All posts by Toni Tileva
God Loves Uganda Film Review
God Loves Uganda, a documentary by Roger Ross Williams, turns its lens onto a new kind of Western exploitation taking place in Africa. Spearheaded by American Evangelicals, the cultural exploitation is no less damaging or disturbing than the plundering of resources and people that has decimated Africa for centuries. The film is about much more than what caused Uganda to be the first country to introduce anti-gay legislation into Parliament that makes homosexuality punishable by death, although it makes the link between America’s hate-filled religious right rhetoric and the spread of homophobia in the country. God Loves Uganda is really about the insidious way in which something as seemingly well-meaning as missionary work has chilling implications for a country still attempting to shake the shackles of Western exploitation. It also is a very probing look into the workings of a mega church.
The film introduces us to International House Of Prayer, a.k.a. IHOP, a religion-in-a-box mega church that would surely match the pancake franchise in its customer outreach. Led by Lou Engle, IHOP is the prototype of the modern-day Christian fundamentalist mega church—in one word, a corporation no different in its methods, resources, and structure than a Fortune 500 company, except in that its media machine would surely be the envy of any corporation. Jono Hall, IHOP’s Media Director, explains he has over 1,000 full-time staff, split into 80 departments; IHOP broadcasts 1 million video hours a month to a 117 nations. No activity goes undocumented on film; millions of dollars go into messaging alone.
What exactly is the message, you might ask? Couched in nebulous and euphemistic terms like “spreading the good news,” or “The Call” campaign (12 hour pray-a-thons to put an end to abortion, for example), the message goes far beyond a merely religious one. This is where the genius of God Loves Uganda really comes through: it reveals the blatantly jingoist language used by the missionaries themselves. The missionaries in Africa keep referring to themselves as an “army” and this kind of rather violence-connoting ethos is scarily illustrated in the scene where firebrand anti-gay preacher Martin Ssempa is literally rolling on the ground, punching the floor, as his disciples all scream, “No to Obama!” for his “pro-gay stance.” A young missionary describes her mission as “imparting a DNA of prayer and worship,” and like DNA, she explains, she wants to “replicate values.” In another equally hair-raising quote, the missionaries explain how the fact that Uganda is nation where 50% of the people are under 15 years old would allow them to “multiply ourselves.” Words like “strategy” and other rather militaristic language only serve to dispel the myth that there is anything particularly spiritual or elevated about IHOP’s goals. At best, this is pure jingoism and all God Loves Uganda does is point a camera at it, without any commentary.
The jingoism also expresses itself in the way the missionaries hone in on specific communities. Engle calls Uganda, “a firepot of spiritual renewal and revival.” Reverend Kapya Kaoma, a priest and former Ugandan now residing in the U.S., who cannot return home because his research into the influence of the religious right there has made it dangerous for him to do so, calls it preying on vulnerable communities and enforcing values on them at the cost of receiving aid. Kaoma explains how the mega churches seek out especially neglected communities, ones unreached by anyone else, and turn them into “dumping places for extreme ideas.” By building schools, orphanages, and hospitals, the American Evangelicals are becoming all-powerful in Uganda and reliance on their help makes any sort of dissent an impossibility. As Kaoma very poignantly states about the young missionaries, “All they know are the Biblical verses they have memorized, but people listen to them because they are white and American.” And even worse, extremist preachers like “the gay agenda is to make your children gay and destroy the world” Scott Lively, who as Kaoma points out, is literally a nobody in the US got an audience in Uganda’s Parliament where he was directly instrumental in urging PM David Bahati to introduce the anti-gay bill. The damage is done in other areas too. During the Clinton administration, HIV reduction was hugely successful; with the advent of Bush’s abstinence-only programs, HIV rates once again began to creep up. Abstinence-only programs were the only ones receiving funding so adhering to the religious right party line was the only choice Uganda had.
God Loves Uganda is a daring film and a look into what happens when religion is used to fan the flames of hatred and violence. There is no “good news” to be found in the message of IHOP and others of its ilk; one either goes along with their message of intolerance or one is heading towards sure damnation. It’s a highly ironic given that the West has plundered Africa to the point of making it hell on Earth.
The Production Of Value–What Happens When Banksy Roils The Art World’s Waters Yet Again
My Blog for Ministers Of Design
Last Sunday, a booth appeared in Central Park selling “signed, 100% original” Banksy pieces at $60 each. Banksy is currently “on residency in New York”; his work is popping up in his trademark spectacularly subversive fashion–a creepy stuffed animal “slaughterhouse delivery truck” in the Meat Packing District, for one.
