Disturbing: de la Rey

JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 26 — "Proudly South African" is this nation's E Pluribus Unum, a slogan stamped on products, echoed in radio commercials and inculcated into the new South African DNA. Much as America's motto celebrates melding many into one, South Africa's says that it doesn't matter what you look like — we can all be proud of our young country.

Enter Louis Pepler, who, perhaps inadvertently, has cast the notion of South African pride in a whole new light. He and two friends penned an unlikely rock ballad about an Afrikaner general named De la Rey who battled British forces a century ago, and it instantly became an Afrikaner anthem.

Mr. Pepler calls the song, "De la Rey," a testament to Afrikaner pride. "I'm part of this rainbow country of ours," he said. "But I'm one of the colors, and I'm sticking up for who I am. I'm proud of who I am."

Which would be fine, except that nobody, not even Afrikaners themselves, agrees on what an Afrikaner is these days.

A dozen years after the end of an Afrikaner government that invented apartheid, the mere concept of Afrikaner pride remains an exquisitely sensitive issue among whites and blacks alike. Are Afrikaners the feared Dutch descendants who built an empire based on a belief in their God-ordained racial superiority? Are they just another ethnic group, like the Zulu and Sotho and Xhosa, with a distinct place in the new democracy? Or are they South Africans first and foremost— 2.5 million whites in a stewpot of 4.5 million whites among 47.5 million people — and Afrikaners second, or third?

"De la Rey" has become a vessel for those aspirations and fears and, for the last month, the object of a caustic, often racially tinged national debate.

I'm generally pretty mellow about this sort of thing, but I can certainly see the concern here. The Afrikaners ruled with an iron fist, disenfranchised millions of their countrymen, and sought to silence political dissent. They were no heroes. (And I'm even cutting them a bit of slack because many members of the Irish resistance fought with the Boers, under the highly complex theory that if you were shooting at a Brit, for whatever cause, it was a good thing.) Idealizing one of their historical forebears strikes me as pretty offensive, even if intended innocently--and I'm not convinced it was.

Taken literally, the lyrics are clear: "De la Rey" is a song about Afrikaner history. In the Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, a much larger British force overwhelmed the Boers, or Afrikaners, in a scramble for gold and land — but only after Gen. Koos de la Rey inflicted punishing defeats on the British. Nearly 28,000 Afrikaners and perhaps 20,000 black Africans died in British concentration camps during the war, many of them women and children. Their suffering is a central theme in Afrikaner lore.

Mr. Pepler's song is set in the trenches of that war. In the music video, a blooded and beleaguered Afrikaner soldier sings of "a handful of us against a whole big force" and "a nation that will rise again" — as the Afrikaners later did, winning control of South Africa in an election in 1948.

"De la Rey, de la Rey," the refrain pleads, "will you come and lead the Boers?"

But while the lyrics as a whole refer to the Boer War, some see in those phrases, and in the soldier's hopeless plight, a metaphor for Afrikaners' reduced place in post-apartheid society. His plea for a leader is viewed as a call for resistance to South Africa's government, which is based on universal suffrage.

The lyrics are as follows:

Delarey - Bok van Blerk lyrics (English Translation)

On a mountain in the night
We lie in the dark and wait
In the mud and the blood
As rain and streepsak clings to me

And my house and my farm were burnt to the ground so they could capture us
But those flames and those fires now burns deep deep within me.

De La Rey, De La Rey can you come and lead the Boers?
De La Rey, De La Rey
General, General we will fall around you as one.
General De La Rey.

The Khakis that laugh
A handful of us against an massive force
With our backs to the cliffs of the mountains
They think its over for us

But the heart of a Boer is deeper and wider, they will come to see
On a horse he comes, the lion of West Transvaal

De La Rey, De La Rey can you come and lead the Boers?
De La Rey, De La Rey

General, General we will fall around you as one.
General De La Rey.

Because my wife and my child are in a camp dying,
And the Khakis are walking over a nation that will rise again

De La Rey, De La Rey can you come and lead the Boers?
De La Rey, De La Rey
General, General we will fall around you as one. General De La Rey.

What do you guys think?

