While it may look like a typo, Llanhyfryddawelllehynafolybarcudprindanfygythiadtrienusyrhafnauole is, in fact, the new name of an old village in western Wales. The English translation of the new name is both angry and charming: “A quiet beautiful village, an historic place with rare kite under threat from wretched blades.”

The wretched blades in the name of the village refer to turbines, and activists in the village of Llanfynydd are renaming their town in protest against a proposal, submitted by Gamesa Energy UK, to erect a 40-meter tall mast on the edge of the village. This mast will test whether the region is suitable for a wind farm, which would create energy through turbines. Given that the project is, at this moment, only for a single mast, the name change does seem a bit eccentric and somewhat gimmicky, since this unwieldy name, with 66 letters, is now the longest place name in the United Kingdom (although it is considerably shorter than the little hill named Tetaumatawhakatangihangakoauaotamateaurehaeaturipukapihimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuaakitanarahu in New Zealand).  

Meirion Rees, a resident of the village, which is still technically named Llanfynydd, claims reasonably and correctly that “Welsh place names reflect unique landscape features, and hundreds of years of historical events and cultural traditions.”

Regardless of whether this protest can affect the results of the wind farm project, the use of the Welsh language as a vehicle of protest is certainly welcome; at a time when only one-fifth of Wales’s population of 2.75 million people speak Welsh, the residents of Llanfynydd are helping to keep the Welsh language alive.

Mimi Hanaoka

Religious language is nothing new in political discourse, but it has, unfortunately, become one of the most dominant voices booming out the Bush White House.  

David Greenberg, in his review of three books about the Bush legacy in The New Yorker, highlights research by Bruce Lincoln, Professor of the History of Religion at the University of Chicago, about President Bush’s use of religious language. According to Lincoln, President Bush made allusions to Revelation, Isaiah, Job, Matthew, and Jeremiah during his speech to Congress in which he declared that America would invade Afghanistan. Bush’s speech was littered with biblical allusions not only for theatrical and emotional effect but stemmed, at least partially, out of genuine religious conviction.  

Greenberg notes that “this kind of recourse to religion leaves citizens no grounds on which to question the President’s actions. If the inspiration of God or the Bible is purely personal or subjective, it’s not open to debate – and decisions based on it become immune from scrutiny.”

While Greenberg makes a valid point, I’d like to underscore the creative aspect of religious language. When religious language is used to discuss political events, language escapes its descriptive role and becomes outright creative – what is and should remain a political issue assumes a religious dimension. It is true that President Bush is fighting his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under the protective shell of a religious banner in which his personal religious beliefs are excused from rigorous scrutiny. Just as importantly, however, it is the repeated use of religious language to describe a political issue that has made America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to an extent, a religious issue for some citizens.  

Religious language and imagery are nothing new in political discourse in America or elsewhere. Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab, one of the most acclaimed 20th century Iraqi writers, configured the British colonialism of Iraq in apocalyptic terms, and he did this to great effect. Al-Sayyab claimed in 1957 that the eyes of the modern poet have “been ravaged by his visions and he perceives the seven sins pervading the world like a terrifying monster.” According to Al-Sayyab, the modern poet is tormented by his apocalyptic visions and great evil of this century’s colonialism.  

While the apocalyptic vision may be well suited to poetic language, it is when apocalyptic visions seep into the dominant political discourse that we should be wary; it is this type of religious language that bars us from speaking honestly and productively about the political and material motivations for war and occupation. President Bush is not so much describing an apocalypse but encouraging one.  

Mimi Hanaoka

A recent study has found no evidence of Gulf War Syndrome, but soldiers and specifically veterans of the first Gulf War still suffer from numerous debilitating medical problems. If there is no Gulf War Syndrome, what is it that these soldiers are suffering from?

A recent study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine researchers, based on a study of 40,000 former soldiers, finds no evidence for the existence of Gulf War Syndrome. As the BBC reports, the myriad problems that afflict the former soldiers — including “mood swings, memory loss, lack of concentration, night sweats, general fatigue and sexual problems,” — are particularly common for veterans of the first Gulf War, but inexplicably so. The study concludes that

“Gulf War veterans report significantly more symptoms of disease than non-Gulf War veterans in almost all ill-health categories examined, yet there is still no consistent explanation for this discrepancy.”

