The sad death of Bruce Wasserstein is a popular news that shocked the business industry. Popular Bruce Wasserstein is a Wall Street investment banker. He helped establish the hostile takeover in the 1980s and reform the mergers and achievements business into a high art. But sad to say he past away, last Wednesday.
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Bruce Wasserstein, chairman and chief executive of Lazard died at 61. The cause of death of Mr. Wasserstein is until now not undetermined. Though Mr. Wasserstein was hospitalized earlier this week for irregular heartbeat. The company explained that Mr. Wasserstein’s condition was serious, but he was recovering and stable.
Bruce Wassertein started his career as a lawyer but quickly he shifted into investment banking and worked on some of the major deals for the past three decades. The Kohlberg Kravis Robert’s takeover of RJR Nabisco was his famous achievements. Mr. Wasserstein’s thinking in deal making is like a game of chess – one move ripe for complex tactic and frequently came at high cost. On his deals he always advocated win-win conditions and encouraged his clients also to do so in other deals. To date, Mr. Wasserstein is dubbed by his friends and colleagues as a great tactician.
Before, Mr. Wasserstein became a Lazard CEO he was hired first to run an investment bank. From there he influenced many of the firm’s dealmakers to support one of the largest deals of his profession. As a result he took Lazard public and ending more than a century of private ownership. From then on, Mr. Wassserstein became popular that he even made a surprise bid for New York Magazine, beating some of the city’s richest businessman.
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This is the second article of the series:” The Wind in Bible versus Quran”.
The Bible says that the Almighty Creator 1) made the Winds His Angels, 2) His servants are flames of fire, 3) He has chariot, 4) He walks on the wings of wind and 5) He made the earth never moves etc. The Noble Quran says that Naught is as Allah’s likeness in attributes. Any form, picture, thoughts that you put the Almighty Creator in it is absolutely mistaken.
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The Wind in the Bible (2)
In Psalm 104:1-8, Kind David says:
“Bless Jehovah, O my soul. O Jehovah my God, thou art very great; You are clothed with honor and majesty: Who covers himself with light as with a garment; Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain; Who lays the beams of his chambers in the waters; Who makes the clouds his chariot; Who walks upon the wings of the wind; Who makes winds his Angels; Flames of fire his servants; Who set the foundations of the earth, that it should not be moved for ever. You cover it with the deep as with vesture; the waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled; At the voice of your thunder they hasted away. They flowed over the mountains; they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for them.”
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Herein, there are some important points:
1) The Bible describes the lord God, the Almighty Creator as:
He has clothes
He covers himself with light as with a garment
He stretches out the heavens like a curtain
He lays the beams of his chambers in the waters
His chariot is made of clouds
He walks upon the wings of the wind
He makes winds his Angels
His servants are flames of fires
He set the foundations of the earth
His voice is the thunder
2) The Bible says that the earth has foundations and it should not be moved for ever.
3) The speed of the Lord God was that of the wind.
4) The wind has wings!
Moreover, there are some discrepancies in the translation of some words in the many versions of the Bible e.g.:
In some Bible’s versions, the word “Angel” is translated to “messenger”.
In some Bible’s versions, the word “wind” is translated to “spirit”.
In some Bible’s versions, the word “curtain” is translated to “tent”.
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On the other hand, all of the above points are ABSOLUTELY rejected in the Noble Quran because:
1) The Noble Quran says that Naught is as Allah’s likeness in attributes. Any form, picture, thoughts that you put the Almighty Creator in it is absolutely wrong.
2) The Almighty Creator is not a body
3) The thunder is not the voice of the Almighty Creator.
4) When the Almighty Creator decides upon a matter, when He wants to do anything, He only says to it ‘Be!’ and it is.
5) The speed of the Lord God was that of the wind; for instance, does not He know the speed of the light? However, Naught is as Allah’s likeness in attributes.
6) The wind has no wings!
7) the Angels are created from the Pure Light.
the Angels are the servants of the Almighty Creator and they never disobey Him.
9) The earth has No foundations and it is rounded and it moves
10) The Great Prophet King David can not say that about the Almighty Creator simply because he knows better who Allah is.
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Aside from the Bible and the Quran, boys in schools know very well that the earth moves and it has two types of movements: the first one is around the sun at about 100,000 km/h. It takes 365 days (1 year/12 months) for the Earth to complete one revolution around the Sun. and the other around itself. It takes 24 hours for the earth to spin around itself.
These two movements are responsible for the seasonal changes and the day and night respectively.
I really do not believe that the Lord God or King David says that the earth foundations and it should not be moved for ever. .
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Psalm 104:1-8 in three different versions of the Bible:
New International Version
1 Praise the LORD, O my soul. O LORD my God, you are very great; you are clothed with splendor and majesty.
2 He wraps himself in light as with a garment; he stretches out the heavens like a tent
3 and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters. He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind.
4 He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants.
5 He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
6 You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.
7 But at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight;
8 they flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for them.
King James Version
1Bless the LORD, O my soul. O LORD my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and majesty.
2Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain:
3Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind:
4Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire:
5Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be removed for ever.
6Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains.
7At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away.
8They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the place which thou hast founded for them.
Young’s Literal Translation
1Bless, O my soul, Jehovah! Jehovah, my God, Thou hast been very great, Honour and majesty Thou hast put on.
2Covering himself [with] light as a garment, Stretching out the heavens as a curtain,
3Who is laying the beam of His upper chambers in the waters, Who is making thick clouds His chariot, Who is walking on wings of wind,
4Making His messengers — the winds, His ministers — the flaming fire.
5He hath founded earth on its bases; It is not moved to the age and for ever.
6The abyss! as with clothing Thou hast covered it, Above hills do waters stand.
7From Thy rebuke they flee, From the voice of Thy thunder haste away.
8They go up hills — they go down valleys, Unto a place Thou hast founded for them.
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The Wind in the Noble Quran (2)
In this article, the following three points will be discussed:
1) The Historical destructive wind as a Punishment for the disbelievers of the Ancient nation of Aad
2) What if Allah wants to do anything?
3) The Precious verse (faith-wise) of the Quran that describes the Almighty Creator
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1) The Historical destructive wind as a Punishment for the disbelievers of the Ancient nation of Aad.
Verses 69:4-8 of the Noble Quran describe this destructive wind!
Historical Background:
Aad was an ancient nation. Aad nation is always mentioned in the Noble Quran as a nation that came after Noah. Allah sent his Prophet Hud to the people of Aad; some of them believed and many of them disbelieved. Allah punished the disbelievers of Aad by the wind and He saved the believers. The people of Aad were famous by their outstanding might.
It is said that Aad nation lived at the south of Saudi Arabia, nearby Yemen.
The Prophet Hud was Arabic.
The nation of Aad and the Prophet Hud are not mentioned in the Bible.
Thamud was an ancient nation. Thamud nation came after the nation of Aad; it is always mentioned in the Noble Quran as a nation that came after Aad.
Allah sent his Prophet Salih to the people of Thamud; some of them believed and many of them disbelieved. Allah punished the disbelievers of Thamud when they killed the Camel which was the miracle of the Prophet Salih who warned his people not to hurt that Camel and they agreed but they never kept their word. The miraculous Camel emerged from a big rock and it has no father and no mother; it came out as an intact adult Camel following Allah’s will when He says to anything He wants: Be! And it is.
The people of Aad were famous by the might and transgression.
It is said that Aad nation lived at the northern part of Saudi Arabia, nearby Yemen.
The nation of Thamud is too not mentioned in the Bible may be because the Prophet Salih was Arabic too.
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The meanings of verses 69:4-8
Verses 69:4
The nation of Thamud and the nation of Aad both disbelieved in the Resurrection to come and they denied their Prophets and refuted the Day of Judgment.
Verses 69:5
As for Thamud, they were destroyed by the overwhelming Roar, an excessively severe shout of the Angel Gabriel. They were destroyed because of their transgression and idolatry; and it is said that their transgression drove them to disbelieve until they were destroyed.
Verses 69:6
And as for Aad, they were destroyed by a fierce roaring wind. The wind was deafening, intensely clamorous, violent wind, [that was] powerful and severe [in its assault] upon Aad, despite their power and might.
Verses 69:7
Allah forced and imposed that wind upon them uninterruptedly for seven nights and eight days with the same force so that you might have seen the people therein lying prostrate, lying dead on the ground, as if they were the hollow, collapsed, trunks of palm-trees.
Verses 69:8
So do you O Muhammad see any remnant of them? Do you see one remaining?’ No!
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Verses 69:4-8 of the Noble Quran in four different translations:
Verses 69:4
QARIB: Thamood and Aad belied the clatterer.
SHAKIR: Samood and ad called the striking calamity a lie
PICKTHAL: (the tribes of) Thamud and Aad disbelieved in the judgment to come.
YUSUFALI: the Thamud and the ‘ad people (branded) as false the stunning calamity!
Verses 69:5
QARIB: Thamood, they were destroyed by the violent shout (of Gabriel),
SHAKIR: then as to Samood, they were destroyed by an excessively severe punishment
PICKTHAL: as for Thamud, they were destroyed by the lightning.
YUSUFALI: but the Thamud, – they were destroyed by a terrible storm of thunder and lightning!