Art collectors loudly bemoaned the fact that they missed the chance to acquire the much-coveted pieces that routinely fetch six figures at a ridiculously discounted price. And Banksy, as he is wont to do, got to make fun of the idea of what constitutes art and the pretentiousness of the “art market,” where value is conferred by exclusivity. Would we recognize art if it is not labeled as such? And what happens when graffiti, an art form that in its very execution flies in the face of concepts such as ownership and private space, gets a price tag and starts participating in the very machine it seeks to obviate?
Banksy might as well be one of the world’s most reluctant “successful gallery artists.” The Sunday Central Park stunt was a spectacle, a performance art piece like the many he has done before, and it flew in the face of the notion that exclusivity confers value. Sure, Banksy is now, willingly or inadvertently, in the business of selling rebellion. But that doesn’t mean that taking the “art world’s” money has caused him to sell out. Sunday’s stunt was Banksy’s thumbing his nose at the fact that we need art critics to tell us what art is and how much it is worth. Banksy has often made fun of the elitism, pretentiousness, and outright absurdity of the curating art and placing it in a museum. The art market, like any other capitalist cultural reproduction tool, works to equate ownership of art with culture and the mark of the “cultured,” as James Clifford explored in his seminal article On Collecting Art and Culture.
According to the video from last Sunday, more than four hours passed before the first sale was made, to a customer who bargained to get two paintings for $60. Later, a woman from New Zealand bought two. Finally, a man from Chicago stopped and said, “I just need something for the walls” of his new place. He bought four. 8 paintings sold in total.
In other words, if it is not labeled as such, would we know a Banksy? Does knowing that it is a Banksy somehow raise the value of the art just because it is now branded and hence ownable and usable as an identifiable and identity-conferring status symbol? Does art’s subjectivity not mesh particularly well with its object-ivity? You tell us.
Seize The Seizures: My Mom’s Book
My Mom recently published a book, Seize the Seizures. Below is an excerpt from it.
I have this recurring dream about my Mom–-we are in some unknown European city. I rap on the door of a small flat. I hear shuffling sounds as she peers from behind a small opening in the door. She looks startled, like I have just awoken her out of some deep slumber and like the light hurts her eyes…she doesn’t say much, but her eyes look impossibly plaintive. “I wish you could be here more.” I wake up, crying. It’s just a dream, but this is what you feel like when someone you love is hurting. There is a lot of guilt, no matter what you do…and what you do is never enough.
People expect you to wear your grief in plain sight for all to see, as though the only way to express authentic pain is to cover yourself in ashes and wear sack cloth…as though there is something you are supposed to be doing. I am not sure how much doing is going on, but I do know a lot of feeling is. I don’t like telling people my Mom is sick because it makes what I feel is a very private thing public. To talk about it feels diminishing and banal. How can pain be banal? I cannot tell you how many times people ask me how she is doing, almost waiting for me to respond “Fine,” so they can get on with the conversation. I sometimes don’t even bother telling them that she is very far from fine, so I just tell the truth. She is hanging in there.
What a lot of people won’t tell you, even though it is such a ubiquitous trope, is how hard it is to talk to someone in a coma. Imagine seeing your Mom lying in a bed, with all manner of tubes sticking out of her like some alien arthropod has nested atop, her body wracked by the spasmic echoes of seizures happening beneath the surface of her heavily sedated brain. I tried to talk to her, but the words were not really coming out. All I could do was look at her and hold her hand. I know you will understand that even coming to the hospital to see her like this was crushing.
This book is the story of a really good woman who had a lot of really bad things happen to her, yet she is sharing her story. It’s not a story about epilepsy but something a lot bigger than that. A guy in San Francisco once told me, “See you on the flipside, mama.” My Mom’s been on the flipside and she wants to tell you about it. To me, it’s the ultimate gift of a mother to her daughter and a testament to who my Mother is–-a brilliant writer and a firecracker of a woman (even by Bulgarian woman standards!), a spirit of immense strength, and a wicked sense of humor (I like to think I get that from her). I like to think, rather arrogantly, that only I could have edited this book because I get my Mom so well and am connected to her on some subconscious, supra and super-natural level. I feel like the translator of a language of two speakers, one that I hope will not be deemed endangered any time soon. Even the title of the book works on so two levels—I know she can explain it a little better to you… But seizing the seizures is about grasping them, taking a hold of them, hoping to understand them a little better in hopes that will cease to seize over her life.