Even if we table the question of whether Gulf War Syndrome exists, this research does highlight a troubling but often neglected aspect of war: The psychological and physical damage that war inflicts on a solider. In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Dan Baum focuses on the psychological damage that killing inflicts on a solider, and he reports that the U.S. Army is shamefully unprepared to alleviate the suffering of soldiers traumatized by the killing they have done. According to Baum, the Army’s “Field Manual 22-51: Leaders’ Manual for Combat Stress Control” is completely mute on the issue of the stress created by killing an enemy solider. The individual soldier’s conscience, it seems, is his own domain, and it is the soldier’s lonely duty to resolve the deep trauma that results from killing.  

This is not to suggest that what veterans — or more specifically, veterans of the first Gulf War — are suffering from is related to killing. Rather, Baum’s article and the recent study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine highlight the fact that those who are shipped off to battle and manage to return may be affected by devastating trauma. Some of the soldiers who return safely from their tour of duty bring their war home with them; the shame is that their suffering — and more importantly, the specific reasons for their suffering — are so seldom addressed honestly, directly, or productively.  

Mimi Hanaoka

While the horrors that occur routinely in Africa — massacres in the Darfur region of Sudan, the AIDS crisis, absolute poverty — often seem callously but comfortably far away, it is bracing to remember that in the age of globalization, we cannot unsympathetically dismiss another country’s problems as irrelevant to us; we are, after all, very intimately connected.  

Consider that in the city of Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an average family of seven will spend approximately $63 a month. Accepting bribes, peddling goods on the street, and prostitution are some of the means of eking out a living. As Davan Maharaj reports in the Los Angeles Times, 37-year-old Goma resident Mama Rose turned to prostitution after her husband was robbed and killed by militiamen. As a mother with four children to support, she parlayed her gender into a dangerous and only marginally profitable profession: prostitution. As Mama Rose explains, “Every truth is not good to say … But let us face it. In Goma, everything has a price. And I don’t want to sell myself short.”

When Mama Rose’s clientele is, like herself, impoverished, she earns less than $25 a month. In the months when her clientele includes the United Nations soldiers who are stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo — since the five-year long regional conflict that wreaked havoc in the DRC only ended in 2003 — her income may be somewhere in the region of $75 a month. According to the regional governor, 80 percent of Goma’s sex workers are infected with HIV or AIDS.

As the AIDS crisis increases its stranglehold on Africa, there is a brain drain occurring in the African health care sector as nurses are lured to practice their profession in more lucrative and less hellish conditions abroad. Celia W. Dugger reports in The New York Times:

In Malawi, a quarter of public health workers, including nurses, will be dead, mostly of AIDS and tuberculosis, by 2009, according to a study of worker death rates in 40 hospitals here.

The statistics are staggering and the prognosis bleak.  

While the Bush Administration officially introduced its $15 billion emergency anti-AIDS program in February of 2004, the project has been criticized for lengthy funding delays. As an entire continent is destroyed by the AIDS epidemic, it should benefit everyone to keep in mind the sobering fact of the interconnectedness of all things.

Mimi Hanaoka

Michael Moore has recently been both pilloried and feted, and in all of the furor over Fahrenheit 9/11, a number of critics have glossed over one of the more beneficial aspects of the film — its power to spark reasoned and informed debate.  

Writing in The New York Times, A.O. Scott states that Fahrenheit 9/11 “is many things: a partisan rallying cry, an angry polemic, a muckraking inquisition into the use and abuse of power. But one thing it is not is a fair and nuanced picture of the president and his policies.”

A.O. Scott is correct; Moore’s film certainly isn’t nuanced, nor is it meant to be. Fahrenheit 9/11 is more like an editorial than a documentary; it is clever, opinionated, researched, and affecting. It reminds us of the circus of the 2000 elections and the confused battle for Florida, highlights some of President Bush’s most offensively incompetent moments, and documents the human cost of the war in Iraq. Moore’s research and analysis is not exhaustive or comprehensive, but it is provocative.

