Enjoy !

You can, therefore you must!


Today’s politics is more and more the politics of jouissance, concerned with the ways of soliciting or controlling and regulating jouissance. Is the entire of opposition between the liberal/tolerant West and the fundamentalist Islam not condensed in the opposition between, on the one side, the woman’s right to free sexuality, inclusive of the freedom to display/expose oneself and provoke/disturb man, and, on the other side, the desperate male attempts to eradicate or, at least, keep under control this threat.

--Zizek

Two things I find very boring: rants about immorality/decadence (read: the lewdness of women); and rants about fundamentalism/backwardness. Politically: you love life or you love death! Or Bush: they're jealous of our freedoms.

So, let me (with your permission) engage in a bit of ranting of my own. Tourism. These adverts on the televison are surely designed for morons who want to "experience" something "real", so that they can 'escape' the humdrum of their own lives. The more exotic, the better: Indian elephants or Bali dancers...wow! nothing like a bit of culture and traditional dancing..perhaps we can even throw in a whirling dervish to satisfy your spiritual leanings). Authentic. the real deal. Been there, done that. Check.

There is now a television show called 'Shopping for religion'..I kid thee not! And everyone's a sufi now! One of the funniest things I saw at the Tate was a short film on Mumbai. People turned up in their droves-mainly the usual seekers of 'the mystical'. But they left in horror after five minutes. No colour, no Bollywood glamour, or 'shining India'..damn, not even any elephants. Just the grim reality of slumland, just five million people who have to shit on the streets because there aren't proper facilities.

And then there are the unreal cities in the Middle East with their 'education cities' and huge shopping malls and their own brand of the virtual city-devoid of any politics, real people, or sense of place. A snazzy version of Singapore, really, where you can play golf and talk about derivatives., or ski indoors and then grab a Starbucks coffee. The Friends generation. Or worse: the swarm of yobs-aka. British tourists- that descend on the Greek islands to lose themselves in excess.

One last thing: no offence to any Scousers: but Liverpool as a city of culture? This is how cities now have to market themselves (I've even heard that the late B.B. hired Saatchi & Saatchi to improve the brand image of Pakistan!).

The next time I hear some air-head talk about having "fun" or "sample the local culture" I think I'm going to reach for my gun, in my backward sort of fundamentalist way...