Letters to the Editor
Matt DeCoursey
Published Letters: 7 Editor's Choice: 1
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"Nine of the top 10 songs on the United Arab Emirates singles chart are hip-hop or R&B."
[Read the article: Beyoncé Knowles, freedom fighter]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You should realize when you read this that 85% of the population of the Emirates consists of foreign hired help. This includes large numbers of native English-speaking managers and teachers, as well as Pakistani labourers and Filipina and Sri Lankan housemaids. It's very easy for foreigners to set up businesses there (at least in Dubai), so the great majority of businesspeople are foreigners too. It'd be really surprising if the top 40 were not predominantly global-level English-language pop music, so don't go thinking this is any kind of gauge of Arab or Muslim musical taste.
I have a problem both with the analysis of the situation in pop music in this article, and also with some of the comment. Russell presents African-American culture as proceeding essentially unchanged into the Muslim world, dominating people's sense of the good life. As Habibi points out, different Muslim countries are different. I lived in Turkey for three years, and from what I an see, Turkish pop music is predominant, and the Western pop music they like is largely not hiphop. (Pink is a big star there. Her image is inescapable in Istanbul just now.) When I went to Syria once, I was struck with the range and creativity of Arab pop videos. Some of them are tinged with hiphop or R & B, but that's not African-American culture just sliding unchanged into Arab culture. That's Arab musicians listening, appropriating, leaving aside the things they don't like and throwing in bits of Arab traditional music if that's what they do like. To say that what they do is "just" copying black American musicians is equivalent to claiming that the Beatles were merely copying their American sources.
There's a global level of pop culture, and American music is the single most important presence in it. But places are specific, too, and that's not going to change.
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Same tactic used against the Muslim world
[Read the article: Howard Kurtz, Michael Barone & Argument by Anecdote]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn Greenwald is quite right about this tactic. I often notice the same thing with articles on the Muslim world: take some genuinely crazy statement often out of a Saudi newspaper and hold it up as representative of the Muslim world. Never mind that huge numbers of Muslims think the Saudis are lunatics and would be appalled to see a Saudi form of society imposed on their own countries.
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A fine interview. Congratulations.
[Read the article: The religious state of Islamic science]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This interview goes a long way to fill a gap in media portrayal of the Muslim world. It creates a picture of intellectual life, especially in Turkey, with limitations and struggles, but with reality. Mr. Edis is sophisticated and well-informed on the history of science--not something that comes automatically with a background in physics. And it's a pleasure to run across a journalist who knows that Newton was interested in alchemy.
The only problem I have is with the blurb: the Golden Age of Mesopotamia was golden, and Edis seems to say so in the article. What he says is that it wasn't in the modern sense scientific. That doesn't mean that it wasn't a golden age of intellectual ferment, a time of great human creativity.
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On the Long Tail and Today's Kids
[Read the article: What's the matter with kids today?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Let us reflect on the significance of the "Analytic Bibliography of On-Line Neo-Latin Texts" by Dana F. Sutton. It lists, at present, 24,965 texts in Latin available on the Internet, published in the Renaissance or later, all of which someone has entered and edited. I suspect there are texts here of interest to perhaps 2 people other than their editor. The whole field of Neo-Latin studies is tiny and ultra-specialized. Most Renaissance specialists don't know what goes on inside it.
How many other fields are there like this? How many groups of a few thousand people are there, building human knowledge in fields that no one else cares about?
Will there be a next generation for neo-Latin studies? Absolutely there will. More young people study Latin now than did in my generation. I had to pick it up as a graduate student.
Things will be lost. Yet I feel lucky when I hear young people sing Queen songs. I once had the amazing experience of listening to extensive extracts from Jesus Christ Superstar sung from memory by a Romanian teenager. We are lucky to be of a generation with quite a small generation gap, and it sometimes doesn't seem to exist at all. Our juniors know some of our songs and respect what we know.
I live in Hong Kong and teach at a postsecondary institution. My students are not erudite, about Chinese history and literature any more than Western. But I don't believe they constitute a descent from the past. Their strengths are just elsewhere.
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Jeremiah Wright and the preaching tradition
[Read the article: Rev. Jeremiah Wright isn't the problem]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Jeremiah Wright's "God damn America" sermon has perfectly standard Protestant themes:
1. He lists human empires (German, Japanese, French, and, in most detail, British).
2. He says that all failed to provide justice, because only God is just.
3. He says to the congregation that they shouldn't think that they are better than others, that their own country is no more just than the rest. (Hiroshima, internment of Japanese Americans, massacre of North American Indians...). In each case, he says "we" did these things, not separating black from white. He's not playing black victim here.
4. In this context, he brings up slavery and Jim Crow laws.
5. When he says "God damn America," he's being biblical enough. Consider the words of the prophet: "Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward" (Isaiah 1:4).
There's nothing remarkable here. It's got its loony side, but that looniness is straight from the Bible and from the religious tradition. I don't think it's at all surprising that McCain's preacher is just as loony.
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"Slut"
[Read the article: Girls on Miley Cyrus: She's a slut]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This interview is an example of what I have long thought. Words like "slut" are used almost exclusively by women and girls to refer to other women and girls. The whole structure of meaning is internal to the female world, and has very little directly to do with men and boys. It's about girls and women exercising control over each other.