UPDATE: I actually thought a lot about this song all night, plus I got a commenter from Pretoria (I checked the IP and everything!) who calls this "a big sob story." So it's as I imagined, the rough equivalent of, say, Jerry Lee Lewis penning a song in 1955 celebrating Stonewall Jackson, as an expression of ethnic pride in the face of the civil rights movement which, by implication, denigrates the goals of that movement and celebrates the racist underpinnings of the system which has been dismantled.

It's not that Pepler's song is actively racist: it doesn't need to be. Like many colonial texts, it focuses on the battle between the white people over who gets to control the resources and the land of the third world: the actual indigenous population might as well not even exist in this formulation. They're even less important than the landscape, which at least merits a mention. The only people who "matter" are the soldiers and the obligatory blonde wife and child. Christ, even Heart of Darkness was more sympathetic to the indigenous African population than this. At least they existed, however dehumanized.

I'm not suggesting that we're in "Skinhead Boy" territory here: at least not intentionally. But part of the point of Lynx and Lamb is that they, well, kind of suck, and this doesn't, really. It's well-produced and catchy (partly why I ruminated on it all night), both anthemic and orchestral at the same time.It's apparently become something of an arena chant at South African sporting events. (It was banned, and then unbanned at Loftus Versfeld Stadium, a rugby pitch in Pretoria.)

There's clearly a difference between hate speech and racial pride, or is there? Does it matter who speaks, what their history is?

Get Well Soon, Steve!

We here at PowerPop wish a big get well soon to Steve Gilliard of the News Blog. Steve's a very bright guy and a terrific blogger, especially sharp on issues of military strategy and race and, err, macaroni and cheese.

Anyway, he's having surgery sometime in the next couple of days, and we wish him well.

Toyz

So I was looking at Sadly, No! and Gavin inspired me!



No idea if this will actually work.....

Religion, Bad Religion, and Evolution

Sorry for the delay; Liberal Mountain has been Typhoid Mountain for the last several days, with various versions of strep and the flu knocking almost all of us out to some degree. By the combined miracles of penicillin and TheraFlu, however, I am at least upright for the first time in three days.

Since I've been on this religion and politics kick recently, I'll connect that back to music and talk about this really interesting project:

Evolution and religion may not be at war, but no agreement seems possible in their most basic tenets. Traditional religions are based on dualism, and evolution is strictly materialist. Dualism is founded on a belief in the supernatural. The materialist position forms the basis for belief in naturalism, which holds that "the empirical procedure of exploration and verification is the only known reliable method of discovering truth" (Smith, 1952). For the materialist, the supernatural has no basis in reality but instead is an unwarranted distraction brought about through mythology.

The idea that naturalism might be a kind of modernist religion has been advanced in recent years (Johnson, 2000). Evolutionary biology enjoys a privileged position at the core of this belief system because it offers explanations about why and how humankind originated. Any teacher of evolution is by default a teacher of a deeply philosophical world-view, one that differs dramatically from that of traditional theistic religion.

The proposition that one must "believe in evolution" as people blindly believe in God is easily discounted. Still, much of modern evolutionary biology today is sprinkled with tinges of dualism. Notions of progress, purpose, emergent properties, optimality, and increasing complexity in evolution all contain vague hints of dualism, and are debated in symposia and published in books and journals by today's most active evolutionists. These architects of modern naturalism have traditionally shunned the ideas of religions, but to what degree they discount the supernatural remains to be seen.

The most important feature of evolutionary biology is its integrated view of humankind's place in nature that easily lends itself to a deeply satisfying metaphysics based entirely on materialist principles. This provision, coupled with the observation that theology has lost so much of its appeal to the average citizen, leads to the controversial conclusion that, in the modern world, Naturalism is a substitute for, and provides all the benefits of, traditional religion. If the naturalists have their day, theism is effectively dead.

Now, I know I'm a geek and all that, but this sounds fascinating to me. Principal investigator? Greg Graffin. Yes, THAT Greg Graffin, who finally went back and finished his doctorate after allllllll these years. (Congrats to Greg, BTW. It's not easy, especially when one's life seems to have taken a different path.)

Essentially, what Graffin did for his research was not so much an evolutionary zoology project as a study of what the detailed study of evolution does to one's beliefs, that it, whether or not evolutionary scientists themselves have personal belief in God, or whether they believe such beliefs are necessary for moral behavior.

