Wednesday, July 27, 2016

California's Wildfires And The Firefighters' Philosophy

We see the might of the fire department when it tries to contain enormous wildfires, and we know that this fire department could replace the police and the army in places that are susceptible to fires. The fire department's up-to-date technology, such as the latest cutting-edge chemicals to tackle the blaze, and its highly skilled manpower consisting even of airplane pilots, enable it to manage large swathes of land and large numbers of population, making it very powerful, sometimes literally overnight. But this power is dependent on the whims of the fire.

The sustenance of power in the fire department depends fully on the duration of the blaze: if the blaze lasts for days, the fire department is powerful for those days, and if it lasts for weeks then the fire department is powerful for weeks. After the wildfire is extinguished, the fire department dramatically loses power and once again goes back into oblivion. Its oblivion and inactivity is complete, for the fire department maintains no internal “office politics” because its experience of power is intense, short-lived and accompanies the fire, as opposed to being the result of careful and farsighted political planning, team-building and manipulation.

Today's intense and panicked focus in the media on the wildfires of Canada and the USA are not so just because the fires have been particularly intense and active, but because of the anxiety that the longer the fires last the longer the fire department stays in power, and gets the chance to further strengthen its role in a certain place and in wider society, toppling even the police and army from certain places, for one.

The fire department dictates the flows of people out of dangerous places and evaluates when the population's private property has to be left behind. Giving the painful instruction to leave behind one's home and other belongings which cannot be taken along is made far easier by the philosophies declaring the impermanence of things. It is this idea in philosophy of impermanence which can be carried forward, thought over and espoused by the fire department more than by other organizations. It is this philosophy with which the fire department is engaged in while doing its “office work,” when the firefighters directly face the blaze, as opposed to being politicized thoroughly like the police and the army and thinking of the tactics and strategies to gain more political power for a certain team or leader within the department, even when they are supposed to be completely engaged in on-the-ground operations. Politics is of no interest to the firefighter, politics ultimately being the search and problematization of the “other” of a certain society, which the firefighter is not concerned with, given that his/her “enemy” is the natural fire itself and not the foreign or criminal “other.”

However, there is a political-philosophical problem in the fire department when it engages in the Greek philosophers/thinkers who consider fire to be one of the important four or five elements which compose the universe, and influenced by the ancient Greeks the firefighter celebrates the importance of fire and becomes a supporter of fires, and considers fire to be his/her leader and indirectly lends support to the sustenance of the fire department's power through his/her desire to see the fires burn for as long as possible. He/she ceases to fight the blaze, and builds all kinds of protests in the department in order to ultimately support his/her budding revering of fire. We must continue to reward the firefighters as enduring heroes and heroines of society for their role in dousing fires even long after they doused the blaze, which may convince them to abandon Greek philosophy's emphasis on and exaltation of fire.

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Kathmandu's Widened Roads And The Marginalization Of Nepal's Nomads

There can never be an ideal, true nomad: being born is being born stationary and being introduced to a sedentary life. There is a significant moment of nomadic rebellion within the mother's womb, when the infant kicks his/her feet against the wall of his/her mother's womb, asking to be let go from his/her stationary and sedentary life, and be submitted to a “life of the legs.” But the kick is misinterpreted, and the child once born is introduced to a sedentary world, placed on its back, given illusory empty space where his/her kick does not meet an object to push away, and displayed for the pleasure of other sedentary figures that surround him/her as a special destination.

Reading Lacan, one feels that the mother's walking away from the child is due to her own nomadic impulse to walk, or her way of kicking the child back as a response to her child's kick on her womb. Yet contrary to Lacan, the child does not ask the hurt-filled question “Where does my mother go?” because indeed the child itself has kicked the mother away from within the womb before the mother actually walked away. The mother walking away from the child is a result of his/her kick to her womb; the child demands the mother to walk; the child is the originator of a nomadic impulse in the mother.

Some of Nepal's villagers become nomads when they leave behind a previous more sedentary life in the village for Kathmandu. The Nepali villager comes to Kathmandu for the first time, and in that very first moment of stepping off the bus, he/she is completely directionless, lost from familiar sedentary life, nauseous from the bus travel, with the solid and firm tarmac below him as a kind of support, a kind of sign that the urban world he/she is in can be navigated. Then as he/she travels on foot, taking hesitant steps at first, he/she becomes nomad, a traveler of Kathmandu's roads, criss-crossing Kathmandu's roads without more than the most basic purpose, at most to sell his/her village goats in the market he/she cannot locate, but moving beyond that purpose too as he/she keeps walking freely. He/she doesn't care to read the sign-posts that tell him/her where the goat market is and he/she doesn't try to understand the prevailing dialect/accent.

Yet Kathmandu's main roads have been widened significantly as a part of a big development project. Supposedly the roads have been widened to aid the growing population of drivers, but these widened roads marginalize Nepal's nomads. The pavements, which are the paths that once allowed nomads travel on foot, are nonexistent in many places, and even where they exist they are unsafe to walk given drivers driving fast and reckless. Crossing Kathmandu's widened main roads is impossible given the fast and heavy traffic flow, and so there is no possibility of changing directions based on the whim of the nomadic legs, of criss-crossing Kathmandu freely, like there used to be.

