Market opportunities in the developing world

This is an article about various US companies that are getting smart by seeking customers in the developing world's burgeoning markets.  I've talked in the past about the growth of the middle class worldwide, and specifically the wisdom of US companies focusing their business strategies on this newly-minted middle class.

Inevitable revolutions in Central America

I just finished a book called Inevitable Revolutions, by Walter Lafeber.  It is an exhaustive review of US-Central America relations from the early 1800s to the 1990s.  It has two theses that it argues throughout the length of the book:

• The United States, despite its revolutionary birth, has since at least the 1820s been an anti-revolutionary power in Central America, prizing stability over all else.
• The very insistence of the US on promoting stability over revolution or even democracy in Central America has in fact created time and again the basic conditions for revolution.  In trying to avoid revolution (through military, economic, and diplomatic pressure on Central American countries), the US has in fact been the prime driver of it.

One thing that leaps out at me from both this book and from my recent exposure to Central American reality is that, while the entire world and Latin America in particular speaks of and denounces US imperialism, Central America is a totally different case from anywhere else.  Mexico has been too big, strong, and nearby for direct US intervention in much of the 20th century, and South America has been too far away (the Allende coup notwithstanding).  But Central America is the only place that I've ever seen where the US actually plays a role like France does in West Africa.  The cities in Central America are built on the mid-century US model, the food and culture (and the cheapening of both) and the commercial establishments are like in the US, even the gang violence seems modeled on the US.  Most strikingly, elites in Honduras emulate and identify with US culture in the same way that elites in francophone Africa do with France.  They speak to and educate their children in the colonial tongue, they send their children to study and live in the dominant country, they are more familiar with many parts of the metropole than with most of their own city and country, their clothes and vacations and cultural consumption are all from the colonial mother power.  It's really uncanny.  My wife, upon getting to know a bit of Honduran culture, said something to the effect of, "Everyone in Colombia moans about gringo neocolonialism, but we haven't seen what neocolonialism really is!"

Inevitable Revolutions is a very well-researched book, and is organized at multiple levels (chronologically, thematically, and by country) to make for easy reading and a coherent understanding of the subject matter by the reader.  It has certainly illuminated many of my questions about Central American history, economy, culture, and present-day politics.  I would highly recommend it.  The latest edition is from 1993, so it covers the 1980s very well, but obviously gives no updates since then.  I'd love to hear Lafeber's take on the countries' trajectory since then.

Fascinating little-known Native American cultural facts

I am often pretty hard in my judgments of modern society, and specifically of the utility (or lack thereof) of many new technologies.  However, one facet of modern life that I really admire and value is the Internet.  I'll talk in a future post about how the Internet has revolutionized alone time for a lot of people.  Before, if you were home alone and too lazy to get a book and read or do something else involved, you just watched bad TV.  It was a very lonely, passive experience.  Now though, you can doodle around on the Internet.  A lot of people don't spend their time on the Internet very productively, looking mainly at memes and other mindless entertainment that isn't much better than TV.  But Internet at least gives you the option of a more active, intellectually valuable use of your spare time, because you can look up something you have always wondered about, then follow it where it leads you, looking up and learning about countless other related topics.  For me at least this totally changed my way of spending time alone, and it made me feel much less isolated from the rest of the world.

These days, with a full time job, a family, a house (with relatively gender-equitable division of domestic duties), and especially two young boys, I don't have much idle time for the Internet.  Just keeping up with my own blog writing is a Herculean effort that I can never get ahead of (I recently budgeted that it would take me about 84 hours of writing time to produce finished blog posts about all the different subjects that have been building up for me over the past years).  But recently I had a spare moment that allowed me to learn two things about Native American cultures that I'd had no idea about before.  Thank you Wikipedia!

One is Fuegian dogs.  These were dogs that the native people of Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of the Americas, domesticated not from wolves but from the Andean fox.  This is amazing, because it represents to my knowledge the only domesticated canid in the entire world that does not descend from the gray wolf.  I mean, even the domesticated dingos of Australia, the remotest outpost of human settlement, are just regular dogs like everywhere else.  And here this other culture, at the other extreme of human settlement, that is in all other respects pretty materially primitive, took a totally different (and very difficult) path to domestication of an animal.  It also seems that the terms of this domestication differed from that of the common domestic dog--Fuegian dogs were not loyal to a specific owner, and one of their major uses was simply as a heat source, wrapped around lightly-clad humans sleeping in a cold climate.  Unfortunately, the Fuegian dog seems to have been exterminated, presumably by Euro-descended settlers of Patagonia.