While the factual and educational merit of the film is debatable, it would be a shame if Fahrenheit 9/11 served only as an anti-Bush film and a hollow and tired talking point for liberals and democrats. Fahrenheit 9/11 should act, at the very least, as a springboard for informed public debate about the American war in Iraq. Our understanding of the war in Iraq should not be limited to the sensationalized news flashes on CNN and Fox; to digest only those sound bites is to fail to see the larger historical context of America’s and George W. Bush’s relationship with the Muslim world and with the leaders in the region. While Fahrenheit 9/11’s box office earnings are impressive — the film grossed approximately $21.8 million in its first three days — let’s hope the film isn’t just preaching to the converted.

Mimi Hanaoka

As impractical and as menacing as is seems, the Chinese government has issued regulations that allow the country’s mobile phone service providers to monitor all of the text messages sent and received in the country. Given that approximately 300 million Chinese mobile phone users sent over 220 billion text messages in 2003, Beijing’s latest edict is staggering both in its scope and in the damage it will do to the freedom of communication and the dissemination of news in China.

While these regulations are targeted towards identifying pornographic and the somewhat vague concept of “fraudulent content,” the Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders reports that a Chinese company involved in marketing one of the text message monitoring systems stated that “false political rumors” and “reactionary remarks,” will also be under observation.

According to Venus Info Tech, a company that sells the message monitoring software to Chinese mobile phone service and message providers, certain key words and combinations of those key words may generate an automatic alert, which will be sent to the police. China Mobile Corporation, which controls 65 percent of the Chinese mobile phone market, will implement the new and Orwellian regulations. During this past week, the government forced 20 message service providers to close shop as a punishment for insufficiently monitoring inappropriate messages.  
  
As Beijing was gleefully stifling freedom of expression and the spread of information, the residents of Hong Kong staged an enormous pro-democracy protest. On Thursday, July 1, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in Hong Kong to express their fury at Beijing’s recent decision that the citizens of Hong Kong will not be able to directly elect their leader next year. The protest was held on the seventh anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to Chinese rule; while Beijing called on the people of Hong Kong to take the opportunity to celebrate the anniversary of the handover, approximately 530,000 people — although estimates range anywhere from 200,000 to 680,000 people — marched peacefully in the 95 degree heat. The scope of the demonstration is made all the more impressive by the fact that the population of Hong Kong is a mere 6.8 million. Given that the new mobile phone regulations will target political dissent, it is precisely this kind of political demonstration and expression of discontent that is under threat.    

China’s decision to police private text messages is troubling not only because it is anathema to the concept of a free and safe exchange of ideas, but also because text messaging has proven to be profoundly influential; when the Chinese authorities attempted to cover up the SARS outbreak in 2003, it was the millions of private text messages that were sent that alerted the populace to the outbreak and exposed the government’s cover-up of the epidemic. According to The New York Times, “Text messages have also generated popular outrage about corruption and abuse cases that had received little attention in the state-controlled media.” In a nation where the media is scrupulously monitored, these new mobile phone regulations are dangerously close to choking off the last and private outlet for the exchange of ideas and the dissemination of news.    

Mimi Hanaoka

That it was only a handful of people, gathered together for less than half an hour, who witnessed the birth of a new Iraq probably saved Iraqis and the Coalition forces many lives; let us hope, however, that this handover ceremony was not reflective of how the new Iraqi government will operate. Secrecy and speed defeated, at least for the moment, the increasingly violent insurgents, but it is precisely the qualities of secrecy and haste that the new Iraqi government must avoid.

Making Bush and Blair seem particularly devious and secretive, the BBC reports:

Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair — apparently the only leaders at the NATO summit aware that the handover was taking place — exchanged smiles and a brief handshake after consulting their watches.

With 160,000 Coalition troops still in Iraq, in addition to the privately contracted security services — less official but no less prominent — the immediate effects of the handover may be difficult to discern. The New York Times reports that the new American embassy in Iraq will be “the world’s largest,” and will manage the staggering sum — eight billion dollars — that will be channeled into Iraq as reconstruction aid.  

If Dr. Iyad Allawi, the new Iraqi Prime Minister, should impose some form of martial law in the coming days to control the bloody chaos that is Iraq, the birth of a new Iraq may become an even more nervous occasion. The vacuously buoyant note — “Let freedom reign!” — that President Bush jotted to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice could not strike a more dissonant note with the very cautious optimism on the ground in Iraq.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Plunging into the increasingly competitive market for the Arabic-speaking audience, the BBC has announced plans to develop an Arabic-language TV station. While Al-Hurra (The Free One), the recent American incursion into Arabic language television, was reviled — Tishrin, a Syrian newspaper, denounced it as “part of a project to re-colonize the Arab homeland that the United States seeks to implement through a carrot-and-stick policy,” — the BBC’s project might well become successful.  

