five. She died in the way she most wished for, in a hospital with a team of doctors performing every possible form of resuscitation. I'm not really sure if she achieved any sense of peace with death at the end. Despite living the last two decades or so largely in bitterness, frustration, and poor health, she clung desperately to life, or, perhaps more accurately, to the idea of being alive.

It's hard to sort out the emotions I feel at her death. On the one hand I carry a fair amount of resentment over the way she chose to live and die, and over her obvious disapproval way that I have chosen to go about living. I sort of had to give up on her emotionally when it became clear that nothing I was ever going to do as an adult would be "right" in her eyes.

But on the other hand, I am terribly sad at the loss of the Grannie of my childhood. She was an enchanting grandmother. Everything she did was slow and deliberate. She thought long and hard about every little detail in the very limited life she led. She monitored everything, noting important events in a little book that she kept by her chair. She kept her shoes stacked up in their original shoe boxes in her closet. She read every word of the sentiments printed in greeting cards. The way she would smooth the sleek fur around her beloved dog Bobbie's eyes showed extraordinary deliberation and affection. Nothing escaped her, and in observing even her simplest actions I often found myself mesmerized.

She was a small town beauty queen who loved stock car racing and Hank Williams (Sr. and Jr.). I can still hear her astoundingly slow southern Illinois twang reading out her telephone number on her answering machine ("You have reached ... 6-1-8 ... 5-6-8 ...). In my memory that number seems to go on forever. She had me call her "Grannie" because that was the English way to do things, and her own grandmother was an immigrant from Yorkshire. Here they are together, when Grannie was a young teenager:

They were thick as thieves, and Grannie knew unequivocally that her grandmother loved her best. I knew that too as a child, though she was quiet and reserved. She was painfully shy, but warm and giggly when it was just the two of us. We shared a great affection throughout my childhood, right from the very start, although we only got to see each other twice a year at vacations.

She was unrelentingly fastidious, and terrified of appearing unkempt, or poor, or slovenly, terrified of the small town gossips. Every detail of her attire was coordinated, achieved only after much thought and careful planning. She would go back and look at a jacket in the store five or six times before she would buy it. She loved diamonds, and carried all her best jewelry with her in her purse at all times. On car rides from the airport she always had me look through her purse, pointing out her "good" rings, a new wallet, or a couple of new watches with a sheepish, conspiratorial look. She never paid with exact change. Instead, she would break a bill and take the change home to save, sometimes just to build up a buffer, but often so as to have rolls and rolls of coins to give to me when I came to visit.

She remembered anything anything anyone ever said about her. She never forgave an affront (intentional or imaginary) and brooded obsessively over the losses and injustices of her life. She would whisper bitterly to herself on car rides when she thought no one could hear.  I suspect that she never felt that she was in charge of her own life. When confronted with a moment of freedom or autonomy she invariable made the most conventional choice.

I am sad that she has died because she was so desperate to stay alive, but, oddly, not sad about losing her now. If I'm really honest, I've probably been mourning the loss of the Grannie I once knew for about twenty years. What I am most sad about is the fact that we found it so difficult to relate to each other once I became an adult.

Selvmedlidenhet?

It's odd how draining I found my confrontations with Norwegian bureaucracy last week to be. It really knocked me off course, and I feel completely demotivated to do anything at all. And the odd thing is, it actually turned out not to be so bad. When I went down to the police station to submit my documentation, the woman who processed my paperwork was kindness itself, and assured me that I wasn't too late at all.

I realize that my overreaction to the residency permit has to do with how much I have personally riding on it--every year I see stories in the media about people with children in Norway getting deported, and having to spend months and even years to regain the legal right to be with their children. Having a child makes a person feel so much more vulnerable to the whims of the state. If I were single and childless and got deported, I would be terribly upset, but would simply rebuild. If I were to be deported in the situation I'm in now, I think it would kill me.

The only measurable thing I was able to accomplish since the last time I posted was to knit a necklace. Yes, you read that right, a necklace! It's this cool (free!) pattern from Kirsten Johnstone:

This won't be the last time I'll be knitting this. In fact, I've already started on a second version with the same yarn (Classic Elite Silky Alpaca Lace). I only discovered at the last of the seven circles that I should really have been using an elastic cast off (sl1, K1, K these two together, *K1, K2tog*). So, I'll keep this one and send the second as the gift it was originally intended to be.


So now it's Monday, with my two last classes to teach for this semester, and I'm really, really hoping that I can manage to motivate myself to do the research and writing I had planned to get done before the Christmas break. There's a lot riding on that too, since it's material that--ideally speaking--needs to be done before I submit my next job application.


Motivation is such a fickle thing. I know exactly what I need to do. I know how to do it. I know that I can do it. I even know how to break it down into smaller, manageable parts. What I don't know how to do right now, is get myself to actually do it. I wish I had some kind of reward or something joyful and random that could shake me out of this funk, but I don't even know what that would be.

Mentalt mørbanka

I'm about to burst a vein here, folks. This week has so far consisted of nothing but onerous tasks and frustration.

First up, I have had to spend a whole bunch of time copy-editing chapters in the book I'm co-editing, and along the way I discovered a whole bunch of inconsistencies, both created by me and by others. Right now I feel like the book is just going to be a terrible mess, and that it will get panned in the reviews. I'm sure it's not as bad as I'm making it out to be, but I feel like such an editing failure.

I've also been fretting for a long time about my residency permit. When I arrived in December 2008 I was granted a 3-year permit, so I have known all along that I would have to reapply. I kept waiting all fall for some kind of word from UDI, which never came. Finally last week I got so nervous about it that I sent off an email asking what I'm supposed to do. After an incredibly draining day at work yesterday, I came home to find an email response telling me I had to apply a minimum of one month before my old permit expires. yesterday was November 22nd. My permit expires on...wait for it...December 22nd. I think that technically I've missed the deadline, though I'm still going to go ahead with the process and hope for the best.

Last night I spent what felt like hours trying to fill out the online application form. It kept crashing on me, but I eventually managed, and paid the fee online too. After I got that taken care of I tried going to the two websites that were supposed to provide a list of necessary supporting documentation. Neither of them had such a list, and I searched every conceivable link and page on those sites. By the end I was spitting mad. After I calmed down a bit, I realized that there was some information about what I needed in the email response I got from UDI, so together with that and the documentation I saved from my first application three years ago, I think I'm going to be okay.

So today was my day for clearing the decks: I ran around gathering all the documentation I'm going to need for my meeting with the police tomorrow morning. I finally finished all the copy-editing. All I really want to do now is relax and do something super therapeutic, but when I got home I was met with an official letter from the University of Oslo informing me that they have evaluated my full educational background, and nothing from my 10 years of higher education in the US counts toward an undergraduate degree in English here. Nothing. Not the composition course, not the Milton I read, nothing at all. I'm kind of shocked, but I do still (perhaps foolishly) maintain hope that the MA program in English literature will still accept me when I apply this spring. Anyway, the letter only added an additional layer to my current level of frustration over Norwegian bureaucracy.