Verses 69:6
QARIB: as for Aad, they were destroyed by a howling, violent wind
SHAKIR: and as to ad, they were destroyed by a roaring, violent blast
PICKTHAL: and as for Aad, they were destroyed by a fierce roaring wind,
YUSUFALI: and the ‘ad, they were destroyed by a furious wind, exceedingly violent;
Verses 69:7
QARIB: that he subjected upon them for seven nights and eight days consecutively and you might have seen them struck down as if they were the stumps of palm trees that had fallen down.
SHAKIR: which he made to prevail against them for seven nights and eight days unremittingly, so that you might have seen the people therein prostrate as if they were the trunks of hollow palms
PICKTHAL: which he imposed on them for seven long nights and eight long days so that thou mightest have seen men lying overthrown, as they were hollow trunks of palm-trees.
YUSUFALI: he made it rage against them seven nights and eight days in succession: so that thou couldst see the (whole) people lying prostrate in its (path), as they had been roots of hollow palm-trees tumbled down!
Verses 69:8
QARIB: can you see any remnant of them now?
SHAKIR: do you then see of them one remaining?
PICKTHAL: canst thou (O Muhammad) see any remnant of them?
YUSUFALI: then seest thou any of them left surviving?
——————————————————————————————-
2) What if Allah wants to do anything?
Verse 36: 82 says:
QARIB: when he wills a thing, his command is to say to it ‘be’, and it is!
SHAKIR: his command, when he intends anything, is only to say to it: be, so it is
PICKTHAL: but his command, when he intendeth a thing, is only that he saith unto it: be! and it is.
YUSUFALI: verily, when he intends a thing, his command is, “be”, and it is!
The meanings of the verse:
His command, His affair, when He wills a thing, that is, [when He will] to create something, or to do anything is just to say to it ‘Be’, and it is.
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3) The Precious verse (faith-wise) of the Quran that describes the Almighty Creator
Verse 42: 11 says
QARIB: the originator of the heavens and the earth, he has given you from yourselves, pairs, and also pairs of cattle, thereby multiplying you. there is nothing like him. he is the hearer, the seer.
SHAKIR: the originator of the heavens and the earth; he made mates for you from among yourselves, and mates of the cattle too, multiplying you thereby; nothing like a likeness of him; and he is the hearing, the seeing
PICKTHAL: the creator of the heavens and the earth. he hath made for you pairs of yourselves, and of the cattle also pairs, whereby he multiplieth you. naught is as his likeness; and he is the hearer, the seer.
YUSUFALI: (he is) the creator of the heavens and the earth: he has made for you pairs from among yourselves, and pairs among cattle: by this means does he multiply you: there is nothing whatever like unto him, and he is the one that hears and sees (all things).
The meanings of the verse:
He (Allah) is the Originator of the heavens and the earth, the One Who created them [without precedent]. He has made for you, from your own selves, pairs, when He created Eve from Adam’s rib, and [also] pairs, males and females, of the cattle and whereby He multiplies you through marriage. There is nothing like Him; there is no likeness of Him, exalted be He). He is the Hearer, of what you say, the Seer, of your works. Naught is as His likeness in attributes, knowledge, power and providence etc.
The basic point of faith is that Naught is as your Almighty creator.
Since man is a creature which has Spirit that gives him like; and since Naught is as the likeness of your Creator, then the Almighty Creator has NO SPIRIT.
Hence, the Almighty Creator is not a body or material like us. Any form, picture or thoughts that you put the Almighty Creator in it is absolutely wrong.
According to the Islamic Rule of Faith, if any one put the Almighty Creator in any form, picture or thoughts, he or she is Disbeliever and has No faith; and he will end up in the Hereafter as a dweller of the Eternal Fire.
This is in spite of what name(s) you are giving to your Almighty Creator e.g. Allah, Lord, God, Jehovah etc.
On the other hand, the vice versa is absolutely True!
========================
Back to my question to the smart and interested reader:
Is the Quran quoted from the Bible?
Professor Dr. Ibrahim Khalil
? Prof. of Clinical and Chemical Pathology,
? Head of Clinical Microbiology and Infection Control Unit, Ain-Shams University. Cairo, Egypt,
? President of the Egyptian Society of Inventors,
? Member of the Egyptian union of Writers,
? Published some 60 Medical Articles,
? Supervisors for 79 PhD theses,
? Supervisors for 111 Master Degree theses,
? Co-Chief Editor of the Egyptian Journal of Lab. Medicine,
? Honorary President of SPIC-Egypt (The Society for Practitioners of Infection Control – Egypt)
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Okay, let’s grant this at the outset: no one needs me to tell them about the – let’s face it – unparalleled excellence of HBO’s The Wire, given that we’re dealing, after all, with a truth acknowledged by everyone who’s ever sat in front of a cathode ray tube in the hope of filling up the silence of the infinite spaces that surround them…
So, if any of you heart-wrenchingly attractive people still need my testimony to be convinced of the greatness of this show, then you are not only a friendless (if lovably eccentric) technophobic anchorite who’s spent far too much time with no-one to talk to but the tins of “Chunky Irish stew” that line your fallout shelter, but you’re also someone who needs to hear the following harsh truth the way you need a tin-opener and maybe some kind of gaming console:
YOUR FRIENDS ARE DELIBERATELY CONCEALING THINGS FROM YOU IN TO LAUGH AT YOUR CONFUSION.
Yes, the Illuminati are running this caper, ladies and gentleman, which is why your life is now, and forever shall be, one part The Truman Show, one part Emir Kusturica’s Underground. (Not a bad film concept, incidentally, as long as all the hierarchies of angels can somehow conspire to make the likes of James Cameron stay away from the thing….)
But, anyway.
The Wire is one of those shows, that despite being (at least now in its resurrected ‘DVD boxed set’ days) so popular that, if you’re a 20 to 50-ish vaguely middle-class person of the kind who’s seen at least one HBO drama, than you can safely bet your last marketable organ that at least two-thirds of your friends are, on any given night, sedulously watching the latest episode instead of attending your birthday party/wedding/stupefying Houellebecqian orgy as they mumblingly promised they would while drunk and/or attempting to seduce you with their endearing sensitivity. Believe me, then, when I say that even as you read this, people you know are already thinking of how they can bestpretend to be deadin not only to escape your Friday night drinks, but to indulge in the kind of Wire marathons that would make the Bayreuth festival look like the punch-line to a pun.
And don’t misunderstand me: I’m not just saying that your shy, housebound, irredeemably uncool friends are abandoning you in favour of watching the show, I’m saying that this is true even of the resolutely sociable and earnestly self-improving ones – the ones who purposely don’t own televisions. Trust me when I say that – all hyperbole aside –these people, are, even as we speak, finding the flimsiest of pretexts to drop in on your mutual friends (“Hi Hailey, Hi Amanda…just thought we’d stop by and see the new baby…ooh..how excit-ing…” in the hope of getting even a whiff of Omar Little and his merry band of social-realist-story-telling uplifted and transformed-by-a-panoramic-perspective, acute insights into systematic injustice and -larger-than-life character archetypes who, as in Dickens, play the role of putting flesh on structures that do, at least in a certain sense, and contra a famous May ’68 slogan: walk the streets. (Anyone who doubts me on that last point should read Joan Copjec’s book Read my Desire >until they…y’know…submit).
The Wire, at its heart is so vast, so baroque, so generally magnificent and has also had so many gazillions of words put forward attesting to its vastness and baroqueness, that it’s hard to know where to start. In deference to this, I’ve decided to try introducing my own commentary by means of one gratuitously over-extended knock-knock joke.
(As I believe Lao Tzu said: have blog, need gimmick: otherwise how else will I ever get to do that hipster froideur thing via which the more important doyens-of-the-blogosphere manage to patronise all the non-entities in their comment boxes? So, here we go:
Knock, knock.
“Who’s there…?”
“That was…”
“‘That was’ who…?”
“That was the American Dream abandoning this city like it was post-Katrina New Orleans on the day that it was announced that the city was being turned into a nuclear test-site which was to be entirely populated by the post-Apocalyptic (i.e. zombie) progeny of Glenn Beck and the Beckhams. As it drove off into the sunset (listen to those tyres screech, people) the Dream, of course, took with it the standard obscene CEO payout, a couple of the more attractive secretaries – that was the horn of the getaway car proposing to raise the dead of another city less lost than this one — and all the amusing stickers from the receptionist’s desk. Oh, and the ‘knocking’, sound? That was the Dream announcing that it had left a calling card on your doorstep whose glossy promise of secular transcendence will undoubtedly haunt (and in a strange way even edify) your short and brutish (if not always nasty) life, like the vengeful ghost of every promise of liberty, equality and fraternity once made by the founders of the Republic that now lies ostentatiously bleeding to death on an unregarded housing project corner. But, you know, take heart: the little calling card is still enough to tie some kind of subjectivity together into a mish-mash of affects sutured to actions by fantasies resilient enough to live as if it were not inevitable that the former should be distorted into psychosis and the latter crushed under the heels of the city of Baltimore like another of those ubiquitous discarded drug drug-vials that cake the shoes of anyone who visits the many depressed and posthumous parts of the city (East or West). And, I mean sure, you can even feel, on the odd night, your possibility of redemption, that you might be getting closer to the goal, that the cash, the girls, the house, and even the rap star ‘lifestyle’ isn’t far behind you:: you’re part of a good crew now after all, your star’s rising, people treat you with respect/ Bang/Huh? What was that?/Nothing. Just your pointless death. You’re a statistic now. It’s like fame only crunchy. And don’t worry it’s bad for “5-0″ (as in “Hawaii” or what the show’s characters call ‘po-lice’) as well – they’re ruled by numbers and quotas and corruption so all-pervasive that it’s as if the vestiges of civic virtue and government ‘by the people, for the people’ seem like the irritating parasite on the host organism of the corruption.”