The second wild thing I learned about South American Native culture is the existence of a few indigenous languages that became widely-used among non-indigenous colonists--a total reversal of the course of most of the rest of the Americas, where European languages have supplanted Native ones.  Many people know about Guarani, the major language of Paraguay, and the best, living example of this anomaly of an indigenous language becoming the dominant tongue even for non-indigenous people in a given territory.  But apparently there also existed something called lingua geral Paulista, which was a modified form of the Tupi language spoken all along the Brazilian seaboard pre-Conquest.  For most of Brazil's early history, Tupi and lingua geral were spoken by indigenous and colonist alike, as the lingua franca of much of the territory.  More established Euro-descended colonists apparently adopted it as a native tongue, and would communicate in lingua geral with other colonists.  This situation prevailed until the mid-1700s, when an imperial decree and increased Portuguese migration led to a resurgent dominance of Portuguese, eventually wiping out lingua geral.  But still, it's amazing to me that for so long an indigenous language remained the lingua franca in a post-contact American country.  In the present day, a cousin of lingua geral paulista, Nheengatu, is widely spoken in the upper Rio Negro basin (think Colombian Amazonia), and in its turn is even displacing some other native tongues as members of smaller ethnic groups lose their own language and adopt Nheengatu.

Interestingly, Guarani, Old Tupi, and Nheengatu are apparently pretty closely related, (perhaps mutually intelligible?), and the three also gained and in two cases retained a dominance thanks in large part to the efforts of colonial-era Jesuit missionaries, who encouraged literacy, education, printing, and catechism in these languages and not in Spanish or Portuguese.

Anyway, none of these are things I knew two weeks ago, and all of them I learned with a few simple mouseclicks on Wikipedia.  If you're interested in Nheengatu, there's even a professor teaching it in Sao Paulo!

Innocent tonight (for Paulo)

You will grow and suffer.
You may struggle, oppress, or succor.
To me you are ever
A cackle of delight
As we roughhouse and tumble
On this Sunday night after your bath.

Mexican Donald Trump

Here is a silly video imagining a Mexican version of Donald Trump.  It adroitly flips around some of the xenophobic anti-Latino discourse in the US, and shows just how absurd it is.

Formation by Beyonce Knowles

Even from my secluded perch, far from the Twitterverse and shunning as I do all television (and especially the Super Bowl—here is a funny cartoon summary of televised professional sports that captures my sentiments exactly), I know that Beyonce is a big deal. And it's even come to my attention that she has just released a new song and music video that has the Internet abuzz. From what I gather, lots of people are excited that she'sgoing beyond her normal, vanilla, uncontroversial superstar image to celebrate black culture and even protest the abuse of black people in the US. I'm sure lots of people are also trolling about bad it is for black people to openly celebrate being black, but I haven't much read what those people write, and I'm not going to actively seek it out.

In any case, this all makes me a bit reluctant to comment on the video and the song, lest my [totally subjective, relatively unimportant] voice be added to the cacophony of value-laden, definitive pronouncements already out there about What This Video Means. But on the other hand, I always write about things like six months after everyone else has stopped caring about them, so I figured I'd seize the opportunity to write about current events when they're actually current.

In short, I agree with the people who are excited about a pop star's open embrace of what it means to be black in the US in 2016, from physical traits to music to food to funny cultural quirks to the specific challenges and oppression facing the community, without her worrying about projecting one monolithic, coherent image of blackness (because such a thing doesn't really exist).