What I find most authentic about it is that it is so refreshingly pathos-free. My Mom doesn’t want you, the reader, to go “Aww,” by the time you finish it. There is no overdramatization meant to pluck at your heart strings and appeal to the Oprah set–-my Mom really is far too fun and funny for those sort of shenanigans. She keeps it real, I am sure you will see. And yes, there is a lot of sad, too. Ultimately, the book is a strange little microcosm of what seizures are–-electrical storms–-it roils and stirs and moves and severs and connects and fires and rattles…it unsettles and it calms…
A Geography Of Internet Popularity: Popular Sites On A World Map
My Blog Post for Ministers of Design
Researchers Mark Graham and Stefano De Stabbata, at the Oxford Internet Institute, mapped the most visited sites in different parts of the world. The map shows each nation’s most popular website, with size of the nations modified to reflect the number of Internet users there. Google’s domination is almost universal, reigning in North America, Europe, and parts of South Asia. Facebook, the world’s most popular site, is most popular in North Africa, parts of the Middle East, and the Pacific coast of South America. Yet, even in those countries, Google still retains the second spot. As De Stabbata and Graham explain, “Among the 50 countries that have Facebook listed as the most visited visited website, 36 of them have Google as the second most visited, and the remaining 14 countries list YouTube (currently owned by Google).”
Baidu domines China and some neighboring countries. Noteworthy, Yahoo is top in Japan and Taiwan, perhaps in part to its longstanding partnership with Japan’s SoftBank and its purchase of Wretch, the Taiwanese social media site, which Yahoo is shutting down at the end of this year.
Yandex, a search engine, is Russia’s most popular site.
The countries where Google is the most visited website account for half of the entire Internet population, with over one billion people. Thanks to the large Internet population of China and South Korea (more than half a billion users), Baidu is second in this rank, and Facebook, with 280 million users, places third.
DeStabbata and Graham suggest that “the territories carved out now will have important implications for which companies end up controlling how we communicate and access information for many years to come.”
Baidu domines China and some neighboring countries. Noteworthy, Yahoo is top in Japan and Taiwan, perhaps in part to its longstanding partnership with Japan’s SoftBank and its purchase of Wretch, the Taiwanese social media site, which Yahoo is shutting down at the end of this year.
Yandex, a search engine, is Russia’s most popular site.
The countries where Google is the most visited website account for half of the entire Internet population, with over one billion people. Thanks to the large Internet population of China and South Korea (more than half a billion users), Baidu is second in this rank, and Facebook, with 280 million users, places third.
DeStabbata and Graham suggest that “the territories carved out now will have important implications for which companies end up controlling how we communicate and access information for many years to come.”
Crossfade Roulette–My Weekly Music Column
BYT Fall Movie Guide
Contribution to the BYT Fall Movie Guide:
Spark: A Burning Man Story (VOD-theatrical release TBD) – This documentary by Steve Brown rekindles the bright-eyed dreamer ethos that we want to believe is what the giant festival in the desert is all about. In recent years, Burning Man has been much maligned for its seeming descent into the dreaded c-word (commercialization) and for no longer being the counter-cultural celebration of a Mad Max-like dystopia it once was. Spark will make a believer out of you; a celebration of the artists who toil assiduously at making the giant sculptures that end up destroyed in a pyre of glory, it is a true roots revival of what Burning Man is still really about.
The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (November 1) – If you don’t know who Slavoj Zizek is, well, he is probably the coolest academician around at present, even if you won’t find him giving TED Talks. The irreverent and brilliant Czech philosopher/ideology-unraveler follows up The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema with yet another thoroughly engrossing and entertaining film (and don’t call this a documentary…it’s a one-man show). Joining forces with filmmaker Sophie Fiennes, it runs like a cultural studies student’s wet dream, a parsing out of ideology in the most gloriously hilarious way.
Crossfade Roulette–My Weekly Music Column
Inequality For All: Robert Reich’s Powerful Message: Not “Trickle Down,” But “Middle Up”
My Article For Voice Of Russia
The documentary Inequality For All, directed by Jacob Kornbluth, features Robert Reich, former Secretary Of Labor under Bill Clinton, author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, in an impassioned exposé on why the chasm between the rich and the poor has much further reaching implications than a mere income gap.