Overwhelmingly, they don't, on both counts. (PDF) The vast majority of Graffin's respondents were Western (85%) and for those who claimed a religious identity, the plurality were Christian (But still under 10%).

Some really interesting questions here. There's the expected "Do you believe in God?" sort of thing (almost 80% said no, unequivocally), but then he divides that into traditional religion and deism and a willingness to believe that there's an unnamed thing out there. Other questions deal with immortality, free will, materialism, and the role of evidence.

I was most interested in the question of morality. Graffin asks his respondents to reply yes or no to the question "I believe the findings of evolutionary biology can influence and alter morality." A somewhat surprising 67% agreed. Now, we might be dealing here with differing definitions of "morality," as we clearly were with the term "values" in the 2004 election, where for some the term meant "please don't attach electrodes to the genitals of quite possibly innocent foreign nationals" and for others it meant "please don't interfere with my right to be hating on the gays." Here, I expect the two poles would be sexual continence, drinking and dancing vs. a long term view of the morality of our behavior as regards the environment, the planet, and the various species upon it. For example, I happen to believe that it's immoral that we're clearcutting the rainforests in Borneo and Sumatra to build palm oil plantations for biofuels. I have nothing against biofuels per se, but they seem at best a stopgap measure, a methadone for oil addiction. I'm just not convinced orangutans, who only live in Borneo and Sumatra and are possibly a brief decade or so from extinction, should be sponsoring our habit, you know? Anyway, for some of these evolutionary scientists, that might be the sort of morality they mean.

The only area where the scientists showed real division was in the question "What is your view of purpose and progress in evolution?" About half said there was progress in evolution, but not purpose, another 40% said there was neither progress nor purpose, just random changes (since I presume the term "adaptation" would imply progress or purpose). I take it that this is the great Darwin question (but I'm certainly willing to be corrected on that point).

Anyway, an interesting read and a thoughtful intervention in our intellectual discourse by someone who was already well known as a serious principled, and articulate guy. Oh, and a great rock lyricist.

e.g.:


Best of everything Dr. Graffin!

Photoblogging: Last Day!

It's officially my last day of the Other Job, and I've been working with annoying documents for most of it. But the pictures are really beautiful, so I thought I'd share one with you.



And this is my favorite image ever, painted by a fifth-grader in Aceh. Tragic but beautiful.



I've been working at least two and frequently three jobs for just about a decade now, and I'm done. I never want to work more than one job again.

Wingnut Watch: Evil Zionist Conspiracy Edition

One of the oddest pairings in the recent political landscape has been the somewhat surprising conjunction of evangelical Christianity with Judaism. I guess I'm the only one who recalls that callers blathering about the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy were a longtime staple of the sort of late-night radio that has since morphed into your Limbaughs and O'Reillys and Coulters: bizarre people up too late and spewing shit in the wee hours. The talk radio hosts in those days would let these people go for a moment, then cut them off. Now, of course, they're the hosts.

September 11, 2001, among its many somewhat bizarre effects, created a rapprochement between evangelical Christians and Jews as they teamed up to fight the Mohammedan Menace© the world over. I hear that your Rapture Right actually want to poke the Middle East with a stick until someone nukes Israel because that's supposed to bring Jesus back, but I confess I do not have independent confirmation of that (except for one family member, married into the Baptists, who confessed to me that they terrify him: "They really do want to cause the end of the world!"). The nuclear annihilation of Israel seems like an odd goal, but even odder when you consider the political alliance between these two groups.

So it's nice, I guess, to see them return to a state of mutual distrust.

Today's example comes from the office of Georgia State Representative Ben Bridges, a Republican from Cleveland, GA, whose office this week released a memo opposing the teaching of evolution in schools, not because it's unGodly per se, but because it's well, you know.

“Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” the memo says. “This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

The memo calls on lawmakers to introduce legislation that would end the teaching of evolution in public schools because it is “a deception that is causing incalculable harm to every student and every truth-loving citizen.”

...........

Bridges denied writing or authorizing the memo.

“I did not put it out nor did I know it was going out,” Bridges said. “I’m not defending it or taking up for it.”