Alternatively, I could have just summarised the above by taking a line from the first season:
Drug dealer (being dragged away in a police van and beaten en route) “You can’t f*!#ing do this, man: this is America!”
Random Police Officer: [laughing] “This is.West.Baltimore.”
But, as I say, you don’t need me to tell you that The Wire is to television what a cigar-chomping, gun-toting, Hegel-reading reincarnation of H.W. Fowler would be to the obscenely self-regarding Australian Press — no matter how much I just did this.
Also, given that I do agree with the prevailing excited consensus on the greatness of the show, I can’t attempt to offer you any shiny faux-contrarianism to take away the bad taste that’s left by so great an oxymoron as a “critical consensus.
So, instead of talking about the sheer ambition and daring of The Wire, its extraordinary writing, its frequently hilarious, frequently poignant vignettes coloured by those almost constant “I can’t believe this is happening” moments that will make you cover your eyes, and groan out loud to the gods even after you’ve watched seasons of the stuff and mistakenly think you’ve become desensitized to the show’s implacable “corruption squashes virtue” logic (a kind of scissors, paper, rock, without the paper and in which one side always uses the rock.)
And yet, if you’re a natural sceptic, you might still think that all of this nicely-packaged excellence is basically the familiar stock-standard “quality television” that can be found in almost any HBO show and that The Wire might be nothing more than The Sopranos with a little more incomprehensible Baltimore street argot thrown in to fulfill its ‘life on the streets’ authenticity quotient.
But, no.
Let me explain this by way of a remark that will also allow me to opportunistically explain something that I said in a previous post:
I recently made a video that went by the name, the Australian Middle Class Saves the World”. After I posted this video on Youtube and elsewhere, I started to squirm guiltily at the number of times the word ‘racism’ came out of the mouth of my idiot-hipster character ‘Maddie’ (who says this word — as she says everything — as if it meant ‘general badness which I oppose every time I go into a trendy bar as opposed to somewhere less hip.’)
Now, this squirming on my part, was and is, of course, stupid and pathetic, not to mention revelatory of any number of equally pathetic neuroses of the “oh, maybe I’ve said something that will lead to my beautiful soul being tragically misrepresented, thus leading to situation where I won’t get invited to all those parties that… I…er…don’t go to.” (Hmm. So, everbody wins after all…)
At any rate, at the time, I was worried that by making Maddie constantly invoke the term in her stilted, Xtranormal (and indeed “extranormal”) speech, some censorious and easily offended mythical reader of mine might somehow break through the ‘why would she give a shit?’ barrier and publically censure me for implying that racism exists only as a chimera in the mind of self-important morons. Now, of course: a) I never meant to say anything of the kind and b) no-one’s actually made such an accusation because well, you know, www.whywoudlanyonecare.com. But, to clarify this anyway, for narcissistic reasons: I wasn’t making light of racism, as much as I was attempting to satirise what I think is the prevalent ideological illusion that good and bad (and even the task of combatting present present social injustices stemming from historical ones) is in the end a matter of making sure the right people have the right attitude, that everything will be all right as long as the privileged groups have the right (“Aw…we like those people…they make nice food…”) aesthetic outlook on the victims of the injustice.
Now, what I’m worried about here is the potential for a kind of ‘consumerist’ distortion of what it means to hold ethical and political positions. The distortion operates like this: under the perpetual “Web 2.0″, “find celebrity or die” imperatives of the present, potentially any and all decisions (always conceived as choices from life’s extensive menu) can be perverted such that they are principally a means of ‘expressing ourselves’ through our consumer choices.
In an environment governed by the imperative to ‘make sure you show what kind of person you are at all times because this is somehow terribly important’ the danger is that even our most passionately proclaimed ethical and political can take on the appearance of (even if they don’t actually become this) nothing more than tribal tattoos which we desperately try to make intricate or distinctive enough to not be mistaken for everyone else’s (crappier, duller, less “edgy”) attempts to have their selfhood recognized and thus given substance.
I think you know the kind of thing that I’m talking about: the weird contexts in which even perfectly honourable moral and political positions that are supposed to be about solidarity, equality, justice and which are supposed to give rise to what Badiou calls the ‘tent-words’ under which an elusive ‘we’ might shelter together, and work together for a better world, suddenly becomes instead less about ending oppression or actually achieving certain goals than a convenient way for me to show the (apparently perpetually watching) world my latest kung fu move in the endless game of (to quote Fight Club) “which colour scheme best expresses who I am as a person: the fuchsia, the cobalt or the cafe latte creme caramel?”
Now, I’m not saying that I think that politics needs to be like this or even that it is like this most of the time: but I am saying that there’s at least a marked tendency given the way selfhood in our epoch is thought of (as a function of shopping and other gestures of self-display) that we will turn our political “alignments” as well as our attested to (as opposed to acted upon) moral principles into just another way of selling ourselves.
As an example, of this, I’d point to the Australian columinist Catherine Deveney, who is familiar to me chiefly for what seems to be her horrifying genius for spouting deceptively progressive sounding rhetoric in a way that must be incredibly comforting for the political right that she thinks of herself as opposing.
This is because, in her amazingly self-regarding discourse, ‘politics’ is persistently portrayed as if its main purpose was to provide an outlet for the smug self-assertion practiced by the inhabitants of the hipper suburbs, a self-assertion that consists in finding any opportunity to imply one’s both moral and aesthetic superiority to all of those crass, ignorant unenlightened types who don’t share Our Way of Life [sic] and who will thus be deservedly Passed Over when the revolution finally acknowledges that the aforementioned ‘let’s live in the interesting parts of the city with access to real life types’ are the saviours of muddled humanity….
Now, I won’t surprise anyone when I say that the ideology of “it’s all about your attitudes and choices” is particularly common to Hollywood and even more so to American television.
To explain: how many films have you seen where a problem of “race”, poverty and Imperialism” is portrayed largely as a consequence of the subjective nastiness or prejudice of individual imperialists/capitalists?
The recent apotheosis (or perhaps Apocolocyntosis) of this sort of thing is James Cameron’s Avatar, a film which though it does feature an undeniably pretty and pleasingly blue CGI jungle for its puppy-dog eyed, noble savages with sexy feline noses to frolic in, is, despite this saving grace, unbearably, pompously earnest in its constant, humourless attempts to portray the evils of Imperialist exploitation as ultimately the handiwork of psychopathic crew-cutted military fucknuts doing the bidding of smarmy, slump-shouldered, cynical corporate half-humans, who together constitute an alliance so evil that it wears a death’s head mask on either nipple and has a smiling corporate logo that says “we’re the bad guys” and goes on to explain how said alliance is dedicated to stomping on every flower that ever made an innocent child smile, even and especially when those flowers grow in magical, extra-terrestrial forests full of shiny blue indigenous people with carefully constructed super-sensual Angelina Jolie lips.
The unbelievable superficiality and childishness of Avatar’s moral outlook derives mainly from its cartoonish portrayal of oppression and exploitation as principally deriving from a lack of sensitivity and wonder, and thus as something that couldn’t possibly be abetted or perpetuated by normal, sensitive, beauty-loving people who don’t actively relish the sight of Arcadian innocence being summarily cluster-bombed by steroid-abusing thugs.
But, of course, the problem with this portrayal of capitalist Imperialism is it implicitly identifies the standard cinema-going audience’s rudimentary capacity to be moved by drama (“I’d be all like ‘Go blue cat people, I’ll> endure a cosmopolitan inter-species shag with Cat Woman Pocahontas if it stops those nasty U.S. marines from their ogre-like brutality”) as the key to solving the planet’s plunge into ecological degradation as well and at the same time as the best way to improve the condition of that inconveniently poor and dying billion people currently living who so recalicitrantly refuse to be ‘uplifted’ by what economists have long been telling us is the inevitable downward trickle of global wealth.
By doing this, i.e. by portraying exploitation as a reality that is in no way compatible with the existence of the average movie goer and his feelings, the film completely negates what is nonetheless its enormously inflated moral-political pretensions to ‘communicate’ an important message to the people via the multiplex. In the end, Avatar and its filmic fraternity will never be a call to arms for anyone to anything simply because (like Cameron’s much less watchable, and indeed execrable ) it feeds and flatters pervasive ideological illusions rather than dispelling them in the name of truths that might re-orient the field of what we think we know.
To make the more general point: there’s a certain way that people in general and Hollywood films in particular have with dealing with “Imperialism” (say, the British Raj) as if it were mainly the consequence of “Whig notions of the upward march of progress and civilisation”, as if racism, class-distinctions,Titanic and exploitation all comes down to someone saying explicitly “screw these savages/poor people/they’re not civilized so we can do what we want to them.”
Now, while of course, this was (and is) undoubtedly an element of the colonial mindset, the illusion here is that Colonialism would never have happened (or would have taken another rosier road) if only the Colonial Offices of say, the East India Company, were filled with the standard movie-going public of our time, i.e. with people who defined themselves by what is mistakenly believed to be the opposite of the “Whig” attitude: i.e. a capacity for wonder at the beauty at “difference” – at the cultural wealth and depth of ‘other cultures’.