The question of journalistic independence and national partiality is a legitimate concern, since the British Foreign Office will provide the BBC with funding for its venture into Arabic-language TV. Government funding, however, certainly doesn’t preclude journalistic integrity or local popularity and acceptance. While some may regard the American Al-Hurra — to which Congress allocated a $62 million budget for its first year of operations — and its radio equivalent, Radio Sawa, with little more than deep suspicion and loathing, the BBC is both popular and respected.

The BBC World Service radio news broadcast has 1.8 million listeners per week in Baghdad, Basra, and other major cities in Iraq, and it is the largest international radio broadcasting station in the country. These impressive statistics are in spite of the fact that the British Foreign Office currently finances the BBC’s numerous World Service radio stations. The BBC World Service offers news in 43 languages, and an estimated 45 million listeners worldwide tune into the BBC’s English-language radio service.

The BBC’s Arabic-language TV programming, then, may emerge as a healthy competitor for Arab satellite stations, such as Al-Jazeera, which boasts an estimated audience of 35 million viewers in the Arabic-speaking world. Granted, the figure of 1.8 million BBC listeners pales in comparison to Al-Jazeera’s 35 million viewers, but while Al-Jazeera both feeds and panders to a sense of pan-Arab solidarity, the BBC may be able to trade on its reputation as a reliable and accessible source of news. And the BBC knows its competition: When Al-Jazeera was founded in Qatar in 1996, it lured and successfully poached a number of former BBC Arabic staffers.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Sierra Leone surely qualifies as one of the many little hells on this earth. Apart from diamonds, the country has little else to bring a glimmer of hope to its economy. What it does have is political instability, a landscape and a people ravaged by a decade of civil war, and the recrimination that is the natural result of post-civil war reconstruction.

But for the women in Sierra Leone, childbirth may also be a life-sentence of ostracism and humiliation. If it were not horrific enough that approximately two in every 100 women die during childbirth, due to inadequate medical care, an inordinately large number of child-bearing women are afflicted with fistula, or vesico-vaginal fistula, whereby, due to complications during pregnancy, a woman is condemned to a lifetime of incontinence.

Fatmata Kargbo is one of the approximately 5,000 women — in a country of five million — to be afflicted annually with the easily curable condition of fistula. She is regarded as unclean and jinxed, lives in solitary humiliation, and earns a living by chipping rocks for builders.

Fatima states: “Everyone deserted me – my husband deserted me, my friends deserted me. I know I will never have a husband, I will never have a boyfriend, I will never have a baby. So I just live by myself.”

The condition is cheaply curable, at 180 U.S. dollars, but there are so many women with the condition that it would take 50 years to treat the backlog of women in Sierra Leone, according to Elizabeth Hunter, the head midwife at Mercy Ships, a Christian medical charity ship that was recently moored outside of Sierra Leone’s capital.
  
Such tragic afflictions should remind us of the pressing need to specifically examine women’s issues within the broader context of regional political and economic studies. While most of Sierra Leone lives in absolute poverty, these women, stripped of social and family networks of support, are cast into their own private little hells.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Indicative of the confused and paranoid bigotry that has seeped into the fabric of American life in the post-9/11 world, students at the University of California at Irvine have denounced the desire by some Muslim students to wear a stole at graduation on the basis that the stole condones terrorism and suicide bombings.

Never mind that stole in question features strictly religious inscriptions — one side of the stole would have the innocuous and pious phrase “Lord, increase my knowledge” sewn into it. The other side would feature the shahadah, which is the Muslim confession of faith.  

Larry Mahler, the president of the UC Irvine chapter of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi referred to the episode about the stoles and stated: “I am offended by that … What they are doing is ratifying the suicide bombing that killed innocent people.”

The inappropriate and unconditional politicization of religion is troubling enough, but this incident at UC Irvine is born of ignorance fanning the flames of religious intolerance. It points to a blunt equation: Islam is terrorism.

