Monday, January 28th, 2013 
On a steamy July evening in 2012, I arrived at the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo for an independently organized event entitled “Culture Shutdown.” While this museum’s name leads one to anticipate a place of grand stature to chronicle Sarajevo’s and Bosnia’s position in world history—from the outbreak of World War I to the city siege at the epicenter of the 1990s Bosnian war—what one finds is a crumbling façade juxtaposed next to a gleaming shopping center. The museum building itself is intentionally its own exhibit, left with its battle scars from nearly 20 years prior.
I happened on this event somewhat accidentally, while conducting research on a different subject. It was collaboratively organized by young professionals who work in the arts, including Dr. Azra Akšamija, Assistant Professor in Art, Culture and Technology at M.I.T., originally from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Joining her were members of the New York-based artist and on-line magazine collective, Triple Canopy, one of whom, Molly Kleiman, had lived and worked in Sarajevo.
Too hot to meet inside, the group garnered folding chairs and convened in a small circle under the trees. Having grown up in a country with no ministry of culture, where the arts are under assault whenever fiscal resources are tight (the United States), I was accustomed to the ongoing struggle for support for the arts and museums. But my country’s problems dimmed in comparison to what unfolded in this meeting: in a matter of weeks or months, seven of Bosnia’s top national cultural institutions were likely to close their doors.
As we talked, the stakes involved became clearer. This means major works of art with no storage oversight to protect them from summer heat or winter cold. It means national archeological treasures locked away with no guards to keep thieves and vandals at bay. It means no exhibits or cultural events for public education or tourism. It means the deterioration of shelves and shelves of books. It means buildings left to crumble. And it means . . .
Read more: Culture Shutdown? A Plea for Museums, Galleries, and Libraries in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Thursday, January 24th, 2013 
There was less of everything at the 2013 inauguration than in 2009 – spectators, protests, and police. The protests made up in diversity what they lacked in numbers.
A 1997 court ruling requires the National Park Service to permit some protest signs along the inaugural parade route. The NPS strategy was to allow a little bit of protest, in small, scattered spots along Pennsylvania Avenue, that wouldn’t cause too much disruption. The allocated space in 2013 was less than in the past three inaugurations, but so were the groups who wanted some place to raise their objections to the Obama administration’s policies.
The National Park Service issued five permits for “first amendment activity” for Monday, January 21. Three were for spaces on the parade route, where only those who got up very early in the morning could get to their assigned spots, and only those people in the parade, with bleacher tickets, or who were equally early risers, could see any protest signs. The Secret Service writes the rules, and among the prohibited items inside the security zone was “Supports for signs and placards.” This meant protestors had to hold up their signs in the cold if they want them to be seen.
ANSWER, which was the plaintiff in the 1997 court decision, got its usual spot on Freedom Plaza, but so many bleachers were on the Plaza facing Pennsylvania Avenue that there wasn’t much room for ANSWER to display its posters demanding “JOBS not WAR.” A few blocks down the street, the Westboro Baptist Church didn’t even have enough people to fill its few feet of permitted space. This is the group that HATES FAGS and promotes its views by picketing anything official, including military funerals. The third group was a pro-life entity that no one had heard of and which appears to have no presence on the internet.
Across the street from Freedom Plaza the DC government hosted its own protest, without having to get a permit. It built a booth in front of its executive office . . .
Read more: Protesting at the 2013 Inauguration
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013 
I wonder if Cornell West ever has second thoughts.
At a “Poverty in America” forum held at George Washington University on January 17th, West forcefully criticized Barack Obama for taking his oath of office at his second inauguration on Martin King Jr.’s bible. See below for a clip of West’s remarks.
West was sure and authoritative, as a self appointed spokesman for the oppressed, in the name of the oppressed, and their great leader, Martin Luther King Jr.:
“You don’t play with Martin Luther King, Jr. and you don’t play with his people. By his people, I mean people of good conscience, fundamentally good people committed to peace and truth and justice, especially the Black tradition that produced it.
All of the blood, sweat and tears that went into producing a Martin Luther King, Jr. generated a brother of such high decency and dignity that you don’t use his prophetic fire for a moment of presidential pageantry without understanding the challenge he represents to all of those in power regardless of what color they are.