The problem with this argument is that it is, of course, super-sized nonsense. In a bag. Where the bag has a full-body shot of James Cameron’s’ gripping his Academy Award and calling for a minute’s silence for the victims of the Titanic. (Yes, he really did that.)
Thus, I’m continually surprised and shocked by how many post-colonial studies types [yes, I just crossed myself ostentatiously] types who are supposed — surely — to take Edward Said’s Orientalism as their bible – seem entirely unaware that Orientalist attitudes (“ah, these blue cat-people have a spirituality and contact with nature that our grey ugly civilization has tragically left behind, but perhaps can regain if only it opens its heart to the mysteries of the East) goes perfectly well if not better with imperialist domination than a Whiggish sense of one’s own cultural superiority: in fact it’s the ultimate (not-so-dangerous) supplement to Imperialist ideology that makes the system function all the more smoothly: allowing the Company to sell the odd sari, and copy of the Vedas back in London along with the tea. Two words for you people who don’t get this: Lord.Curzon.
Along these lines, one of the really great things about The Wire is how utterly un-Cameronesque it is.
This is principally because more than any American television show that I’ve seen (even The Sopranos this a program that shows poverty and even a certain ‘not-what-is-usually-meant-by-the-term’ racism in a way that makes everything else I’ve seen from the U.S. look as sanitized as Tom Sawyer’s fence after his inaugural scam. Best of all, The Wire manages to achieve this without either sentimentality of the ‘every drug dealer in the projects is a hero in their own special way if he’d only discover the power inside himself to attract money with happy thoughts” kind or pandering to the inveterate belief of the well-meaning liberal audience of HBO programming that the main reason that bad things happen is that there are unenlightened, insensitive people in the world and that everything would be okay, as long as People Like Us could rule the world from our living rooms.
Of course, I’m not saying that outright bigots don’t exist; they obviously do, and (much worse) they’re seemingly self-consciously summoned into existence with alarming frequency by the prestidigitations of unscrupulous right-wing demagogues of the kind who seem to have unleashed the tea party on Obama’s America, Le Pen on France to start what would have to be a very long list. But a remarkable thing about The Wire, is how rarely individual sentiments (as opposed to individual actions) are portrayed as being in the least bit important to the on-going functions of the system. It’s not that the world is portrayed, as an arch-cynic might, as being totally devoid of individual virtue — we’re not talking about Mad Men after all — it’s just that the show continually reinforces the fact that if individuals really have to struggle in the face of an utterly corrupt system (to the point that the fates of certain of the more well-intentioned characters throughout the show frequently recall the plot of de Sade’s Misfortunes of Virtue”and Voltaire’s Candide): i.e. no good intention (let alone deed) goes unpunished in a world where having a good attitude (“I can speak to people of all creeds and colours without any screaming ‘kill the interloper’ prejudices”) means precisely what Kurt Vonnegut would call “doodly-squat” in the face of the deeply embedded social inequalities that are all geared up to perpetuate themselves into the next century.
(For, any Lacan lovers among you, out there, I’ll just quickly say that The Wireconstantly shows the destitution of the imaginary – the sphere of ego and alter – in the symbolic, while at the same time showing the terrible actions of those who will not admit the existence of a ‘hole in the Real’: i.e. the properly capitalist-bureaucratic psychosis that equates what can be counted with what ‘is’. But, to spare the rest of you, that’s all I’ll say on the matter, for now.)
To put this another way, in The Wire, racism is not so much an attitude, as an organizing principle: it’s autopoietic, self-perpetuating, built into the heart of things like an inherited disease that is now encoded in every cell of the body, it’s like the information contained in every cell that dictates the direction in which the social body will grow.
Now, you might object here, that racism is, by definition, a subjective disposition/attitude that we usually infer from certain forms of speech and action. And you’d be right. However, it’s precisely these kinds of subjective dispositions that, in the world of The Wire seem, if not exactly irrelevant to the way “Baltimore” operates than something very close to this. It’s as if the series at once suggests that, yes, “life in the city” is, as neo-liberal economic theory would have it, simply the aggregate of all those atoms bumping into each other a la Democritus (or, in a different sense, Friedrich Hayek’s) binding together to handle a complexity beyond that which could be ‘managed’ by any government. And yet the show continually shows us how illusory is the neo-liberal notion that this social reality can ‘be anything at all’ in a way that would suggest these individual encounters and reactions are not already structured by the whole of which they form parts. Instead, what we see in The Wire is the tendency for an already existing pattern (of social injustice, inequality et cetera) gets perpetuated through, by, and very occasionally despite the seemingly isolated and autonomous actions of these same individuals. The point is not to suggest skepticism about the possibilities of human autonomy, but rather skepticism about ‘atomic’ social theory: as the philosophically inclined, among you, will already know, society may be made up of monads, but monads are most definitely not atoms.
Put differently, the fact that Baltimore is, as they tell us somewhere in The Wire’s third season, 65 per cent “African American” added to the fact the show’s universe has a black mayor, police commissioner, senators and generally no lack of prominent black, Hispanic, Polish and Irish citizens and that WASPS of any kind seem conspicuous only in their absence, doesn’t change the fact that Baltimore’s indigent and incarcerated populations are disproportionately African-American.
The show manages — without needing to invent a single easily despised, pot-bellied bigot to fuel audience indignation by coming over all Ku Klux Klan — to show that whatever the attitudes of individuals the fact stilll remains that the poorest districts on either side of the city are all occupied by people who are of the same colour, who speak the same language, and who are so used to and unlikely to escape the housing Project world into which they are born, that they even grow up amidst an urban lore which passes down legends of the great drug KingPins of yore down the generations. It is a fact that, as I like to say, is obscured by its very obviousness.
Thus, racism is here objective rather than subjective, such that although there are indeed many horrendous characters (and there are many of these in the show, most of them concentrated in the higher ranks of the Baltimore PD) this is peripheral to the fact that if you’re black you have a far greater (disporportionate) chance of being born in one of the “Towers” in which the show spends so much time, i.e. of coming from one of the many places where people are – to quote Charles Bukowski:
‘born like this/into this/as the chalk faces smile/…. As political landscapes dissolve/as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree/as the oily fish spit out their oily prey/as the sun is masked/ Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness/Into bars where people no longer speak to each other/Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings/ Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die/Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty/Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed/into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes…”
Also, in the name of chasing this elusive, frighteningly mobile, all-pervasive corruption, the narrative of The Wire across its seasons, operates by a device of continually pulling back the camera to encompass an ever more sweeping vision of the city, itself a microcosm of America: Baltimore is a teeming, thirivng thing: with its alleyways, and its corners (the sites where dealers hang out from dawn ‘til dusk) , its civic centres designed for clandestine political horse-trading, and its abandoned office buildings where the police use type-writers and old SLR cameras in a way that made me think, until half-way through the first episode that the show might be set during the 1980s (we hardly ever see a computer on any desk of the Baltimore PD.)
The fact that the shows narrative becomes increasingly panoramic as the seasons wear on is a feature that several commentators have rightly identified as the show’s curiously (especially for U.S. television) “Dickensian” quality. Like in Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House (the latter of which, I – admit to not having actually read) there’s a dust-heap (or a last will and testament) at the centre of everything: a money if not a paper trail that connects an endless panoply of colourful characters: police, gangsters, drug dealers, users, the frighteningly efficient members of one or more international crime syndicates with local dock-workers (“stevedores”)and their union, schoolteachers, politicians: an endless cavalcade of humanity that, for all the colour of the parade never verges on caricature: you never doubt that you’re witnessing characters drawn from life who echo and express the real life from which they came.
Most remarkably, when in later series the show achieves the remarkable feat of showing the interconnection of all aspects of life in the city via the vast self-propelling system of graft, crime, dodgy deals, and facts that are quickly obscured when they don’t fit with the various ‘target numbers’ of management-marketing bureaucrats it manages to do this without having to resort to any of the gimmicky jump-cut techniques of films like Syriana or Traffic, films which, as Fred Jameson once pointed out, tend to lose the very ‘globalisation’ they are attempting to portray in the manner of an elusive “something that has ‘had a trace put on it’ as we find in a certain kind of Hollywood action film, where the audience sees a map of the world with a light that bounces from LA to New York, to Paris, to Moscow, but then dissipates into the the aether like the argument of an ill-thought out thesis. [Actually, come to think of it, I think Jameson meant that, the vanishing from the map might be a better representation of the reality of globalisation then the attempts to ‘show the connections' a la Syriana. But let's save that for another girl, another planet.]
The first season of The Wire, then, tells what initially looks like the story of cops attempting to catch drug dealers and drug dealers attempting to evade cops: if you didn’t look closely enough, you’d be (as Brooker says) forgiven for thinking that this is “just another cop show”, albeit one with a strong cast and and the standard absence of Manichean distinctions which tends to graitfy all those nice, liberal-in-the-American sense, well-heeled and well-educated HBO watching types. But by the second and third seasons (and I’ve spent several months getting to this point in the show), there’s no question that you’re seeing something that goes beyond drugs, that becomes something like a biography, or better, an ethnography of a city.
The show’s quietly devastating second season, is, in the words of the show’s creator David Simon about the “decline of work”, (a theme which, incidentally, it shares with the excellent Australian movie The Boys).
