In The World

Hey, Were You Looking Under Rhianna’s Umbrella, Too?

While I was Busy Looking for Ela’s Whereabouts

…Justin Timberlake shows up! I’m reading day after day that word has it in Hollywood that Justin and Rhianna are together. Perhaps, for me, this brings a bit of closure to all the suspense that seemed built up around the fact that Chris Brown refused to say much about their intimacy, or privacy, in the aftermath of violence that he wage upon her a few months ago: in the post-ambiance of circumstances that led him to believe he needn’t have explained why he had beat her as he had. Was Chris truly to blame for his senselessness? Becoming that someone who was jealous because of the notion that Justin was moving into his territory following his video work with Rhianna? Or was she surely that good girl gone bad?: and, then, Chris simply freaked out totally about it all.

However, I can’t seem to feel dubious about her merger with Justin Timberlake. In public appearances, I’ve always found Rhianna a genuine personae and classy act. And I have hardly doubted that she wasn’t a stark talent, and she has an inner and outer beauty that must be capable of overwhelming anyone who lands their eyes upon her: be they male or female.

I say this using my words rather intentionally. For a while, e.g., I felt that she was very much her own person. Very much a loner and very independent and individualist: one who would not care to go the way of the traditionalist. Sixteen is a very early age for an island girl to go off in the world as she did.

For a long while I felt that she was even capable of enacting openly in bi-sexual relationships, esp. after the lyrics “under my umbrella: Ela Ela Ela” were tossed out onto the world some years back. I’m sure the lesbians undoubtedly loved the lyrics. (And that I only knew one Ela: my sister-in-law, the song got my fantasy going each and every time I heard it on the air. And it was on the air incessantly in Europe. So the lyrics got my hindsight buzzing from the get-go! Oh, and remember, during her single years there was that one girlfriend that was constantly at her side at galas and many other celebrity functions.) I couldn’t help but think that, maybe, it just might have been that Chris found out about such a liaisons with another woman and went off on her as he did. It’s still one of those “Homosocial” taboos too many of us in America just cannot savory; swallow; and then get on out into the open with.

But suddenly, Justin’s in the picture. Puzzling? I don’t think so: for as we all seem to know, Justin has been out to attain such an exotic, cultivated, post-Caribbean-prize for some years now.

Well, at least for now, I guess the paparazzi [nor I] wouldn’t be secretly scouting about underneath her umbrella in search for Ela.

Sex-Trafficking in the World

All These Missing Little Girls
No longer Does Media Blame Aliens From Outer Space

We are finally getting it. We’re finally accepting that Martians, among other aliens, and the man in the moon can no longer be held solely responsible anymore for all the missing little girls and young teenagers being kidnapped in the world. And now that the truth is revealed, it’s long overdue that we come to some healthy state of consciousness and civility, as to address and reproach this marginalization of women in our civilization. With the exposition of these women as sexually exploited objects, our culture has helped assist women remaining victims in one of the last venues of modern slavery: sex-trafficking in the marketplace of organized crime. Added to this is the fact that the abduction of younger girls in the private sectors also has shown of late that the pornography industry is, indeed, cultivating a new vehicle of harm that has jeopardized the exploitation of children in our society. The paradigms marginalizing and imprisoning women are at last all too visible for either the media or public to avoid.
Of these past few weeks, as I’ve randomly watched the news recurring on behalf of detectives searching for samples of bone debris in the back of Phillip Garrido’s backyard, I cannot help but go back to the incessant days when I spent hours in the basement of the British Studies Institute at the Free University Berlin, reading The Daily Mirror, The Times, The Sun and other British papers that had suddenly returned to the subject of Frederick West following his prison suicide in 1995. (In many ways, I couldn’t believe that such enormous “satanic murders” could surface again, and I kept asking myself, was this but merely a media scheme of sorts on CNN’s part, as to keep us all glued to their TV station for a few extra weeks: were they using Fred West as a PR motive. Or were we as men prone to such violence, dominance, and abuse over members of the opposite sex if our own sense of power (or lack of it) caused us to fuel some mundane illusion in our psyche as to propel us to feel superior? In an attempt to bring some closure over such analysis I did not feel empowered, but shame for the sake of knowing how helpless these men must have actually been. Looking back on Frederick West’s saga, I found it most intriguing how unaware England was during the interim of those twelve murders—I had been stationed in Alconbury RAF in the mid-70s and no one had ever had a clue that such a crime of this magnitude would even incur in England.)
Within the past decade, just around the time Tony Blair was campaigning for England to support American in Iraq, the BBC broadcasted that sex-trafficking and -slavery was about to become even more of a serious challenge in the globalization community. As I listened to the radio-documentary revealing and denouncing sex-trafficking that evening—I asked myself, Why was it so hard for the world to believe that there was no such thing as spaceships out there beaming little girls up into outer space? Why couldn’t society get that there were circumstances far too complex and marred for this dynamics of child exploitation to be recurring as often as it had been?
However, roughly five years ago, suddenly the media started unfolding one story of sexual abuse after another. It seemed the images were beginning to come in loud and clear: from Florida to Minnesota: from Utah to Portugal: and from Colorado to Cambodia: even from Aruba to Peru. Slowly, the media had begun to understand that many of these cases did not limit themselves to mere runaways.
On August 25, 2006 my own breakthrough of conscientiousness on the subject of child exploitation seemed plausibly ignited. On that day, I watched the news from my Berlin apartment and learned about a young teenager named Natascha Kampusch who, only a day or so before, had successfully escaped from over eight years of imprisonment in the cellar of a man named Wolfgang Priklopil in Austria. She had found her way to the safe havens of a police office. He had just placed himself in front of a train, knowing the police were out there hunting him down. The story shocked Europe. Natascha received mega exposure though her face had yet been unveiled. It was to be the first of several women I watched, at the expense of the media, who would find their way back to some state of normality in the world.
I was extremely happy for Jaycee Dugard’s escape. One can only praise her for her bravery.
Yet, even if the whereabouts of the bodies of Madeleine McCann and Natalee Holloway remain a mystery, finally with the success of females such as Elizabeth Smart, Natascha Kampush, Jaycee, and most recently Elizabeth Fritzl, we in western society are finally beginning to place potent analysis on the issues of male dominance and abuse in our culture, as we have at least finally come to accept that the kidnapping of children around the world has got very little to do with Martians, and above all else, at least not on behalf of aliens arriving from outer space.