As for my personal reaction to the video, I really liked it visually. It captures a sort of Southern Gothic aesthetic that has been latent in a lot of music for the past decade or two, but it makes this aesthetic explicit and conscious and intentional. The end product is slick and sexy and abrasive, and very eccentric. The tune isn't that catchy—it isn't in my head today after watching the video last night. Just to show you how not-catchy it is, what's in my head is Ciara's “One Two Step”, which I probably haven't heard or thought about in ten years. I guess “Formation” somehow reminded me of it musically. In general, I don't much care for the sound of most black pop music today—heavy on distorted electronic beats, lots of Autotune, slow chanting, everything very synthetic and inorganic. I think this is what people refer to as Southern-style trap music (which if I understand correctly has its even less charming but somehow more authentic—for me—cousin in the cold, stripped down drill music of Chicago). If Beyonce's video is intriguing, stylish Southern Gothic, much of Chicago's new drill wave is gray, depressing DeathGoth like the Crow, or maybe even some less-polished straight-to-video sequel of the Crow. Dark and sad and cold and post-industrial, with an active aversion to any flash that might make the Gothic seem elegant.

I now realize that I have long had a kneejerk aversion to the Southern tilt of rap music and black popular culture since the 1990s. I just can't get on board with the car-dependent, AC-addicted suburban sprawl of the Sun Belt, black or white, and I guess I subconsciously worried that granting any validity to the resurgence of Southern prominence in national black cultural discourse meant that I was legitimizing the abandonment of the Rust Belt and the suburbanization of the US. I like Outkast and the Goodie Mob, but I don't even like the concept of Atlanta. I don't like its sprawl, its unrepentant, unconscious segregation, its open embrace by black and white of bourgeois consumerist values. And I certainly don't like how it's drawn so many black ascendant professionals away from Chicago!

In any case, I recognize that my distaste for this music is just a subjective aesthetic preference, and my boosterism of all things Chicago (even our murder rate is better than yours) certainly colors my judgment here. And to be honest, given the choice between Chief Keef's “Don't Like” video of a bunch of teenage dudes jumping around to music in a house, or Beyonce's ultra-polished, beautiful production of Formation, I'd much prefer the latter. So in summary, yay for Beyonce on “Formation”.

One last note on what Formation made me think of. Much of the video and the song is an explicit, self-conscious, proud, and sometimes defiant series of in-group references to black customs and idiosyncracies—hot sauce, Red Lobster, natural and fake hair, designer labels, etc. This seems to be powerful, inspiring imagery for the video's black audience, and I can understand that. Insofar as this resounding reception of the video represents a given ethnic group celebrating and reclaiming its identity, this is a great thing.

But it can also border on the tacky or the pandering (though obviously not as noxious or destructive as right-wing politicians' call to “traditional” white values to easily win over an audience). It reminds me of something I see a lot in the US, across both black and white cultures, which is a parochial self-centeredness, an underlying lack of value for or awareness of the rest of the world, that arises naturally from living in the world's most powerful country. I feel that when any group in the US is too centered on itself, it implicitly comes at a cost to the rest of the world since, like it or not, our country bears such a heavy weight in world culture, politics, and economy. So while I see the importance of vindicating black identity and simply the right of blacks to live with dignity in the white-dominated US, I hope that Beyonce and the audience she is addressing with Formation don't become so smitten with the admitted beauty and fun and verve of their own culture that they forget that their struggle needs to also be tied up with other struggles in the world.

Just as much of organized black dissent to the injustice in the US amounts to a call for more consciousness and carefulness on the part of oblivious whites who by their very unawareness perpetuate and strengthen a system that hurts others, I feel that blacks and whites and everyone else in the US need to be more conscious of the problems that our behaviors and our politics and our beliefs can cause, are causing, in the rest of the world. I'm sure eating at Red Lobster may be an experience or a signifier that rings true for a lot of black folk in the US, but if that particular chain restaurant, and industrialized, protein-heavy diets in general cause irreversible ecological harm, rely on slave-labor-heavy value chains, and undermine locally-owned, non-franchise business, then none of us can be content to merely muse at how cute and culturally relevant it is, or how much it makes us feel an in-group solidarity. Ditto for Southern sprawl and car culture, ditto for a consumerist fashion culture, ditto for many other traits of black popular culture that Beyonce makes reference to in Formation. And certainly ditto for the equivalent white US cultural signifiers—meat-laden barbecues, suburban sprawl underlain by fear and hatred of minorities, oversized everything from TVs to cars to serving sizes, a dedication to rugged individualism that borders on a pathological aversion to other human beings. These things may seem to bolster our particular cultures, and to give us satisfaction and meaning for the group identity they provide us, but if they come at the expense of others, we can't celebrate them uncritically.

