Americans discover Tunisia, cont’d

In response to this post, a reader writes:

I’ve been to several Muslim countries and have warm receptions in each. I found your site b/c I want to travel to Tunisia next. I do find it sad, and a bit weak that you have a ‘well practiced Canadian mode’ because I think it’s important to be proud of your nationality and by showing people that we Americans are not stereotypical jerks. By lying about where you are from, you are strengthing the stereotypes.

To an extent, my story was hyperbole, as so far in my travels and during my stints in Spain, I’ve never said I was from Canada and I’ve never been in a situation where I thought I might have to, and I think it’s quite possible that I never will.  Also, perhaps I should have qualified what I meant by “anti-american sentiment”.  I’m not referring to just negative attitudes or the sneer that might appear when someone finds out where I’m from (because that I’ve experienced).  I’m referring to the bellicose kind, any situation where I would actually feel that my safety was in jeopardy, especially if I were confronted with a group rather than just one person, and particularly since I am a woman.  (And quite small.)

Thanks to my mom for sending me this Bizarro edition!

As I don’t know the reader, I wonder if it wouldn’t boil down to a fundamental difference in views on pride, nationality, and patriotism.  While I love where I’m from and in some ways I feel I’m lucky to be from there, historically I’ve not been enthusiastically proud of my country (that has started to change since the 2008 election), nor have I tended to curse it for being a terrible place.  I’m not someone who has always felt closely tied to my American nationality, as so many of us came from somewhere else relatively recently — on my mom’s side I’m only the third generation born in the U.S. — and in many ways I believe that being American is more a way of life and a system of political beliefs rather than a nationality.  And I don’t think I can say that I’ve ever been a super-patriot.  Actually I’m an expatriate, which, while I wouldn’t agree with them, some Americans equate with being anti-American.  There are definitely situations in which I would be willing to die for my country, but more so because that implies many lives rather than caring specifically about American lives, and there are lots of others where I can tell you that I don’t love being an American so much that I wouldn’t pretend to be from somewhere else if it meant saving a life…  The fact that I’ve even seriously thought about my Canada idea — and the fact that I’m not the only American I know who has one — says much more than the idea itself.

I do believe it’s good, when abroad, to try to represent your country and your country’s people as best you can.  In fact, it’s my job.  My gig here with the Spanish government is twofold: to help the students and teachers learn English and to be a cultural ambassador.  And while I understand that my reader doesn’t like the idea of hiding one’s nationality, I have difficulty seeing how not showing pride in being American, if confronted with anti-American hostility, would perpetuate our stereotypes.  The worst of our  stereotypes say that we’re arrogant, gluttonous, uneducated imperialists, not spineless, self-loathing apologists.  I can’t say if a foreign America-hater would consider it weak or not, but I can’t imagine it playing worse than an American tourist displaying pride in his or her nationality when it would be dangerous or inappropriate to do so, or being aloof and boastful without regard to the environment. Indeed, I do not agree that it’s important to be proud of your nationality.  I think it’s ideal to be able to be proud of your nationality, but saying it’s important to be proud of it is presuming an inherent obligation to your nationality and country, and to a fault. 

Still, I’ve been pondering my reader’s comments and his/her words did sting.  There have been times, while contemplating lying about where I’m from, when I have felt the guilt of a  perfidious expat betraying who I am.  But I’m not convinced that lying about your country of birth can be likened to recanting your religious faith or something in which you fiercely believe in the face of persecution…  Am I wrong?  Right?  Thoughts?

Here — enjoy another one of my pictures from Tunisia! 

Recent creepy/amusing/intriguing searches

I was excited to discover upon switching my blog over here a while back that in Blog Stats you can see lists of search engine topics people enter that lead them to your blog.  Only recently, however, did I start paying any attention to them, and the amusement that has ensued has had me scouring the archives to see all the wacky and strange things that bring people to my site.  Of all the things I write about, so far among my most visited posts are ones that deal with popularity and mean girls, punishment, and fashion.  (Every day there are several if not dozens of searches for “mean girls” that bring people to my site.)  Here’s are some of the “best” searches so far, along with my guesses on who could be the searchers — and feel free to send me your guesses:

• “middle school sluts” (dirty old pervert; horny middle-school pervert; middle-school girl either considering becoming a slut or pondering her slutty schoolmates)
• “bad girls high school” (see above)
• “women getting sluttier” (see above above, except adults)
• “exposed girls” (obvious, and I’m not sure yet how I feel about these searches leading people to my blog…I’ll let you know when I decide)
• “overalls fashionable” (someone wanting to know if they are; someone who delights in oxymora; someone who delights in oxymora and is possibly a native Spanish-speaker)
• “dinosaurs+taping+thumbs” (surely someone who knows about this; someone I might want to be friends with)
• “social hierarchy posers tools” (trying to figure out where they are in the pyramid?)
• “legs pre teen girls” (dirty old pervert; pre-teen girl experiencing self-esteem issues)
• I’m not actually putting this one down but it was a URL and it led to a rape-fantasy site (yikes)
• “what was the name of the book chaza gave” (assuming they were referring to Chávez giving Obama a book, someone who should read more)
• “emo girl at hotel” (?)
• “ways of hanging out with the populars” (obvious; or someone doing research; the sad part is that I searched that to see what popped up and the first result was a forum where a girl was saying that her mom wanted her to be popular and tried to get her to hang out with the popular crowd…moms like that should be punched in the ovaries)
• “raped girls video free” (AAGGHH)

More as I get them.

¡Ni una sonrisa! Madrid’s police force is insane.

We went on a very strange field trip yesterday.

It got off to a rough start, after our administrators had told us to take our thirty-one kids to the busy plaza by our school to wait for the bus.  It was cold outside.  The kids are rowdy.  After about twenty minutes, we called the school, and the vice principal said she’d call us back.  A few minutes later the bus arrived, the driver saying he’d been waiting outside the front door of the school for half an hour.

Off we went to a police station on the outskirts of the city.  The main goal of the excursion was for the kids to learn about what the police to do help and protect them, a supplement to the educación vial sessions they had earlier in the year where cops came to the school and taught the kids about traffic lights and looking both ways.  Not as fun when you’re not in Safety Town and don’t have movies narrated by Jiminy Cricket.

The cop running the show seemed energetic and friendly.  We all filed into a cold, concrete room and our kids took up the first few rows, waiting for some kids from another school to arrive, and he explained that anyone who doesn’t want to listen to him could go wait on the bus.  Fair enough.  Establishing authority, discipline, and I don’t blame him because our kids need it.  But then the other students — interesting, new, different, fascinating children from another school — come in, something that will obviously catch the attention of a third-grader, and our kids turned their heads to examine the newcomers.  The cop, let’s call him Franco, goes into this whole spiel about how he doesn’t want to see a single kid turn their head around, not once.  And when he starts the PowerPoint presentation and does his narration, they are not to look at him while he talks, ONLY the screen, and NOTHING else and he doesn’t want to see ANY heads turning while the screen is on.  (And I can assure you that for all the technology that the Madrid police force touts, PowerPoint is not their strong suit and the kids would not have missed out on anything by just looking at the floor the whole time.)  

Americans discover Tunisia

I haven’t posted for a while, and there are lots of things I’ve been wanting to write about.  First up, Tunisia:

I just got back from a vacation in Tunisia, a trip I took with two other Americans and one Spaniard.  It was amazing and beautiful and the people were exceedingly kind and friendly, but the most important thing I want to talk about is the strange sensation of being American in a type of country (read: Muslim) and a part of the world to which many Americans don’t dare to trek, especially not for leisure.  In some cases, it is with good reason; I don’t see myself booking a vacation to Iraq any time soon.  Likewise, as since returning from our trip we’ve decided that we would like to explore more of North Africa and have therefore been doing a bit of research, if a trustworthy guide (like Rick Steves or Lonely Planet) warns that a place is very dangerous, in general or for tourists or for Americans specifically, I will likely imagine the worst and refrain from going there.

 

And in any foreign country, particularly when you’re from a nation that doesn’t have the best reputation in the world, you’ll do well to stay alert.  Obviously I didn’t walk around waving an American flag or boasting about my nationality, and had I, at any time, picked up any sort of anti-American sentiment, I would have kept my mouth shut and gone into my well-practiced I’m-from-Canada mode.

Ann Arbor News, R.I.P. in your (kind of) new intangible home

My hometown newspaper is going under, and will officially cease printing in July of this year.  A new web-based news company will go up in its place, AnnArbor.com, which is good, but this is still a sad loss and it still means that some good jobs are gone.

Perhaps they can use this to continue or better the news community in Ann Arbor.  Despite the high level of education in the city, our newspaper does not have a reputation for being near-perfect or particularly typo-free.  They could use this to clean house and fix things up a little.  As the News’s article says:

“The Ann Arbor News was struggling as a daily print newspaper, with steep losses in 2008,” Champion said. “At the same time the demand for local news and information in a wired community has never been stronger.”

There are a lot of talented journalists and web-savvy people in Ann Arbor.  I’m hopeful that this will not mean the death of Ann Arbor News, so much as a new and brighter direction for journalism, information, knowledge and communication in my hometown.