The second season follows the characters from the first series through a series of complex plots that revolve around a dock workers’ (stevedores’) union whose charismatic Polish-American shop steward (is the term used in America? What’s its local equivalent?) Frank Sabotka (below) is desperately struggling to keep his union alive, while facing among other things, a vendetta stemming from a high-ranking police officer who will even allow a prohibited murder investigation to continue (oh, the irony) if it might humiliate Sabotka in revenge for some past slight.
Sabotka’s job is, as he, but also many of his fellow dockers see it, to keep his struggling men (and their families) waving, rather than drowning in an increasingly desperate economic situation in which the work which has for generations has kept these people alive is turning from a daily reality into a distant memory. In post-Fordist (but remember pre-financial crisis) Baltimore: the men (Polish, Irish and African-American) of the stevedores union are guys who would have grown up expecting to spend and even end their lives doing the kind of difficult, physical, full-time work that their fathers and grandfathers did. But now, they’re struggling. It’s hard to get more than a few hours a work a week, even with the help of the union (which everyone has joined because it’s a community, a multi-generational family, the only point of resistance against the brutal imperatives of capital). Thus we are introduced to a number of characters who, unable to pay their bills, and completely unaware of how they might go about getting any other kind of work thus find themselves in a situation very like that of the kids from the Projects, except for dock-workers lacking the dubious “advantage” of their contemporaries in not having been ‘born into’ a world on the fringes of the criminal shadowlands, and who thus are at once less resigned to this world as a condition of existence, but also less capable of surviving in it.
Of course whenever we see poverty attached to ever-present hopes of fulfilling the American dream (even in the relatively sober version of a small (possibly rented) house, a car, some medical insurance, some vestiges of dignity in regular work) the temptation that the dock-workers face is naturally that of finding an easier road than the hard week’s work that is, at any rate, becoming increasingly unavailable to them. Thus, the second season heads towards a devastating final act that will show us the consequences of these essentially decent (but, again, unsentimentally portrayed) being increasingly by crime and thus embroiled with criminals whose ruthlessness far surpasseswhat these characters are capable of imagining.
This allows the viewer to see even more of the vast networks that circulate money and influence (and ultimately drugs) through the Byzantine channels that connect “City Hall”, with the dealers on the corners of the previous season, to the young dock workers and their families, to our familiar “point of identification” characters who make up the few well-meaning ” po-lice”; to their obstructive, malicious, and vindictive superiors of the former group. In the second season all of this is also shown to connect with what also seems to be something like a pan-European crime syndicate that is not above the kind of casual murder that would make the druglords of the first season shudder.
The third season is (again I here quote from the show’s creators) about attempts at “reform”. Thus, it is also, given from the outset that it is a season that will show the kind of rocks upon which both the well- and not-so-well-meaning attempts to ‘clean up the system’ flounder: thus whether it is gangsters trying to convert their operation into a ‘legitimate business’ (a theme of course which recalls The Godfather), to various characters making quixotic attempts to clean up corruption everywhere from the police department to the mayoral office, or even just the admirable attempts of one tired, soon-to-be-retired senior cop who tries to come up with a strategy of simply containing (rather than eliminating) the everyday catastrophe that is the is the total, dismal failure of Baltimore’s (and everywhere else’s) “war on drugs” by coming to an accommodation with the dealers; the third season continually rubs in its audience’s face a stark, wince-inducing portrayal of an all-too-familiar aspect of modern life that was already burned through the audiences’ eyeballs in scene after scene of the previous two seasons: I’m talking here about the soul-destroying, ruthless, reign of numbers (not only money, but of particular pre-delineated ways of counting what is and isn’t reality) to which the show continually testifies. By the reign of number, I’m talking about the classic bureaucratic ‘if it’s on the page it’s fine, if it’s not on the page it doesn’t exist’ (No hole in the symbolic, in other words,: reality is what can be measured/counted accoridng to the ways we’ve counted, c.f. my Middlesex post). This, we all know is how institutions work whose bureaucracies have been infected with management and marketing principles that now serve as the only legitimation discourse of the instiutiton.
Baltimore, we see, is run, not only by a modern version of the Benthamite philosophy that forms the basis of Dickens’ Hard Times, but by that familiar-to-everyone-these-days combination of corporate Newspeak acting as the basis for legislation that pays no attention to reality, and that uses numbers and spreadsheet data (“is the murder rate up or down…if it’s too high we’ll have to pretend that a few of those murders didn’t really happen/or that we solved them, by arresting someone random from the streets who no-one will care about”): as the only guage for reality. Everything is subordinated to giving the higher echelons of the bureaucracy the ‘numbers’ they need, given that these numbers have now become the only legitimate way of finding out what counts as reality: all else is subjective psychosis.
Thus, some of what I found to be the hardest scenes to watch in the whole show (thus far) occur in the third season. These are not brutal gun fights that leave the streets bloodied (although this season in particular certainly has its share of such things). Instead, the really unwatchable scenes, for me, are the ones that involve smug, smarmy, insouciant, and cautiously corrupt higher-ranking policeman publically humiliating their subordinates for not making their ‘policing data’ turn out the way they’re supposed to and, in the process, being awarded with ever more promotions for their exemplary ‘management’. The worst thing about this, is that we know, from our own experience in considerably less desperate and tragic worlds than that of The Wire that the same kind of principles run the world at large: the university, the public service, and other once last bastions of a different logic, a different way of counting reality, are of course, no exception to this.
In essence: I’ve never seen anything to match The Wire for portraying corruption as so embedded in the heart of a city (and a social system) so capable of completely resisting the efforts of the few remaining honest men and women. At the same time, it’s important to note the way that this pervasive, systematic ‘corruption’ is portrayed.
Essentially, the show tackles corruption in a way that multiplies moral ambiguities at epidemic speed: it’s not just the usual “oh, we get to see the light and dark sides of both dealers and of cops thus humanizing them both” blather: instead, the audience is constantly being given unpleasant forced choices between varying degrees of corruption. Thus a character whom we have seen commit some act of unmitigated bastardry suddenly looks like a crusading hero when he’s moved for complex reasons to oppose the machinations of another character who will himself look like the lesser of two evils in a different situation in which he is not a power-broker.
This focus on systematic corruption means that there’s no evil in the show in the sense of a metaphysical (or naturalized) property attached to certain individuals: there’s no Joker figure continually motivated only by an obscure desire to cause mayhem. Instead, everyone is alternately decent and a monster according to the logic of different situations and how these characters perceive the extent to which their interests can be advanced or threatened. Obviously, the point here is not to deny the existence of human freedom, nor of the mind’s capacity for transcendence: the show -does- portray characters who nobly sacrifice themselves in adherence to principles and who refrain from letting their principles be dictated by the exigencies of a situation: but although these characters are (for certain obvious reasons) protagonists they are never 1) never portrayed as White Knights and more importantly 2) we get, very often, to see these good-guy through the eyes of their colleagues and superiors: i.e. as lunatics who are hubristically setting themselves up for disaster.
To give you a sense of how much this theme of all pervasive and yet graded corruption permeates the show, early in the first season we see one of the show’s most consistently sympathetic characters beating an adolescent with a night-stick, for the minor crime of having basically shoved one of her fellow police officers. It’s a brutal scene, that comes at the climax of an episode, and that places most of the violence off-camera such that we get the disturbing vision of the beating continuing as the credits roll in our living rooms. We’re just left with the feeling that even the show’s “good po-lice” still have their moments of relishing the violence that, it is, after all, so often part of their de facto if not de jure brief to inflict especially when it comes to one of the show’ frequent, futile ‘let’s appease the media’ with a few raids on the housing projects). Casual police violence to witnesses that would have led to a whole story arc in other shows are mainly shrugged off by even the most sensitive of characters: it’s the way things /‘battles have to be picked’ / and so on.
Last of all I suppose I should attempt some criticism of the show. The weakest character in the Wire is undoubtedly at least to my mind) its putative protagonist (despite the excellent performance by English actor Dominic West).
West’s character McNulty, though undoubtedly a likable Irish-American rogue is too much of a cop-show stereotype (hard-drinking, divorced, unable to quite make his alimony payments &c., dedicated to solving the case to the detriment of everything else in his life) to be of comparable interest to some of the other characters, despite the fact that he does have a 3-dimensionality that elevates him above his equivalents in more pedestrian programs. But even the relative blandness of McNulty is really a small flaw, because the show never seems to make the character more than a lynchpin: a familiar face that we can follow into unfamiliar parts of town with some sympathy, and some recognition. In this sense, the show is from its beginning, and ever more from its first season onwards, an ensemble piece where the ensemble recalls not only a modern Dickens but his inevitable French “version” (to say a phrase that would have me lynched in Paris) Victor Hugo.
Lastly, I should also say, at the risk of anti-climax that the show has one character, who, I’m tempted to say belongs to the literary-treasure house of the world, despite the fact that his presence in the show marks the intersection of the world of The Wire with something from a completely different genre. I am talking here about the character of Omar Little (played by Michael K. Williams).