This is not Beyonce's problem to deal with, nor is it the problem of black folks writ large in the US to solve (nor is it any given US white person's problem to solve alone). It's just something we all need to think about more. I don't know that I've done a very good job with it myself; I have as yet been unable to wholeheartedly join the battle against any of the very real problems that affect our communities in the US, both black and white (bad diets, economic inequality, lack of political representation, violence, hatred, racism, etc.), because I can't get past the idea that my suffering compatriots are at the same time and each in their own way themselves oppressors, often of people living thousands of miles away in entirely different contexts. So I always feel stuck between a drive to work with the Third World poor, and applying my talents to try to improve life in my home country.  The former feels worthwhile but lacks both the glamour of highly-publicized and mediatized US problems, as well as the resonance for me of working with my own people (not to mention that I'd surely be more effective working with people from my own culture than from distant countries).

At any rate, a big thanks to Beyonce for giving me and millions of others some food for thought.

Ralph Bunche

This is a fascinating account of a great US diplomat.

Rising fascism in the West?

A few weeks ago, my cousin sent me this article about Poland's turn to the far right.  I read it just as I was worried about the same thing in the US.  It seems like there are a lot of people in a lot of parts of the world that are no longer just talking the usual intolerance for minorities and other "not-mainstream" groups of people.  No, from Trump down I am hearing a call for actual elimination of the other, I am seeing an explicit demonization, dehumanization, and proposals to totally violate the basic human rights of Muslims, Latino immigrants, and black victims of state crime.  I am seeing a pretty widespread desire to militarize our own domestic affairs, as well as calls to enter new wars abroad.  It's unprecedented for me to see this in US politics.  I mean, I've long abused the label of "fascist" to discredit anyone whose political positions were solidly to the right of my own.  But I didn't really mean it until now, when people are literally advocating for differentiated classes of citizenship and the bullying oppression of minority groups.  For a while I was severely depressed about this.  I feel less pessimistic about it now, but it may be less due to a change in the tone of US politics and more due to my avoiding the news.

Netflix expanding

I was impressed to read that Netflix is massively expanding in 2016.  About ten years ago, when Netflix was becoming established in the US through its mail-order DVD rental, a friend and I mused on the potential for creating a similar, local service in Madrid, Spain, where delivery would be by bike or motorcycle (in the absence of the highly efficient US postal service).  We obviously never did this, but years later, when Netflix streaming came to Colombia, it was a huge deal for my wife and me.  We could suddenly see a wide range of films (most of them crappy, but a few gems) even in our relatively isolated town.  I liked watching Netflix go from being a successful US business to a truly multinational undertaking.  This latest expansion into 130 countries is a huge step for them.  I'm sure more and more US businesses are realizing that US consumers are just a small part of the potential in the world.  Anyway, I somehow feel personally invested in this growth of Netflix, I guess because its discovery of the larger, vibrant, promising world outside of the US somewhat coincided with my own.

Gage Park murders

I somehow found out about the recent murder of six people in their home in the relatively tranquil Gage Park neighborhood of Chicago, and since then I haven't been able to get it out of my head.  The brutality of murdering an entire family, including seniors and children, seems like something out of the beastly gang wars of Central America.  And yet I can't see that the news is very interested in following up this story.  Anyway, I just wanted to share it with my readers, since it is so shocking and mysterious.

Reflection on the super-rich

This is an analysis of the fears and worries of the super-rich.

Ode to the post office

This is a short little reflection on how great the US postal system is for its reliability, ubiquity, and standardization.  I can testify after having lived in many other countries that their postal systems are okay, but none is quite as strong as the US model.  The article also gives a shout-out to the public library system and just mass infrastructure in general that are real assets to people living in the US.

Pushing free gated internet

Here is an article discussing Facebook's efforts to provide inexpensive access to Facebook and other curated, sponsored internet platforms in the developing world.  It specifically details the resistance that this project is encountering in India.  I have written in the past about the drawbacks of the "gated" internet of apps and platforms, and the benefits of the wide-open, uncurated internet.