Driving within the confines of their small cars, Kathmandu residents miss the nomadic travelers once found walking the pavements. Hence authorities must interpret Kathmandu's automobile collisions as expressions of a wish for all the cars to be “kicked” away and life to be enjoyed by foot again. But a large crowd gathers around the road accidents in Kathmandu, and it is a mysterious large crowd of sedentary individuals that seems made specially for the purposes of surrounding accident scenes. This sedentary crowd blocks the drivers involved in the accident from running away on foot and instead forces them to become sedentary. For the drivers this crowd signals the real possibility of imprisonment, that most sedentary of experiences.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Nepal's Holidays And The Disciplining Of Politics

When everybody else is on Republic Day holiday in Nepal, the politician goes to work. In the holidays, the politician produces a holiday-related document, such as a policy paper on improving work condition for laborers, released aptly on and for the occasion of Labor Day holiday. The politician also engages in other activities like visiting the site of significance given a certain holiday, or engaging in healthy debate with his peers about the holiday.

“Holiday politics” is the result of the disciplining of the political system. One is effectively told that one can only say and do certain things during a particular holiday, like discussing the plight of women strictly on the occasion of Women's Day, when it is allowed and indeed given a lot of exposure. But there is yet the space for rebellion against such a disciplining of politics: one can write something on the plight of women even when it is not Women's Day, or write about an important event long after it has elapsed so that the “holidays” around it is already over, when it is as if a normalization after the event has led to the origin of conditions for the event to re-emerge. It is problematic that we celebrate Women's Day again next year precisely because we have already forgotten or erased the significance of this year's Women's Day and its achievements; what we need to do is originate and re-originate Women's Day and not just celebrate it and forget it.

Problematically, we have written history to create more holidays. We have become historians to unearth events in any given day which could transform that ordinary day into a holiday, and we have come up with techniques of studying history in order to produce more holidays. This is how history writing is so close to the politician, because the historian provides the politician with holidays. Thus, even if a small group of women rebelled against the significance of “Women's Day” and wrote a paper on women on an ordinary day, the historians are able to magnify and glorify this event to transform that day into a new broad holiday related to all women, and make it distinct from other more ordinary days.

The ordinary people must try and enlist historians to downplay the official holidays rather than transform ordinary days into holidays. Or, ordinary people must show that they are always thinking of their causes, and indeed, that every day should be a holiday. The creation of holidays must be taken up by the stakeholders of a certain cause and not left to the historian-politician team. 

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Olympic Fantasies In Nepal's Torch Rallies

Protesters in Nepali torch rallies having daydreams that they are carrying the Olympic 2016 torch instead of protesting some issue with an ordinary flaming torch...First, this quite peaceful fantasy of carrying an Olympic torch helps to deter the protesters from using the flaming torch for arson, and hence this fantasy may be thoroughly crafted by the figures like the road-side Television stores that do not wish to see physical disturbance through torching. However, this fantasy of being an Olympic sportsperson leads to a moment when the protesters become more athletic, making the protests louder, more physical and even more violent.

The Nepali torch rally becomes a site of sports-like competition: who can run the fastest without tiring? Who can shout the catchy slogans the loudest? Who can cause the most disturbance in the streets? Ultimately, whose body is more healthy and better? This competition fractures the unity of the protesting crowd, dividing the protest itself between winners and losers.

It is entirely possible that a small team of very athletic athlete-politicians win in the torch rallies of all the political parties and hence cement a leadership position in all the political parties, forming a kind of authoritarian element in the whole political system and thereafter dominating the other losing political figures. Indeed, the danger of Nepal's unhealthy and non-athletic politicians is that it will allow authoritarian power to develop among an athletic set of political figures who keep winning the torch rallies across the political spectrum.

In the torch rally, it is the body of the protester which is scrutinized, not his/her mental ability with regards to politics, or even his/her emotion or passion towards a cause. Especially in the case of Nepal, with aging politicians, politics in the public event of a protest becomes a thoroughly bodily activity: the body dictates how long the politicians walk, and the unhealthy politician's body's need for exercise may be accompanied by an upward surge in torch rallies.

But for some politicians the torch rally is not an exercise or a training for a bigger athletic-political event, rather it is itself the most important event for which they prepare with other lesser events such as charity football matches. Whereas in a more romantic time in the past, the body was given up in the fight for a cause, as for instance through lengthy imprisonment of the body, today the politician's body has to be kept fit and well-exercised in order that there be sufficient energy for winning torch rallies across a variety of causes. The cause in the torch rally has stopped dictating the protester, rather, the distance of the protesting route may be more important, or the protester's diet. In the future, as a kind of real blow to the passionate politicians' attempts to be sensitive to real problems, the torch rally may be made more routine, with the artificial manufacture of more and more dubious causes to protest, if the torch rally becomes part of the exercise routine for the leading politicians.