kriticulture

When workers in a McDonald’s restaurant in Canton, Ohio, opened their paychecks this month, they found a pamphlet urging them to vote for the Republican candidates for governor, Senate and Congress, or possibly face financial repercussions. The pamphlet appeared calculated to intimidate workers into voting for Republican candidates by making a direct reference to their wages and benefits, said Allen Schulman, a Democrat who is president of the Canton City Council and said he obtained a copy of the pamphlet on Wednesday. The pamphlet said: “If the right people are elected, we will be able to continue with raises and benefits at or above the current levels. If others are elected, we will not.” It then named three Republican candidates after stating, “The following candidates are the ones we believe will help our business move forward.” Link: McDonald’s Workers Are Told Whom to Vote For - NYTimes.com

By JÜRGEN HABERMAS That we are experiencing a relapse into this ethnic understanding of our liberal constitution is bad enough. It doesn’t make things any better that today leitkultur is defined not by “German culture” but by religion. With an arrogant appropriation of Judaism — and an incredible disregard for the fate the Jews suffered in Germany — the apologists of the leitkultur now appeal to the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which distinguishes “us” from the foreigners. Nevertheless I do not have the impression that the appeals to the leitkultur signal anything more than a rearguard action or that the lapse of an author into the snares of the controversy over nature versus nurture has given enduring and widespread impetus to the more noxious mixture of xenophobia, racist feelings of superiority and social Darwinism. The problems of today have set off the reactions of yesterday — but not those of the day before. Link: Leadership and Leitkultur - NYTimes.com

IJZS - "Zizek on Wagner" Vol 4, No 0 (2010)

By Rajesh Kumar Sharma There was a time, not very long ago, when the humanities were under attack. Now they are just ignored. It is as if the case for 'job-oriented' education (to use a tasteless phrase that rules the journalistic writings on education these days) had been decisively and finally won. So long as someone was speaking against the humanities, a dialogue –howsoever worn-out and tattered– was at least alive, though not with any great kicking life. But a silence now reigns over the fate of the humanities.             It is a symptomatic silence. Symptomatic because it comes at a time when cultural commodities become most expensive and attract increasing investment under the shadow of speculation. As canny communicators and cool gurus swarm the cultural marketplace, it is nevertheless being proclaimed that an education in the humanities no longer pays.             Whi...

By Rajesh Kumar Sharma The open letter of Harcharan Bains, media adviser to the Chief Minister of Punjab, should be archived in the cultural studies departments of the world's universities. 1 It is such a model illustration of how ideology functions in these times.  If it is a calculated attempt to put the case of 'injured merit' (here the government's) before the 'discerning' readers of The Tribune , the calculation appears to have gone fatally wrong. As a signed statement that purports to answer a former minister's charges against the leadership of the principal ruling party and the CM and the Deputy CM, the letter merits serious scrutiny. But what a scrutiny reveals is that the answer does not really answer anything. The official media adviser has penned, actually, a personal letter. But then why give it wide public circulation?  The answer lies in the nature of the letter. It is a fine, indeed admirable, exercise in rhetoric. Bains exploits to ...

(S. Malhans's remarks appear below the post 'Book Review of Shikargah' here ) Dear S. Malhans, I take your observations with gratitude. You have obviously spent a good deal of time and care to comment on my short review. I will try to respond one by one to the points you have raised. My ideal reader is not a lazy person. I do not write for those who would expect me to "summarise" the text for them. Moreover, I do not see how a reviewer's summary can be treated as objective and hence relied on by a reader to arrive at a fair assessment of the review. I do not deny the uses of "structural logic" but I would like to be alert to its own logic. The search for structural logic may, in some cases, arise from a deeply insecure conservative impulse. Structural logic can function as the Great Secret Validator: to explain away and justify everything. Indeed I do not think that in the name of structural logic we can even condone a writer's poor han...

A novel in Punjabi by Surinder Neer Published by Chetna Parkashan, Ludhiana, 2010 Price: Rs. 300 By Rajesh Kumar Sharma Surinder Neer's maiden novel Shikargah shows she is a gifted story-teller. I choose the word 'gifted' to indicate her ability to tell her story engagingly and without straining herself. Besides, she has a profuse invention: she does not run out of absorbing situations and manages to sustain the reader's interest in most of them.  She has as much strength to dwell on sorrow and death as the sensibility to register the magic of everyday life. Dying and loneliness do not scare her, which is no small virtue in a writer in these days of profit-driven cultural production.             Romantic situations are not her forte: the conversations between lovers are generally stilted and unexciting, and the colours of passion are faint and borrowed. But she is at her best in handling encounters across the generations, ...