The term “terrorist” is problematic in itself — after all, it is the contingency of politics that may define one group as “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan and another group as “terrorists” elsewhere — and the inherent association of Islam with extra-legal violence is deeply troubling and shameful. It speaks not only of ignorance and religious intolerance but a sad readiness to associate the religion of 1.3 billion Muslims with terrorism.

Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan and an expert on Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia, provides insightful commentary on the situation at UC Irvine and a thorough explanation of what the shahadah is.  

To associate Islam with terrorism in the way that the students at UC Irvine have done is to forgo understanding, encourage bigotry, and promote the polarization of communities.

Mimi Hanaoka

While American audiences sit in front of their TVs, captivated by the recent fad of metrosexuality — which I doubt has made any serious inroads into productive dialogue and understanding — with shows such as “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and “Boy Meets Boy,” Bollywood lesbians are faring less well.  

Karan Razdan’s latest film, “Girlfriend,” has been condemned both by conservatives and by women’s organizations. The plotline of “Girlfriend” is that possessiveness and envy tear apart a lesbian couple when one of the women swaps her Sapphic indulgences for a boyfriend. The snubbed lesbian, jealous and possessive, becomes psychotic.    

IndiaFM.com reports that members of the right-wing Shiv Sena group, incensed by what they perceive to be a film that runs counter to Indian culture, set the Sajjan cinema in Varanasi on fire when it screened “Girlfriend”, while the Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena wing of the Shiv Sena party also protested and disrupted a matinee screening of the movie in Bombay.  

Right-wing Shiv Sena activists have denounced the movie as “regressive,” while women’s groups have condemned the film as “highly regressive” on the basis that it panders to heterosexual male titillation while incorporating “all the negative popular myths about lesbians.” According to women’s groups, “Girlfriend” is nothing more than a “pornographic and stereotypical portrayal” of a lesbian couple.

I suspect that some critics may quarrel with director Karan Razdan’s claim that his film addresses the issue of a woman who has chosen to become a lesbian as a result of her circumstances. Radzan’s I-refuse-to-take-a-clear-stance-about-my-own-film comment was that “whether my film generates good or bad publicity, my intention is to start a discussion about this subject, and create an awareness in society.” Radzan’s movie is certainly provocative, in so far as it has sparked anger and arson, but it seems, just as certainly, that it is socially unproductive for all parties involved.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Boarding schools, those clannish institutions that are sometimes regarded with suspicion — since they may be either bastions of privilege or halfway houses for the wayward teen — have captured a new market: two-year-olds.    

Although boarding kindergartens have existed in China for decades — the Weihai Kindergarten, one of the most prestigious boarding kindergartens in Shanghai, China, was founded in 1951 — they are becoming less unusual and more highly sought after.  

At the Li Mai School, a boarding school located in the farmland outside Beijing, students as young as two years old board on campus from Monday until Friday, at which point some of them are collected by their parents and are whisked home.

Shang Shangu, the principal of a boarding kindergarten in Shangai, explained that part of the appeal of the boarding kindergartens is that they offer their students academic and personal advantages that are unavailable to their peers at day schools; these two-year-olds are developing a competitive edge over the broader educated population. Speaking about her students, Shang Shangu stated that “in order for them to be able to compete, we need to help them build up their self-respect and self-confidence.” Self-respect and self-confidence make a marketable individual.  

Boarding kindergartens are, at least partially, a function of the developing Chinese social and market economy, and they speak to an underlying anxiety. The Chosun Ilbo reports that 17 percent of all 18- to 22-year-olds in China were admitted to colleges and universities last year. For the new middle class, the competition for higher education is stiff and, with most couples having only one child, a family’s ambitions may come to rest on one little pair of shoulders.

Such a hysterical desire for a competitive edge is not unique to China, nor is it limited to the anxieties of an emerging middle class; Japan is notorious for its cram schools, or juku, where students take private classes to supplement their public or private school education, just as the privileged New Yorker is famous for purchasing numerous tutors for his or her child. Education has always brought with it social advantage, but what is interesting about the boarding kindergarten phenomenon is the ferocity of the drive for a competitive edge at such a young age.

At a time of rapid globalization and attendant social change, these boarding kindergartens should highlight — without any particular judgment — the very concrete social consequences of broader economic and political transformation.

Mimi Hanaoka