AMERIKA: It just isn’t the best place to live in anymore!

America’s Harsh Realty!
by Fresca

Yesterday morning, as I sprinted down Interstate 85 at approximately seven a.m.—leaving Burlington, seconds before dawn in the westward traffic rush to get my 9-year old nephew to his school in Hillsborough, for his sake: not mine, I kept to the air-waves coming out of Durham, North Carolina’s G- 105.1. The theme that occupied the three broadcasters [always two guys and a woman on these sorts of shows!] that moment was that Norway had just been viewed as the world’s best place to live,[1] and was a country having one of the highest life expectancy among developed nations in the world. The United States was not as high on the list that the listeners wished to have it; I believe the claim was that United States ranked 13^th – other online sources I have looked into since have shown that the States remains to stay at anywhere from the mid-20s to mid-30s in various ratings in recent years.

It was about 6:50 a.m. when this one caller came on and expressed her concerns on behalf of the debate of the poor showing the United States had displayed. She insisted that countries like Norway and Iceland had to have a longer life expectancy rate if only because of the fact that they had lower people living in their countries. Yes, like the three broadcasters, I too was baffled by her logic. Or lack of it. They tried to explain to her that countries such as Australia and Canada with their highly dense populations were ranked in the top five: and, that even Japan was higher—at number 10—than America was. But she kept arguing that America and India and a few other countries had to have higher death rates at an earlier age in life, if but because they were countries with higher populations.[2] There were a few good wise-cracks tossed about. Again, those on the radio tried offer one last shot as to help the woman try to understand that Japan and Canada had high population densities and still experienced higher mortality rates than America did. She just was not about to accept their reasoning and went on and on too long in an attempt to clarify her argument. Then she simply said, “And we are just with too many different nationalities in America and this adds to deaths in our country being higher then what it is elsewhere in the world.” She was far off the mark of conceptionalizing why the calculations had even ever been made in the first place. For example, in Norway alone, 60% of deaths in 2006 were due to cancer and cardiovascular diseases. (Statistics: Norwegian Institute of Public Health) This left 40% for other factors. Like deaths due to automobile accidents, homicides, aging and perhaps other abrupt means. But she tried to argue that because Norway and Iceland were with lower populations it justified why these countries didn’t have poorer ratings. And I seemed to be waiting for her to ask, “And where’s Germany, by the way? Is it still that awful in the East?”

At some point I had to suppress my ambivalence, as to avoid yelling out something rather condescending that might cause me to rebuke her Hinterwelt convictions in a rather cursing fashion, right there in front of my nephew. But I kept on repeating to myself, darn it that she—nor any damn one of them for that matter—is able to simply see that America’s soldiers dying for the cause of our wars against terror; urban gang wars slugging it out against one another; media’s exposure on Chicago youths going head to head with one another because violence in Chicago sells at the moment (haven’t you all figured that one out yet!); lack of cell phone restrictions on the highways; and our basically innate, pro-gun-control convictions were those issues that kept America’s poor showing active in the life expectancy argument, which was also helping to keep America from being one of the best places in the world to live. And just three places below the States, at number 16, was another Scandinavian country: Denmark. But one of Denmark’s best kept secrets was how high its urban violence was. And add to this the percentage of lives lost behind the wheels of drunk drivers attempting to get on over to Malmo and Helsinki for the weekends!

It seemed a perspective worthy of consideration.

I wanted to call in and pitch this question to the hosts of the talk show early yesterday morning, but I’m one who never drives with a cell phone on in the car.

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[1]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8290550.stm

[2]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1218276/Norway-crowned-best-place-world-live--UK-trails-21st-place.html