Omar is a character, who among all of the rhythmic, poetic dialogue, has perhaps the most rhythmical delivery and poetic phrasing of any of the characters: it’s a delight to watch him saunter between one scene and the next, scattering his strange drawling in the argot of the Baltimore street like a kind of gangster Zen master whose always one step away from turning to the camera for a Shakespearean soliloquy that will have the audience in tears. Omar’s role is brilliantly, wonderfully preposterous: a scarred, openly gay, fearless, muscular, shotgun-carrying lunatic/urban-cum-avenging angel who makes his living (as he happily admits to anyone who asks) stealing drugs from other drug-dealers at shot-gun point, in between sleeping with handsome young men, and (later in the series) keeping together a tight family-like “crew” that includes gun-toting lesbian couples of a kind that might have sprung from a late night drinking session between Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.
If you think that this seems like a strange carry-over from the graphic-novel superhero story you’d be right. And yet (the Dickensian thing again) Omar is, like Estella, or Sidney Carson or Scrooge or Jean Valjean or Eponine or Monsieur Thernadiér or Claude Frollo is completely believable as much as he is ludicrously extravagant, and present for the purpose of delighting the audience. In fact, the poignancy of what happens to his character, as the show goes on is all the greater because it’s like seeing an Immortal character from a more comic-book kind of film (Clint Eastwood’s character from a spaghetti Western, or even “Iron Man”) suddenly being forced to realise that not even the man with super-powers is immune to the toll taken by everyday life on the streets of Baltimore. (Oh, and a propos of nothing, Williams should definitely be cast as ‘Thor’ in the upcoming film of the same name.)
Thus, for all of Omar’s extravagance and charisma, we never doubt that his prototype could have really once walked the streets of the real (as opposed to fictional) Baltimore. It is interesting on this note that, even the actor who plays Omar apparently has – more than anyone else in the cast — a background most similar to that of his character. One example of this is the fact that the enormous scar that marrs Omar’s face is not the result of any labour by The Wire’s make-up department.
What this demonstrates is the well-known principle that the legend is sometimes closer to the reality – that if you leave out the more extravagant, fanciful parts of reality and only to print what seems to fit the sober law of averages and bell curves, you miss part of realit just as much as if you had told a story that featured nothing but caricatures.
And no-one, believe me could ever accuse The Wire of “Romanticism” a word which, in the endlessly evocative ‘tattoo-across-the-soul’ Baltimore’ that it presents, probably means something like “hoping that your most diligent works might make even an iota of difference to anything or anyone.” On this theme, it’s possible that the show will be (or has been) criticized in some quarters for the ostensibly ‘pacifying’ effects of its pessimism.
But I’m not at all sure that this would be justified.
While, of course, watching The Wire is, in one sense, as ‘passive’ as watching any other television show (i.e. no-one has yet found, that I know of, a way to storm the Bastille from the couch, )I see no reason to suggest that the show’s attempt to portray systematic injustice unflinchingly (as opposed to the tragedy of this or that individual soul), yet with the dramatic nous that makes it a genuine pleasure to watch should be as a sign that the show contributes to cynicism, and thus to apathy or despair. This argument would make sense only if you were prepared to argue that any focus on structural problems as opposed to simply enumerating the rich possibilities for collective action inevitably had the lesson that ‘there’s no point in doing anything’: at, any rate, by this logic Das Kapital is ‘pacifying.’
Against this, I”ll suggest that there’s always something at least potentially emancipating in a gaze that is prepared to look for the truth of something. As long as we don’t make the classic cynical mistake of taking truth for merely the absence of illusions, it’s still possible to find that a gaze that tries to, in journalistic cliché, “stare unflinchingly at reality” may succeed at the important task of making what was previously invisible, visible. And every change in the distribution of the visibile and the invisible is one more step towards changes in what we take for granted as setting the bounds of the psosible. Anymore than this, is obviously, up to us, becomes genuinely political: hard to ask more of entertainmen, especially of the kind that by its nature tends to be consumed in (at least relative) isolation.
[Original article (includes pictures, parenthetical remarks and links to other websites can be found at http://http://prettycoolforaniconodule.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/born-into-this-in-which-i-review-three-seasons-of-the-wire-and-mention-avatar-with-the-lip-curling-scorn-it-deserves/]
Maladjusted is a philosophy PhD student from Melbourne Australia whose interest include Plato, Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, the history of political philosophy and contemporary Christian theology.? His second blog ‘pretty cool (for an iconodule)” is dedicated to? cultural criticism, satire and shameless auto-hagioraphy.
Before getting into exploring the three most commonly bought types of humidors, it might be a good idea to come up with a brief ‘primer’ as to what a humidor is, for the benefit of those who may be encountering them for the first time. Now, humidors are spaces with controlled humidity, used for storing things that would be ruined if exposed to the severe humidity variations. The things we are looking here include, for instance, cigars, cigarettes, and the semi-processed tobacco that is usually sold for people looking to use in for their pipes. Tobacco, as we know it, is very sensitive to variations in temperature. The easiest way to ruin it is by exposing it to huge temperature variations. It therefore becomes imperative to strictly control the humidity in the place where it is stored, with humidors coming in handy in that role.
Now humidors take all shapes and come in all sizes. There are some whose measurements are in terms of cubic inches (where the humidor is a small box-like structure that you place on your table, even in your traveling bag). And then there are those that are huge, sometimes filling a huge room or even a whole building floor. In cases like these (where we are talking of the room/building filling humidors), the humidor tends not to be a ‘stand-alone’ structure that is brought in; but rather, it is the room or the building that is redesigned to act as a humidor. All it takes, in any case, is to control the humidity conditions in a given space, to turn that space into a humidor.
There are many companies that make and sell humidors. In the market, the humidors are usually categorized according to, among other things, their sizes. And from this categorizing criterion, we end up with a five types of humidors: room humidors, table humidors, cabinet humidors, travel humidors and personal humidors. And some of these types of humidors tend to be more commonly bought than others.
The most commonly bought variety of humidors are, arguably, those that are known as personal humidors. These are usually very modest in size, and are especially popular amongst (individual) cigar lovers. They can be useful for the people who their cigars in bulk, yet who are not heavy smokers, so that the stock of cigarettes bought today could stay for a couple of months or so – during which time they may get messed up by humidity changes. A typical personal humidor will usually have capacity for up to, say, 70 cigars.
Another commonly bought variety of humidors are those that are known as table humidors. They tend to be bigger than the personal humidors, with capacity for several hundreds to a thousand cigars. They are popular with cigar sellers.
Then there are travel humidors, as another variety of commonly bought humidors. Strictly speaking, these fall under the category of personal humidors; but with specialized features for travel. They will tend to take fewer cigars than the typical personal humidors that are created for home usage (so that while the average personal humidor has capacity for 70 cigars, the average travel humidor could take in between 10 and 40).
The other two varieties of humidors – room humidors and cabinet humidors – are less common, being as they are, humidors meant for large scale applications.
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Smoking has become the affliction of a large magnitude of people and others seem to be joining the smoke bandwagon at an alarming rate. Smoking has become a very common sight with one out of every fifth person being a smoker. The trend of smoking has become very common among teenagers also. The problems one gets due to smoking are many, but they do not seem to encourage people to stop smoking or deter people for starting to smoke. The hazardous effects of smoking are many, but people do not seem to be paying heed; the tobacco companies seem to be the only one is reaping the rewards out of smoking.
Since tobacco was born, it has been a few companies dominate the tobacco industry. These companies control most of the production and distribution around the world. They are quick to adapt to their policies and tactics to conform to the regulations set by the government and cater to the needs of the ever-increasing number of smokers around the world.
Tobacco companies of the world
A few companies hold the tobacco production and control of tobacco; the three largest companies sell close to two thirds of the entire supply. The stagnation in demand has prompted them to explore new markets.
The government is in a predicament since the tobacco industry accounts for a vast amount of jobs, but it also has to protect the health of its citizens. The government has tried to cut down on smokers by increasing the taxes imposed on them. By increasing the taxes on tobacco products and leveling higher duties on the companies, the companies are forced to raise the prices, which indirectly reduce use; since higher priced goods will be used less often. There is not much the government can do since tobacco is not a banned product.
The large companies also diversify their business to keep abreast in the market. They use various ways the companies diversify.
By market segments: Products are usually divided into categories, from high priced premium cigarettes to low and middle class of cigarettes. Companies with big brand names sell premium high priced cigarettes but also expand in to lower class to protect them from susceptibility. A decline in of premium cigarettes will be ploughed back by the in the lower or middle brands of cigarettes.
By target group: Every cigarette has its target group. By creating a new target group, the company can raise its overall market share. Thus the need to branch out into women cigarettes and target young people.
This targeting of women and youngsters has been seen in bad light. The tobacco industry has long targeted young people with its advertising and promotional campaigns. One of the most memorable, “Joe Camel” campaign initiated by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, helped generate public outrage against tobacco company efforts to reach young audiences and it is no longer used. The reason is obvious, most people start smoking at an early age. Getting a hold on a new segment will increase its share in the market.
Women are also a segment that the industries try to win over. Cigarettes for women are put forward as a symbol of liberation and some even shown in the light of slimming products. Manufacturers produce (long, slim) cigarettes especially for women. Perfumed or scented cigarettes with exotic flavors are targeted at women. Cigarettes usually have the word “slim” or “lights” to attract women consumers. Minorities are also a target for the tobacco industry.
Diversification by tobacco products: cigarettes companies also try to branch out into other tobacco products. For example, Imperial tobacco has decided to branch out into the roll your own segment; it dominates both the tobacco and the paper for this segment.