The righteous indignation of a Martin Luther King, Jr. becomes a moment of political calculation. And that makes my blood boil. Why? Because Martin Luther King, Jr. died…he died…for the three crimes against humanity that he was wrestling with. Jim Crow, traumatizing, terrorizing, stigmatizing Black people. Lynching, not just ‘segregation’ as the press likes to talk about.
Second: Carpet bombing in Vietnam killing innocent people, especially innocent children, those are war crimes that Martin Luther King , Jr. was willing to die for. And thirdly, was poverty of all colors, he said it is a crime against humanity for the richest nation in the world to have so many of it’s precious children of all colors living in poverty and especially on the chocolate side of the nation, and . . .
Read more: Against Cornell West / For Barack Hussein Obama: MLK’s Bible, the Inauguration and the Left
Monday, January 21st, 2013 
Notes anticipating the Inaugural Address:
By electing its first African American, bi-racial president, America redefined itself. Barack Obama’s singular achievement has been, and will be for the ages, his election, and his confirming re-election. The significance of this cannot be overestimated. It colors all aspects of Obama’s presidency, as it tends to be publicly ignored. Today, at Obama’s second inauguration, he will highlight his and our achievement, as he will take his oath of office on the bibles of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.
Of course, Obama is not just a pretty dark face. He has a moderate left of center political program. He is a principled centrist. He is trying to transform the American center, moving it to the left, informing commonsense, changing the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, re-inventing American political culture. This will clearly be on view in today’s speech.
Obama has changed how America is viewed in the larger world, as he has slowly but surely shifted American foreign policy, ending two wars, developing a more multilateral approach, reforming the American military in a way that is more directed to the challenges of the 21st century. I should add: I am disappointed with some of this, particularly concerning drone warfare (more on this in a later piece). The President has finally established the principle of universal healthcare as a matter of American law, putting an end to a very unfortunate example of American exceptionalism. Another dark side of American life, the centrality of guns and gun violence in our daily lives, is now being forthrightly addressed by the President. His second term promises to address climate change in a way that has been foreclosed by the Republican opposition to this point. And he will almost certainly lead the country in . . .
Read more: Barack Obama: Equality, Diversity and the American Transformation
Friday, January 18th, 2013 
A few years ago, Detroit-born painter Nancy Mitchnick began working on a series of canvases inspired by her hometown. Living at the time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mitchnick had left the Motor City long ago, relocating to New York in mid-1970s, then moving to California to teach at CalArts in the late 1980s, and ending up at Harvard, where she held the position of Arnheim Lecturer on the Visual Arts for more than a decade. “The Detroit Project,” as she called this series of paintings, prompted her to move back to the Motor City earlier this year to live and work.
One of the original members of the legendary Cass Corridor Group, Mitchnick settled in another of the region’s noted bohemias, Hamtramck, a small ethnic enclave virtually surrounded by Detroit, which had been incorporated as a separate city in 1922 essentially as a tax haven for the Dodge Brothers Company, which for decades operated their main assembly plant nearby. The artist took a studio in the Russell Industrial Center, a mammoth seven-building complex designed by architect Albert Kahn in 1915 for the Murray Body Company, a supplier of stamped metal automotive components for manufacturers who lacked large-scale fabrication facilities, including Dodge, Hudson, Hupmobile, and Studebaker, and now home to artists studios and other creative enterprises.
Once Mitchnick arrived in the city and set up shop, however, she found that she was unable to develop the “Detroit Project” as the ideas simply wouldn’t come. Instead, she began working on a series of “covers,” i.e., works that reinterpret famous masterpieces that have influenced her development as artist and to which she returns in times when her creative batteries need recharging. Some 20 of these paintings were on view at the historic Scarab Club in Detroit this past fall in an exhibition titled “Time Travel.”
In discussing the series, Mitchnick has confessed to not really knowing what to make of it. But it just so happens that at the time . . .