In and of itself, Reich points out, inequality can be viewed as an inherent part of an incentive-driven capitalist system, but Inequality For All asks when inequality becomes a problem. This question takes on particular urgency when we consider that of all the developed nations, the United States has the greatest degree of wealth disparity. Much like The Corporation, Inequality For All is broad in its scope, and clearly shows the interconnectedness of a number of seemingly disparate phenomena. Filmed in the style of other policy lecture documentaries, Inequality For All uses Reich’s Wealth And Poverty class at UC Berkeley as the platform for some rather hair-raising revelations (a lot of them new even to those very familiar with the Occupy movement’s platform), yet the tone of the film remains optimistic about disrupting this status quo.
Just how consolidated is wealth at the top, you might ask? Put simply, 400 people in the top income bracket earn the same amount as 150 million in the lower tiers. Reich homes in on a recent study by Pikkety and Saez that analyzed tax data dating back to 1913, when the income tax was first instituted. The study finds that 1928 and 2007 were the peak years of income concentration at the top, creating a graph that resembles a suspension bridge. Both years were followed by calamitous market crashes — a parallel that Reich thinks is not random at all. As income got more concentrated at the top, the rich turned to the financial sector for investment, creating a speculative bubble. And as middle class income was stagnating, that in turn created a debt bubble, conditions that inevitably precipitated economic crises.
The crux of Reich’s argument is that what makes an economy stable is a strong middle class. And while his assertion that consumer spending makes up 70% of economic activity is contestable, there can be no denying that the middle class plays an integral role in the economy. The rich alone are not spending enough to generate the requisite level of economic activity. Inequality For All features venture capitalist/1%-er Nick Hanauer who debunks the myth of the rich as “job creators” in favor of a feedback loop theory that Reich also espouses (he calls it the virtuous cycle). If there is one sound bite to emerge from the film, it is that Reich supports “middle up” rather than “trickle down” economics. If the middle class is not doing well enough to create healthy consumer spending levels, then the economy as a whole will suffer—in other words, as the film rightly notes, one doesn’t have to be a bleeding heart liberal to understand that this is not merely a social justice issue. Reich argues that even from a cynical and self-serving perspective, the top 1% should have an interest in how well the middle class is doing as they drive spending in a rather significant way.
Was there an idyllic time that was different from the current abysmal state of affairs? Reich points to the years between 1947 and 1977 as the golden age of great prosperity and very low inequality. What were we doing right then? Public higher education spending was much more of a priority and the proportion of people who were able to receive a college degree without being saddled with mountains of debt was much higher than today. With decimated federal funding for higher education nowadays, little is trickling down to the states, he argues, causing unparalleled spikes in tuition costs. Unions were also very strong, ensuring that worker wages remained robust. With the decline of unions, Reich argues, wages and rights have suffered a crushing blow. Not only have wages remained stagnant, but upward mobility is also equally imperiled. 42% of children born in poverty will never leave poverty behind. No other developed nation, Reich argues, even the UK with its vestiges of a monarchic system, has less social mobility than that.
Inequality For All covers a number of other plucked-from-the-headlines issues thoroughly as well, such as the shockingly low tax rate most of the rich actually pay, and how the tax code has increasingly evolved to the benefit of the haves. It also talks about the impact globalization has had on worker wages and the fact that which countries’ workers add the most value determines what country reaps the benefits. A prime example is that even though iPods are assembled in China, it only earns 3.6% of the value of an iPod, with Germany and Japan taking much more significant portions because the parts come from there.
The ultimate upshot of inequality is that its deleterious effects ripple outward, profoundly disrupting a healthy economic cycle. Reich calls equal opportunity the “the moral foundation stone on which this country and our democracy are built,” and that is not mere exaggeration or partisan-minded alarmism. When money starts to infect politics, as it has done now with lobbyists and PACs, it undermines democracy and paves the way to plutocracy. Inequality For All offers plenty to get outraged over, but Reich remains measured in his rhetoric. Instead of portraying inequality as an “us versus them” zero-sum game, he explains that is in our interest and in our power in to disrupt the status quo by demanding change.
What’s In A Number: Can We Meet UN Poverty Reduction Goals?
The numbers in the recently released UN Millenium Development Goals Report are a case in point. Among its key findings, the report tells us that “the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has been halved at the global level. In developing regions, the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day fell from 47 per cent in 1990 to 22 per cent in 2010. About 700 million fewer people lived in conditions of extreme poverty in 2010 than in 1990.” A UN High-Level Panel report touts the progress made in the last 13 years as “the fastest reduction in poverty in human history.” In essence, the prevailing consensus is that Millenium Development Goal 1, the reduction of extreme poverty and hunger by half, is already accomplished. But are the numbers really so clear?