Diversification by non-tobacco products: food seems to be the favorite for companies seeking to diversify. R.J. Reynolds bought Nabisco (which, in turn, was later acquired by Kraft) owned by Philip Morris. Japan Tobacco derives a (small) part of its from food. Logistics and wholesaling are another favorite
Austria Tabak, wholesaling of tobacco and other products (and the operation of vending machines) makes up a large share of turnover. Over 20 per cent of Altadis’ earnings originate in its logistics division. Skandinavisk Tobakskompagni owns the largest wholesaler of consumer goods in Denmark. BAT tried financial services (but, since 1998, is a pure tobacco company).
Diversification into food and other activities makes the tobacco companies less dependent on (slow-growing) of tobacco products. However, the profit margins in these industry are usually well below those attained in tobacco processing. Producing and marketing cigarettes remain the more lucrative activity.
Incase of diversification by geographical market, OECD-based tobacco companies are keen to reduce their dependence on their stagnant home markets and establish a presence in markets where growth is above average. After having started business in many markets in Latin
America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Central Asian republics in the 1990s, their center of attention is shifting to the Far East. All the major tobacco companies now have a presence in Poland, Russia and the Central Asian republics. Austria Tabak, which gained a presence in
Estonia when it acquired the cigarette activities of Swedish Match also has a 67 per cent market share in Guinea. The company was considering entering Asian markets when it was taken over by Gallaher in June 2001. Through this take-over and the acquisition in 2000 of Liggett-Ducat, the Moscow cigarette maker, Gallaher greatly reduced its dependence on the UK market. Similarly, Japan Tobacco became a world player when it acquired the international activities of R.J. Reynolds. Thanks to a relentless internationalization drive, Germany’s Reemtsma now sells less than one-third of its total in its home market (compared to over 60 per cent in 1991) (see also figure 6). It is now on the go in several Central and Eastern European countries and, in 1999, it acquired Cambodia’s Paradise Tobacco Company.
The government.
A predicament is generally faced by the Governments all across the world. On the one hand, tobacco-growing and processing can makes a large contribution to employment, tax revenue and foreign exchange receipts. In many developing and formerly centrally planned economies, the tobacco companies have made sizeable and most welcome investments when other investors were disinclined to do so. On the other hand, governments have the responsibility to protect the population’s health. Smoking is harmful to health and treating people for smoking-related illnesses is expensive. This can lead to heated debates within the same government as each sector defends the interests it believes it should represent.
The economic importance of tobacco growing and processing differs from country to country. At the national level, cigarette ( and import) tax can be a main source of government revenue. In Russia, cigarette tax revenue contributes around 8 per cent to the financing of the state budget.
When the government owns the industry, it receives profits in addition to tax. That is why, in so many countries, State monopolies continue to control cigarette trade and production. In China, proceeds from state-owned CNTC amounted to the equivalent of US$11,000 million in 1999. CNTC has been the Chinese State’s top revenue generator for years. Japan Tobacco earned more than US$400 million for the Japanese State in the fiscal year ending March 2000. The monopolies can also play a social function. In Italy, several of the state monopoly’s factories are to be found in areas of high unemployment.
Then there are balance of payments issues to mull over, many low-income countries rely on the export of cash crops such as tobacco to pay for the service of their foreign debt.
Tobacco exports made up close to 10 per cent of Cuba’s exports in 1997-98. In the case of
Tanzania it was 15 per cent, In Zimbabwe over 25 per cent and in Malawi tobacco exports made up two-thirds of commodity exports.
Citizens smoke. But, if they smoke domestically produced cigarettes, using homegrown tobacco or use imported cigarettes and tobaccos can make a large difference when foreign exchange is scarce. That explains why so many countries try to restrict the imports of cigarettes and encourage domestic producers to use local tobaccos, for example, by providing a favorable tax treatment to companies that use a minimum percentage of homegrown tobaccos. The cigarette companies have also been a key source of investment in the formerly centrally planned countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. When others were disinclined to invest, those companies saw the possibilities offered by a blend of pent-up consumer demand, outdated production facilities and the association with independence and “western style” living that so appealed to the people in these countries after many years of central planning and little consumer choice. After having lobbied successfully for the reduction of restrictions of Asian markets such as Japan and the Republic of Korea, the large tobacco companies are eagerly waiting for the opening up of the other economies (notably China) that continue to restrict imports from and/or investments by foreign tobacco companies.
Tobacco growing, processing and exports can thus make a significant involvement to national employment and national income. Yet, however important tobacco growing and processing may be at the national level, its full economic and social significance is best grasped at the micro or regional level. In some regions, tobacco is grown side by side with the crop, which is the main source of income; its contribution to overall income is modest. However, in many others, tobacco is a main source of income and employment.
Tobacco growing and tobacco processing may bring substantial economic and social benefits, but the treatment of smoking-related illness is costly. Cigarette smoking causes cancer. It is addictive. The WHO estimates that tobacco products cause around 3 million deaths per year. Cigarette smoking is the major cause of preventable mortality in developed countries. In the mid-1990s, about 25 per cent of all male deaths in developed countries were due to smoking. Among men aged 35-69 years, more than one-third of all deaths were caused by smoking. The costs of treating all these people are clearly enormous (WHO, 1997).
So far, smoking has not had the same impact on mortality among women and among people from developing countries. There is an approximate 30-40 year time lag between the onset of persistent smoking and deaths from smoking. The effects of the greater incidence of smoking between these two groups will thus be felt with a lag, but it seems reasonable to believe that its impact on them will not differ fundamentally from that on developed country males.
It may be argued that smokers willingly take a certain health risk when enjoying their smoke. They like the taste and all the other things that they associate with smoking. Nevertheless, this does not apply to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) or “second-hand smoke”.
Smoke gets in your eyes your clothes. Moreover, it gets in your lungs. Non-smokers cannot escape from smoke in badly ventilated areas. To be exposed to other people’s tobacco smoke can be a nuisance in addition to being a health risk for non-smokers.
Governments and conflicting pressures: How do they get by?
In practice, governments have opted for several strategies (which are often followed simultaneously). A recent strategy consists of seeking compensation for the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses. It has been followed with success in the United States, as we saw in section 3.4. Governments also set rules regarding the maximum content of hazardous substances in cigarettes. Most of all, however, governments try to discourage demand for what is, as the industry does not tire of telling us, essentially a legal product.
This is done in a variety of ways, with some governments applying particular vigor and others taking a more relaxed approach. Overall, however, the trend is clear: governments’ rules on smoking are becoming ever more restrictive. The use of tobacco products is being discouraged in several ways.
Limitation of the space where smoking is allowed.
This is done above all to protect non-smokers from involuntary exposure to tobacco smoke. Smoking is being prohibited in public places (particularly health care and educational facilities) and in mass transport. Legislation requires restaurants to reserve space for non-smokers.
Limitation by age group
It is prohibited to sell tobacco products to people under a certain age.
Limitations on points of .
The use of vending machines is being restricted because these cannot discriminate against to young people.
Health warnings stating that tobacco is harmful to health have become obligatory.
The warnings must be placed on packets and in ads, with the authorities prescribing the text and the minimum space allotted to the warning in the ad or on the pack. Governments sponsor education and public information programs on smoking and health.
Advertising bans. Restrictions concern the location of ads, the media used (no billboards, no ads in the printed media or in cinemas), the images presented (no young people, no cigarette packets), and the time when broadcasting is allowed (not during hours when children watch television).
The manufacturers are unhappy with these restrictions, and in particular with the ban on advertising. In their view, it is not proved that such a ban discourages demand for cigarettes (as its proponents claim). They are concerned about its effect on the value of their prime asset, the brand name.
Worldwide, the tobacco-processing industry employs hundreds of thousands of people. However, due to a combination of slow demand growth, consolidation, and higher productivity, this number is unlikely to increase by much in the near future. Fewer people are needed per unit of production. The industry is becoming less intensive in the use of labor. Tobacco growing, in contrast, gives work to millions of people. It continues to be a highly labour-intensive activity. The scope for productivity increases in tobacco growing would appear to be more limited than those in tobacco processing.
Over a million people are employed in the world tobacco industry
However, of this number a high percentage is employed in just three countries: China, India and Indonesia. The large number employed in China comes as no surprise in view of the large number of cigarettes (one-third of the world total) produced there. Still, the productivity gap with the United States is striking. China produces roughly three times as many cigarettes as the US, but it needs over nine times as many people to produce them. In the other two countries, the scope for productivity improvements would appear to be even higher.
THE SCENARIO TODAY.
The situation concerning smoking are scary, if global trends continue as they are doing today by 2030 more than 8 million people will die each year from tobacco related causes-80% in the developing regions of the World. In India per example where 120 million smoke 1 in 5 men will die for smoking. Smoking is on the decline in developed nations but is on a large-scale rise in developing or underdeveloped nations. The statistics are frightening, every eight seconds someone dies from smoking; about 15 billion cigarettes are sold daily. There are 1.1 billion smokers in the world today, and if things continue as they have, that number is expected to increase to 1.6 billion by the year 2025.
Smoking and use of tobacco products is on a decline in most developed countries. However, it is on a rampant increase in other developing countries.
In the US, there has been a decrease in the number of smokers. This can be attributed to the growing awareness of the damage smoking causes to the health of the individual. There is however a sad side to the story, smoking has increased to a drastic level in other countries and the figures are staggering.