VP Biden Exposed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Visit Wonkette to see Biden outed and FOX NEWS claim victory once again

Wow, FOX NEWS has done it again and exposed the Obama administration for what it really is.  It reminds me of Al Franken talking about Ann Coulter and how she clearly has no respect for her readers and apparently thinks they’re all idiots.  FOX viewers, your trusted oracles think you have no brain.  Do you really want to rely on these people for information?

Anyway there’s nothing poignant or funny I can think of at the moment that Wonkette hasn’t already said.  Go here.

“Corrective rape” to deal with lesbians

South African lesbians are living every day knowing that because they are homosexual they may be raped and brutalized at any moment.  And the women aren’t the only ones subjected to the abuse—their family members suffer, too.  The Guardian’s Annie Kelly reports on what these women face.  The women interviewed appear surprisingly resilient, strong, able to talk about their experiences, but these are only a few of the many victims.  

Even more disturbing, and infuriating, than listening to the men in the video is that these women and their cases are being ignored in South African courts.  Reports Kelly:

The partially clothed body of Eudy Simelane, former star of South Africa’s acclaimed Banyana Banyana national female football squad, was found in a creek in a park in Kwa Thema, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Simelane had been gang-raped and brutally beaten before being stabbed 25 times in the face, chest and legs. As well as being one of South Africa’s best-known female footballers, Simelane was a voracious equality rights campaigner and one of the first women to live openly as a lesbian in Kwa Thema.

Her brutal murder took place last April, and since then a tide of violence against lesbian women in South Africa has continued to rise. Human rights campaigners say it is characterised by what they call “corrective rape” committed by men behind the guise of trying to “cure” lesbian women of their sexual orientation.

… Despite more than 30 reported murders of lesbian women in the last decade, Simelane’s trial has produced the first conviction, when one man who pleaded guilty to her rape and murder was jailed last month.

On sentencing, the judge said that Simelane’s sexual orientation had “no significance” in her killing. The trial of a further three men pleading not guilty to rape, burglary and murder will start in July.

In Soweto and Kwa Thema, women seem unconvinced that Simelane’s case will change anything for the better.

UPDATE: A reader posted a comment about NGO ActionAid that I would like to add to this post, as Kelly talks about ActionAid in her article, and as surely some of you are interested in what can be done:

“Corrective” rape survivors interviewed by ActionAid (global NGO based in South Africa) were told by their abusers that they were “teaching [them] a lesson” and “showing [them] how to be real women and what a man tasted like”.

If you’re interested in ActionAid’s report on Hate Crimes in South Africa, and our work to combat violence against women, please visit the UK site:

http://www.actionaid.org.uk/101756/hate_crimes_the_rise_of_corrective_rape_in_south_africa.html

Together we can end shameful and brutal oppression of women.

BOP talks with Ludacris, Common, Xzibit, oh my!

Click on the image to see more!

Burn One Productions, owned and run by the talent and imagination of my good friend Ashley Eberbach, has a new and exciting video on BOP Blog TV, featuring BOP correspondent Heather Storm’s trip, with an all-access pass, to the Hip Hop 101 Music & Arts Festival.  She interviews Common, Ludacris, and Xzibit about their music, their work in the movie industry, black history, and more.  ALSO, she’s wearing my drawing (the car on her T-shirt) the entire time!  To watch the interviews, click here!

Ashley’s also just finished working on a new film, Shotgun Chaza, which you can watch at the BurnOnePro YouTube channel.  The short film stars Catherine King, Casey Peters, Jason Burks, and Ryan Fogle.  Michael D. Lynch, John Corser, and Mike Hedge co-produced with Ashley.

One more thing: Blogs, Vlogs, and all things on-line are bigger than ever in the entertainment industry.  BOP has been growing rapidly, and you can help us keep it up by subscribing to the BOP Vlog!

Thanks and enjoy!

The world’s most fashionable people…in overalls

So, I’m a big fan of The Sartorialist.  I love to look at the pictures and get ideas and think of all the clothing and accessories that I want to buy and won’t because I am poor.  (I am both frustrated by and kind of proud of the fact that aside from a sale where I got six pairs of tights for 18€ last month, I have not purchased a single article of clothing or any accessories for myself since moving back to Spain in September.  Frustrated because naturally if I had more money I would and I’m seriously getting really tired of my current wardrobe; proud because the small amount of money I can spend on leisure goes toward things that most clear-headed people would consider more valuable than personal decoration…  But seriously I’m so sick of my clothes.)  