Read more: Nancy Mitchnick, Painting Future Past
Wednesday, January 16th, 2013 
12. In the sixteenth century, Lublin was a hub of anti-war and anti-feudal religious group Socinians who – exiled to Transylvania and the Netherlands – influenced the political philosophy of John Locke. In the Renaissance, this city attracted dissenters; in modernism: the avant-garde; and in the 1970s and 80s: conceptual artists and alternative theatre. Today it boasts young artists: Robert Kusmirowski (featured in the recent Liverpool Biennial), Urszula Pieregonczuk (who queers Dostoevsky and war history) Mariusz Tarkawian (whose drawings will be on show at the Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh Museum in January: ) and Piotr Brozek who has authored the FB profile of a Jewish child murdered in the Holocaust, Henio Zytomirski. Brozek updated the profile with newsfeeds in the first-person, using the present tense. Invitations to add Henio as a friend read: “I would like to tell you the story of one life.” Internet users befriended Henio, and sent him messages, comments and even gifts. Mariusz Tarkawian drew a monumental panorama of bloodshed throughout human history in Lublin’s Biala Gallery. The Holocaust was presented, as was the Armenian genocide (the artist’s ancestors were Armenian, who had for centuries been living in Poland). Tarkawian also graffitied a house with the lyrics to a Yiddish song in order to commemorate Jewish Lublin. Such artistic-social initiatives are necessary in Poland, where mourning for the victims of the Holocaust is lacking. Unmourned millions, unmourned life.
13. In a book Jewish Lublin: A Cultural Monograph, published by the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and the Centre for Jewish Studies, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, the Jewish Mexican sociologist Adina Cimet writes, “What had been home became hell and much was severed: lives, culture, faith, hope, and humanity. The Majdanek extermination camp, just a bus ride away from the city, remains one of the tombstones of that destruction.”
Author of educational projects at the YIVO Institute for Jewish . . .
Read more: 21 Notes on Poland’s Culture Wars, Part 2 (12-21)
Tuesday, January 15th, 2013 
Grassroots Political, Intellectual and Art Activism versus Censorship, Soccer Hooliganism and Far-Right Threats in the City of Lublin
1. Art representing Roma, gays and Jews has been banned and destroyed in Lublin, Poland, twice host to Transeuropa Festival. Stop Toleration for Toleration, a far-right soccer hooligan march, with hate speech chants, has lashed back against the social-artistic campaign Lublin for All, led by Szymon Pietrasiewicz. The campaign included bus tickets with the images of national and sexual minorities who have shaped this city for centuries as a hub of Jewish, Romany, Protestant and queer cultures. City Hall, under pressure from the soccer hooligans, censored and shredded this art. As the municipal authorities have caved in to the extreme right, Lublin — it appears — is not welcoming at all.
The destruction of art crushes the human geography of Lublin: this is a blow to the heritage of this intercultural city and to the current art activism working to make Lublin hospitable.
We need to reclaim Lublin from the far-right soccer hooligans. That’s why the ground breaking Holocaust scholars Jan T. Gross and Irena Grudzinska-Gross of Princeton, Poland’s leading feminist Kazimiera Szczuka, and this country’s only out gay MP Robert Biedron have all signed an open letter “Let’s not give Lublin up to intolerance, aggression and social exclusion,” authored by Agnieszka Zietek, a political activist and lecturer at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin.
2. “Lublin free of fags!” “Run Pietrasiewicz out of Lublin!” “F … Gazeta Wyborcza [Poland’s progressive newspaper]!” “A boy and a girl are a normal family!” “Lublin, a city without deviations!” These were the chants of the soccer hooligan marchers. As editor-in-chief of the local branch of the Gazeta Wyborcza broadsheet Malgorzata Bielecka-Holda writes, the catcalls were received with sympathy by City Hall. This is just one element of the rise of the far right in Lublin. Other ominous developments: the mobilization of the National Radical Camp (ONR) and the hosting . . .
Read more: 21 Notes on Poland’s Culture Wars, Part 1 (1- 11)
Monday, January 14th, 2013 
In a previous article I argued that Italy is witnessing a sort of end of ideology: Prime Minister Mario Monti’s technical government responds to the economic market alone, while Beppe Grillo’s a-political grassroots movement is winning over disappointed voters. But with the elections in sight, the old political guard is warming up, eager to regain control over the country. Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has governed the country on and off since 1994, is first in line: after months of tactical holding off, the Cavaliere – as Berlusconi is also called – decided to get back into the game as it became clear that Monti might run for the elections. For some weeks now he has been appearing on every single political and current affairs show on Italian television, primarily on his own TV channels but also on the more critical, independent La7, where he engaged in a highly media hyped duel with a critical journalist Berlusconi managed to have removed from state television back in 2002. On another talk-show, old times again revived as Berlusconi took it out on magistrates who ordered the former PM to pay €36 million ($48 million) a year in a divorce settlement with this ex-wife Veronica Lario: they were accused of being Communists and now also feminists.