China is home to 300 million smokers who consume upwards of 1.7 trillion cigarettes a year, or 3 million cigarettes a minute. As many as 100 million Chinese men presently under the age of 30 will die from tobacco use. There are approximately 120 million smokers in India today, and it is estimated that in the year 2010 alone, there will be close to one million tobacco-related deaths among men and women age 30 to 69 in India. Worldwide, tobacco use will kill more than 175 million people between now and the year 2030. Current tobacco-related health care costs in the United States total US $81 billion annually. Germany spends an average of US $7 billion, and Australia, US $1 billion each year on health care directly related to tobacco use. Health care costs associated with secondhand smoke total US $5 billion a year in the U.S. It is estimated that as many as 500 million people alive today will be killed by tobacco use. The statistics are chilling.
One reason for the sudden spurt in the numbers in these countries may be due to the arrival of tobacco companies. The lax stand of the governments in these countries makes it a good bet to start business. The anti smoking lobbies in these countries have not been able to combat the increase. Increased awareness has made it hard for tobacco companies to work in many countries and so the tobacco companies have shifted their sights to greener pastures.
These countries have a very small anti smoking lobby and the government restrictions o them are not so tough and the government is dependent on the revenues it earns from them. Setting up business in these countries has resulted in increased used of tobacco products.
The anti smoking lobby has been very effective in curtailing the spread and increase of smoking around the world.
Advertising related to tobacco has is banned in most countries. Warnings of the harmful effects of the product have to be printed on the packet. This statutory warning is mandatory in most countries. The WHO in its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which came into effect on 27 February 2005 has specified that all 168 countries should ban advertisements unless their constitutions forbade them to do so.
Today, we are aware of the hazards of smoking. Even though the people are aware of the harmful effects of smoking they rarely seem to pay heed. Everyone knows that smoking causes cancer, heart diseases and can shorten the life span of an individual. It is a highly addictive habit and smokers are at a risk of losing ten years of their life.
With so many smokers around the world, tobacco companies are the only ones gaining form the increase.
Smoking Joey-Heavy Smoker –
If you are smoking-try to quit- but in the meantime-smoke for less.
Cigars have long been associated with the rich and powerful, with relaxation and rich flavor. Cigar aficionados have created a culture around the art of smoking, assembling various theories and accessories to debate and facilitate smoking. Much like wine tasting, cigar smoking has been seen as a diversion of the upper echelons of society.
It is believed that cigars were probably first produced in Spain, and then quickly caught on in other European countries. Although many different countries manufacture cigars, Cuban cigars have long been highly regarded as one of the most flavorful and rich of all cigars. This is due to regional microclimates that are said to produce the highest quality tobacco, as well as the skill of the country’s cigar makers. Other countries that produce significant amounts of tobacco and cigars include Brazil, Mexico, Honduras, Ecuador, Cameroon, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, and the United States. Why have cigars long caught the attention of so many? Many speculate that the cigar’s main attraction is in the way it is manufactured. High quality cigars are always wrapped by hand. Unlike cigarettes, cigars undergo a lengthy process of fermentation and aging (much like wine), resulting in subtle flavors and textures. They are highly individual and the best cigars will provide no smoky aftertaste at all.
The taste of cigars is much more complex than cigarettes. The majority of all cigars are created by wrapping three different layers of tobacco leaves together. High quality cigars usually contain long leaves of nicotine as the filler, although they may also contain a combination of scraps. This results in subtle variations, different textures, and complex flavors. Cigarettes, on the other hand, are mass-produced and generally only contain one type of tobacco. Cigars also come in an incredible variety of flavors. The dedicated cigar aficionado can find chocolate, vanilla, apple, and even coffee-flavored cigars!
Although cigars have long been lauded for their smooth and complex flavors, they can also pose a great health risk. All tobacco contains nicotine. We’ve all heard about the negative health risks of nicotine, but what does it do exactly? Nicotine is a stimulant that produces a sense of euphoria. Even the casual smoker cannot escape the fact that nicotine is highly addictive and contains various toxins, carcinogens, and irritants. Although most connoisseurs of cigars will avoid inhaling the smoke, they are still at risk of developing various types of oral and larynx cancers.
Long associated with the rich and powerful, cigars evoke images of relaxation and rich flavor. A culture around the art of smoking, created and debated by cigar aficionados, assembles various theories and accessories to facilitate or enhance smoking. Cigar smoking, much like wine tasting, has for many years been viewed as a diversion of the elite of society.
The general consensus is that Spain is where cigars were first produced, catching on quickly in the other European countries. Although manufactured in many different countries, Cuban cigars have been considered one of the most flavorful and rich of all cigars for an appreciable period of time. This is due to the regional microclimates Cuba is blessed with, which are said to produce the highest quality tobacco. Combined with the skill of the country’s cigar makers, the result is a world standard in cigars. Other countries that produce sizeable amounts of tobacco and cigars include Brazil, Honduras, Ecuador, Mexico, Cameroon, Indonesia, Dominican Republic, and the United States. Many speculate that the reason cigars have long caught the attention of so many lies in the way it is manufactured. Hand wrapping is the basis of all high quality cigars. Unlike cigarettes, which are mass-produced by enormous machines, cigars undergo a lengthy process of fermentation and aging (much like wine), creating subtle flavors and textures before they are individually wrapped by craftsmen working with their own hands. This makes cigars highly individual, each with a subtle unique character, the best of which provide no smoky aftertaste at all.
The taste of cigars is also much more complex than the flavor of cigarettes. Most cigars are created by wrapping three distinct and different layers of tobacco leaves together, yielding a depth of flavor impossible from a cigarette. Long leaves of tobacco are typically used as the filler in high quality cigars, though a combination of scraps may also be used. This creates complex flavors subtle variations, and different textures. Cigarettes, on the other hand, are mass-produced, filled from gargantuan hoppers containing generally only one type of tobacco. Cigar flavor variation is further diversified by the addition of non-tobacco flavorings. If desired, a cigar aficionado can find chocolate, apple, vanilla, or even coffee-flavored cigars! Most common, however, are cigars flavored with expensive liquors.
Despite the fact that cigars have long been enjoyed for their smooth and complex flavors, smoking them does pose a considerable health risk. All tobacco products contain the addictive substance nicotine. Everyone has heard about the negative health risks of nicotine, but not everyone is familiar with how it causes them.. As even the casual smoker can attest, nicotine is a stimulant that produces a mild sense of euphoria. It is extremely addictive and cigar smoke contains a multitude of toxins, carcinogens, and irritants. There is still a significant risk of developing various types of oral and larynx cancers even though most connoisseurs of cigars will avoid inhaling the smoke.
Robert Williams enjoys writing for several web sites, on and subjects.
Cigars have long been associated with the rich and powerful, with relaxation and rich flavor. Cigar aficionados have created a culture around the art of smoking, assembling various theories and accessories to debate and facilitate smoking. Much like wine tasting, cigar smoking has been seen as a diversion of the upper echelons of society.
It is believed that cigars were probably first produced in Spain, and then quickly caught on in other European countries. Although many different countries manufacture cigars, Cuban cigars have long been highly regarded as one of the most flavorful and rich of all cigars. This is due to regional microclimates that are said to produce the highest quality tobacco, as well as the skill of the country’s cigar makers. Other countries that produce significant amounts of tobacco and cigars include Brazil, Mexico, Honduras, Ecuador, Cameroon, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, and the United States. Why have cigars long caught the attention of so many? Many speculate that the cigar’s main attraction is in the way it is manufactured. High quality cigars are always wrapped by hand. Unlike cigarettes, cigars undergo a lengthy process of fermentation and aging (much like wine), resulting in subtle flavors and textures. They are highly individual and the best cigars will provide no smoky aftertaste at all.
The taste of cigars is much more complex than cigarettes. The majority of all cigars are created by wrapping three different layers of tobacco leaves together. High quality cigars usually contain long leaves of nicotine as the filler, although they may also contain a combination of scraps. This results in subtle variations, different textures, and complex flavors. Cigarettes, on the other hand, are mass-produced and generally only contain one type of tobacco. Cigars also come in an incredible variety of flavors. The dedicated cigar aficionado can find chocolate, vanilla, apple, and even coffee-flavored cigars!
Although cigars have long been lauded for their smooth and complex flavors, they can also pose a great health risk. All tobacco contains nicotine. We’ve all heard about the negative health risks of nicotine, but what does it do exactly? Nicotine is a stimulant that produces a sense of euphoria. Even the casual smoker cannot escape the fact that nicotine is highly addictive and contains various toxins, carcinogens, and irritants. Although most connoisseurs of cigars will avoid inhaling the smoke, they are still at risk of developing various types of oral and larynx cancers.
the Angels are the servants of the Almighty Creator and they never disobey Him.
— it’s just that the show continually reinforces the fact that if individuals really have to struggle in the face of an utterly corrupt system (to the point that the fates of certain of the more well-intentioned characters throughout the show frequently recall the plot of de Sade’s Misfortunes of Virtue”and Voltaire’s Candide): i.e. no good intention (let alone deed) goes unpunished in a world where having a good attitude (“I can speak to people of all creeds and colours without any screaming ‘kill the interloper’ prejudices”) means precisely what Kurt Vonnegut would call “doodly-squat” in the face of the deeply embedded social inequalities that are all geared up to perpetuate themselves into the next century.