(T.S. Image links to The Sartorialist video page)

ANYway, I was poking around on the video page and on the first one of the two videos discovered a vomit-inducing woman, a fashion photographer, whose conceited tone, vintage-Madonna-ish inconsistent accent, dreadful posture* and unwarranted — given her outfit — pride in her fashion sense, make me want to laugh at her but also maybe punch her in the face.  I don’t think I’ve ever used the word “tool” when describing a woman, but I’m going to say that she’s a tool.  Wait for her, she’s toward the end.  The one with the stupid sunglasses.

In the other video available, the last girl also has a smugness about her, particularly annoying when you watch how she’s trying to poof out her lips and making poorly executed modeling faces.

These girls are asked about the best fashion advice they’ve ever gotten, and toot it as if it justifies some of the gross things in which they’ve decided to drape themselves.  The best fashion advice I’ve ever gotten is advice that I gave myself, and tell myself from time to time: Fashion is just as much about change as anything else; high fashion can be terribly ugly, trends unflattering, and looks can definitely — and frequently — be terribly ugly and unflattering on you.  Any look — trendy, preppy, goth, hippie, boho, somewhere in between or undefinable — can be done well or horribly.

* The posture thing: I’ve concluded that in a decade or two we may face an entire generation of slumped, stooped, riddled-with-back-pain adults.  I swear almost every person I see under the age of 21 (and several over) affects this slumped posture, and consistently.  Horrendous posture is not new for emo kids or goth kids or other I’m-such-a-non-conformist kids, but it’s getting out of control.  It actually appears to be trendy.  WHYYYY???

You weren’t popular.

(Image links to Mean Girls Wikipedia page)

I am fascinated by social hierarchies and social inequality, popularity struggles and the ecosystems of adolescence.  I’m also interested in the concept of popularity, which is important for the rest of this post.  ”Popular” kids in middle school in high school are widely revered for whatever reasons, but aren’t necessarily popular by definition because often times they are widely disliked outside of (or even inside of) their own cliques.  And some cliques will reject what the majority views as popular and go by their own mini-hierarchy with their own popularity contests.  Likewise, there are lots of kids who are genuinely popular in middle school and high school, in that everyone likes them, but are not considered part of the popular crowd.  When I use the term in this post, I’m generally referring to the former concept.

I mentioned in a recent post, Individualism, bad books, and conflict resolution, that Spain, or at least Madrid, seems to have a different, more relaxed system of social hierarchies in grade school and university environments.  Groups of 17-year-olds who appear to have drastically different senses of fashion, music, and pop culture preferences are frequent here, groups that are much harder to find in the United States, at least in the under-25 demographic.  Of course the fact that groups are more mixed here is not a bad thing — for youth, fashion senses are often fleeting, tastes in music fickle, and the moment’s popular trends are just that.  Later in life you (hopefully) realize that, while occasionally those things can be indicators of deeper personality traits or compatibility, there are better ways to choose your friends.

Earlier this year with my class we watched the movie Camp Rock, starring the Jonas Brothers and a bunch of other Disney hopefuls.  The plot is classic for the pre-teen genre: girl (brunette, naturally) is awesome but not popular; popular girl (blonde, naturally) is actually really insecure and has a crappier life than the unpopular girl; there’s some lying and some scheming, both parties get humiliated, they fight over a boy; unpopular girl becomes popular for being who she really is and gets boy, who, it turns out, never cared if she was popular or not because he’s actually really deep; popular girl gets back down to earth and everyone becomes friends.

During scenes in which there was a lot of cattiness and scheming on the popular girl’s part, and those where adolescent girls were going to such great lengths to break free from their social status and join a different one, my teacher was saying that it all seemed so unrealistic.  I told her that movies like this were always overdramatic, but that social hierarchies in U.S. grade schools can be very rigid and can cause kids a lot of problems.  It was something she had a hard time wrapping her mind around because it was a foreign concept to her.

In movies and TV shows that deal with cliques and popularity and the horrors of grades 6 through 12, there is often a level of cruelty that for all my high school’s cliques, popularity fights, and cutthroat girls striving to be on top, I was fortunate never to witness.  I’m referring to things like popular or athletic guys beating up geeky boys just because they’re geeky; popular kids asking an unpopular kids to a dance as a joke; physically threatening and taunting mentally challenged students.  That isn’t to say, though, that other schools in the U.S. don’t experience that sort of cruelty, nor that other types of cruelty didn’t exist in mine.  Social struggles in high school and middle school are exhausting, stressful, and sometimes harmful.  It’s rare that a kid doesn’t agonize at least a little over some sort of social issue, but there are a few here and there and I was always jealous of them.