The actual numbers on poverty look significantly grimmer–1.29 billion people in 2008 lived below $1.25 a day; 2.47 billion people in 2008 consumed less than $2 a day. At the current rate of progress, there will still be around 1 billion people living below $1.25 per day in 2015. Most of the 649 million fewer poor by the $1.25 per day standard over 1981-2008 are still poor by the standards of middle-income developing countries.
It turns out that the seemingly simple question of how we measure the number of poor people in the world is surprisingly difficult and extremely important to answer. It affects how we report success, especially considering that the post-2015 talks now dare to speak openly about the goal of complete poverty eradication. In April, at a press conference during the Spring meeting of the international financial institutions in Washington, DC, the president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, pointed to 2030 as the global target year to end poverty. President Obama expressed similar sentiments in February, when he promised that “the United States will join with our allies to eradicate such extreme poverty in the next two decades.”
So, how much has actually been accomplished? Thomas Pogge, the Director of the Global Justice Program and the Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University, makes an important insight—the way that extreme poverty and hunger are measured has shifted over time, and significantly. In other words, some of the madness definitely lies in the method—measurement shifts have taken place, perhaps under the radar of public knowledge and only noticeable by economics geeks. This is inherently confusing. When we claim success, we should know what we have actually accomplished.
In September 2000, the heads of 147 governments pledged that they would halve the proportion of people on Earth living in the direst poverty by 2015, using the poverty rate in 1990 as a baseline. Here Pogge points out something largely glossed over: as with the hunger target, the so-called success over recent years owes much to the back-dating of the base year from 2000 (UNGA Millennium Declaration) to 1990. More specifically, the goal set at the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996 was to halve the number of chronically under-nourished people between 1996 and 2015. That criterion quickly changed at the 2000 meeting to “halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.” Changing the language to refer to a proportion instead of an outright number and backdating the goals to 1990 changed the picture and made the goals easier to reach. Another modification changed the definition to refer only to people in the developing world. Dr. Pogge explains, “…there are two different shifts: (a) shifts in what is to be halved by 2015 (number of poor, proportion of poor in world population, proportion of poor in population of the developing world) and from what baseline (1996, 2000, 1990). (b) Shifts in how persons get identified as poor (average household income below $1/day in 1985 US-dollars, below $1.08/day in 1993 US-dollars, $1.25/day in 2005 US-dollars). These methodological revisions entailed substantial shifts in the number of poor, in their geographical distribution, and, most importantly, in the global poverty trend.” The back-dating of the year allowed for the international institutions to count the significant progress China had made in poverty reduction.
Another major methodological issue is how poverty is measured, using an international poverty line (IPL), and the resulting overreliance on what Dr. Pogge calls a “money-centric” measure set by the World Bank. “In contrast to a human requirements-centered approach, the Bank has set a relatively arbitrary international poverty line (IPL) defined in abstract money units and translated into local currency amounts that it deems to be ‘equivalent.’” The poverty measurement’s excessive sensitivity to the IPL level has a significant impact in how we measure progress, as it provides a very narrow definition of poverty. At $1.25/day, according to PovcalNet, we are 22.4% ahead of meeting the goal. But with $1.50/day, we are only 8.5% ahead, and with $1.815/day we are 5.7% behind. The choice of base year that the progress is measured from is an equally important consideration. Another distortion comes from the use of general consumption PPPs. The general-PPP (purchasing power parity) equivalent to $1.25 (2005) in a typical poor country buys only as much food there as $0.83 bought in the US in 2005. So, the World Bank’s poverty line is too low to cover basic needs. The Bank’s very low line overlooks a lot of very poor people. It counts as poor in 2010 only 1,214.98 million people. The rather narrow IPL measure also disregards intra-household income distribution by looking at the household as a whole, nor does it account for other dimensions of poverty such as the leisure time/labor time ratio, public goods, and climate.
So how can we get around this statistical quagmire and properly measure a very human problem — living in dire poverty. Dr. Pogge suggests that it is crucial that we “define precisely in advance the goals and targets the world is committing itself to as well as the methods by which progress toward these targets is to be measured or assessed,” to prevent midstream revisions and back-dating of targets. He also advocates that the monitoring of progress be left to groups of independent experts, not to international agencies, which are politically exposed. Ultimately, the new agenda should be a lot more participatory, inclusive, and responsive to those directly affected by poverty and social injustice.