The Dahi Diaries

From the Human Rights Campaign:

Just moments ago, President Obama made history by boldly stating that gay and lesbian Americans deserve full marriage equality.

In saying so, he reinforced what most Americans believe – LGBT people should be fully and equally part of the fabric of our society. Our families deserve nothing less than the equal respect and recognition that comes through marriage.

1. Gay marriage has nothing to do with transgender people. Saying that the President’s statement is for all “LGBT people” is disingenuous.

2. The claim that marriage is what grants one “equal respect and recognition,” and makes one “fully and equally part of the fabric of our society,” is the most regressive and conservative crap I’ve ever heard. Guess what all unmarried people (including, and especially, you single moms): HRC does not believe you are True Americans.

One more quote: 

His words also remind gay and lesbian families everywhere that they are not alone or unheard as they struggle – like their neighbors – to afford healthcare and college for their kids, pay their taxes, and plan for retirement.

So, thanks to the President, a select amount of gay people can now qualify for state assistance for their basic needs, if they get married. Because healthcare, affordable education, and retirement are things that only married people deserve. No self-respecting gay rights organization would push for universal healthcare or equal access to higher education, because, godforbid, that might better the lives of more than just a few homonormative same-sex couples. (Like poor people! We can’t advocate for them — they would dirty the pristine images of happy, well-dressed, patriotic gay people on the HRC website!)   

President Obama did the right thing, and I’m not going to trash him for that. It’s the profoundly conservative and myopic nature of gay “activism” that I take issue with. 

[Zizek] opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. “I will tell you the truth now,” he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. “Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah.” He flicks furiously through the pages. “Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka’s last story and here where I use the community of outcast in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/jun/27/slavoj-zizek-living-end-times

I sort of suspected this about Zizek’s book, but it’s disheartening to me that he doesn’t take his work in politics more seriously. (“I will tell you my problem openly and for this my publisher will hate me. All the talk and the writing about politics, this is not where my heart is. No. I have been sidetracked. I really mean this.”) Though I’ve always thought Zizek is one of the best thinkers alive today to cut through liberal bourgeois bullshit and make observations, simultaneously brilliant and entertaining, about the machinations of politics, capitalism and desire, his political ideas are definitely faltering as of late (repetitive, off-the-mark, over-generalized). I think the left has been so desperate for an all-knowing father figure they’ve been willing to overlook his failings, or perhaps they’ve been too stupid and gullible to see the problem. It’s clear Zizek sees his recent performances as just that, but perhaps — in keeping with his own distrust for absolute anti-authoritarianism — the left really does need a postmodern father figure, and rather than abandon us, Zizek should “level up” and meet the challenge.   

His latest 1000-page tome, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 

is supposed to mark his return to his serious intellectual and philosophical passions.Calling myself uninformed about Hegel would be more than a small understatement (he, uh, influenced Marx, right?), so I think I’ll need to do a little background reading before I get to Zizek’s latest work. It seems to me, though, that this book will either mark the demise of Zizek’s public persona — he’s seems quite serious about dis-engaging with his role as the clown of High Theory — or, in a few years’ time, it will bring forth a refreshed, newer and better Zizek, prepared to engage with the culture as seriously as he engages with the philosophers he loves. Let’s hope for the latter.

It is an empirical fact that in all the coffee shops I’ve visited in India, the staff consist entirely of gay men. (Or, to be politically correct, display behavior and affect congruous with stereotypical depictions of gay men. Which, as an “outsider,” I may be misreading. But I assure you, I’m not.) This is especially the case in the newly-opened Bru World Cafe down the street from me, where the uniformly cute, somewhat pubescent looking baristas are almost excessively flirty with me every time I enter. 

Input on this phenomenon is greatly appreciated.

(Okay this is not what any of my baristas have looked like, but it’s useful for instructional purposes.)