The memo directs supporters to call Marshall Hall, president of the Fair Education Foundation Inc., a Cornelia, Ga.-based organization that seeks to show evolution is a myth. Hall said he showed Bridges the text of the memo and got his permission to distribute it.

“I gave him a copy of it months ago,” said Hall, a retired high school teacher. “I had already written this up as an idea to present to him so he could see what it was and what we were thinking.”

Hall said his wife Bonnie has served as Bridges’ campaign manager since 1996.

Bridges acknowledged that he talked to Hall about filing legislation this year that would end the teaching of evolution in Georgia’s public schools. Bridges said the views in the memo belong to Hall, though Bridges said he doesn’t necessarily disagree with them.

“I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory,” Bridges said. “I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie why teach anything?”

Why teach anything indeed? I mean education makes people think, sometimes even about not voting for bigots. Better just to avoid the whole scenario.


.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

Rep. Bridges' Reelection Campaign Begins.
(Image courtesy of the Florida Holocaust Museum)

Gah. I genuinely don't understand why anyone anywhere ever would ally themselves with these people, but then I'm a moonbat, so what do I know?

The Aging Hipster has more.

A PowerPop Valentine Wish

For all my readers and lurkers and friends.... **mwah!**

XTC: RIP

Went to check our Emerson's assertion in the comments a few posts ago, and here's the news:

Partridge says, "At the moment, XTC is well and truly in the fridge. Purely, really, for the reason that [partner] Colin [Moulding] doesn't want to write anymore. He's either taking a break, or that break could become permanently in place. He told me some months back that he's not interested in music anymore, and doesn't want to write, and basically said, 'Our paths will cross again or they'll be involved in some way.' And then he proceeded to move away from his house-- I have no idea where he's living right now, I have no idea what his phone number is, don't really know how to contact him, and so Colin is obviously wanting to leave the world to some extent. And I guess he's got the right to do that, so I'm not going to pester him and say, 'Come on, what's the matter with you, get it together.' Emphasis added.

That's from less than a weeks ago, so it's pretty current. Thanks for the heads-up, Emerson!

The nine-disc Fuzzy Warbles box set is out and available here.

There's also a podcast here.

I am quite blue about this, I admit.

WoundedTeenBlogging

So after several hours, we come to find out that the teen's freak kickball accident resulted in a broken arm. Just above the wrist. Ouch.



When I gathered the teen from school, her arm was wrapped in a newspaper, which is apparently accepted EMS practice, with a shirt for a sling. Who knew? Here, we have upgraded her to a magazine and kicky scarf.

Now, it's a splint and real sling, and tomorrow we get whatever the orthopedist wants her to have.

She has inherited my grace and dignity, obviously.

The Best Grammy Report Ever

Comes from Sal and Tony at NYCD. Simels hipped me to them a while ago, and I've been having great fun with their emails, but this report was just a riot.

Best acceptance speech: Ludacris --"I want to thank Bill O'Reilly"? "My father's on his death bed. I Love you to death, Dad"? Looks like ya already did 'Cris. Or is it Lu'? Luda? He gets bonus points for thanking the William Morris Agency.

We just dont get Mary J. Blige.

Worst song ever by great band: "Life In The Fast Lane" - The Eagles (winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Band That Pisses Off Tony The Most).

Tony missed Rascal Flatts' Eagles tribute so he could check out a movie on ESPN Classic which features a cameo appearance by Buddy Greco.

..........
At this point in his career, Lionel Richie should devote all his time to feeding his daughter.

OK, Mary J. is better than Chris Brown. But he can dance better than Smokey Robinson and Lionel Richie put together. Then again, they are a combined 130 years old.

It is a sad state of affairs when "Soul Brother Number One" leaves us, and the go-to artist for the tribute is Christina Aguilera, with Prince in the room. Even without Prince in the room. When Peter O'Toole dies, we guess we can expect a tribute from James Brolin.

Ludacris and Mary J.-- it just wasn't good.

Watching James Blunt sing "You're Beautiful" (winner of Best Song That The Entire World Is So Sick Of That Nobody Will Ever Want To Hear Anything This Guy Does In The Future) made us think, "This is what we expect Burgess Meredith would have sounded like as a 25 year old folk singer."

There's more, and bitchier. Woohoo!