The sense of history repeating itself was reflected in a satirical cartoon, where we see Berlusconi’s face on TV as he yells “Happy 1994!” to a terror-stricken viewer. Unless Monti’s newly found political list, “Civic choice,” can put a stop to it. Positioned neither to the left nor to the right, Monti seems to want to do away with traditional polarities in politics for good and give continuity to his technical government, with no one to respond to but the European Union. In fact, when criticized for the rigorous measures taken in order to bring down the government bond spreads, i.e. the spread between Italian benchmark 10 year bonds and safer German Bunds, Monti inflexibly shifted responsibility to bad management by previous governments. In the name of rigor and . . .
Read more: Mario Monti’s Midway: A Civic Choice in the Italian Elections?
Friday, January 11th, 2013 
Sociologists face three distinct intellectual projects in their work. They are well aware of two of them, but the third remains in the shadows. The two standard projects are the study of the social construction, and the study of social effects. The third, the study of the predictable existential dilemmas we face, is the one Jeff Goldfarb and I are working to develop in our work, what we call “the social condition.”
As every undergraduate student learns after her first introduction to sociology, our world is socially constructed. People constantly give meaning, together, to a world that may not have an intrinsic meaning to it. In its deepest form, the one that Berger and Luckmann saw so well over 45 years ago, social construction is an existential drama. It is not only that, as undergraduates quickly learn to recite, identities are constructed by a social world (gender and race being the favorite examples). This is, of course, true and important. It is, rather, that our entire existence, as so far as it is meaningful, must be socially constructed and re-constructed. Like a shoddy plane over the void of meaninglessness, we construct a meaningful world—a world in which human existence, institutions and identities make sense. We may not do it actively the whole time, as, after all, we are born already into a social world that precedes us, and so into a world of meaning. And yet, meaning is always in danger of collapse. In liminal situations—when planes hit the twin towers, when children are slaughtered in their school, or simply when a loved one dies—we suddenly see how rickety our world is.
The second sociological project is that of “social effects,” the intellectual project that has come to define most sociological work. Here, sociologists note that we encounter social categories and processes as a reality that is beyond us. And this world that we encounter is far from equal. Sociologists thus study how social categories predictably affect the way different people encounter their worlds, and their chances to thrive within them. To take a particularly poignant example, Devah Pager . . .
Read more: The Social Condition: The Third Intellectual Project
Thursday, January 10th, 2013 
The American president has signed the bill drafted by Democratic and Republican leaders, which allows the United States to avoid “fiscal cliff.” The solution adopted by the Congress does not, however, solve the problem, but only touches some of its elements and postpones dealing with the others for a few weeks. So who won in this dramatic battle, fought late into the first night of the New Year? Choosing the winner depends on one’s point of view, but no matter the viewpoint we take, one thing seems to be certain – the national interest has lost.
Regardless of who we consider to be the main wrongdoer, it is difficult to identify a clear winner. Obama’s spin doctors are striving to present the agreement as a triumph of the administration, since it succeeded in making many Republicans vote in favor of tax increase for the first time in 20 years. For the richest Americans, with annual revenues of more than $ 400,000, the tax rate will rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, i.e. to the rates existing under Bill Clinton before George Bush’s cuts. The problem is that President Obama wanted to set up a new tax threshold at $ 250,000 of annual income. That’s a significant difference. The White House hoped the tax increase would bring $ 1.5 trillion over the next decade, but according to the current arrangements the federal government will receive a modest 600 billion. Given the scale of the U.S. debt, it’s not much, and what’s more, this money will only contribute to the U.S. budget, if all the citizens who should pay more actually do. But will they?
The main problem with taxing the rich is that while these are the people who have the most money to share, they also have the most money to find ways to avoid sharing. When a few months ago Mitt Romney (remember him?) revealed his 2011 tax return, it turned out he paid tax rate of 14 percent instead of 35 percent or, to put it in dollars, 1.9 million instead of 4.8 million. If every American . . .
Read more: The Fiscal Cliff: American Follies Seen from Abroad
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