Kerim's Triptych ❧ America, Bad Bunny, Balance

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1️⃣ America

If I were to select one article to share with friends outside of the United States to express how I'm feeling about the current situation at home right now, this would be it. You probably won't learn much new from this essay, but it is a wonderfully crafted meditation on Trump, jazz music, freedom, and the role of the US in the world.

Here's a taste:

Explaining the mysteries of America to people abroad, I felt, oddly, like the writers I met in the Arab and Muslim countries to which the US government had relentlessly preached, and who were forced constantly to answer questions about the supposed peculiarities of their political culture: the widening gulf between educated elites and the masses; the influence of religious fundamentalism and conspiratorial thinking; the susceptibility to authoritarianism; the outbreaks of senseless violence; the use of military solutions to social problems. How different were we? At least the people whom America had lectured hadn’t elected their dictators. ‘This is not who we are,’ Biden reassured us. In fact, it is, and the rest of the world sees this all too clearly.

2️⃣ Bad Bunny

While I am tone deaf to the appeal of Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (AKA Bad Bunny) as a musician, this year's Super Bowl half-time show made it clear to me that he is an important cultural and political figure. To understand some of the cultural and political symbolism of his performance, I turned to one of my favorite historians of Latin America, Greg Grandin, who writes about "Bad Bunny’s Stunning Redefinition of 'America'."

And the sexualized twerking dancers and stereotypical Latin lovers who filled the Super Bowl stage are subverted in Bad Bunny’s lyrics. His second number, “Yo Perreo Sola,” asserts the right of women to dance alone without being hassled by “creeps,” a demand made even clearer in the song’s video.

The dance songs gave way to Ricky Martin—who, as a gay Puerto Rican, is both a symbol of Latino and LGBTQ pride and a rejoinder to Trump’s bigotry—singing a snippet of Bad Bunny’s ballad “Lo Que Pasó a Hawaii.” Only if you understand Spanish or are familiar with Bad Bunny’s discography would you catch that “Lo Que Pasó a Hawaii” links US colonialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific—all the more apt given that Puerto Rico and Hawaii were formally seized by the United States in the same year, 1898.

The song’s subtext is that Martínez Ocasio is a nationalist—he wants his island home to be a free nation, fearing that statehood would bring a new wave of dispossession and late-capitalist overlord colonialism, and would do to Puerto Rico what it did to Hawaii: seizing the best lands, closing access to the sea, turning Puerto Ricans into the servants of the world’s billionaires. “They want the river and beach too,” he sings.

Later in the show, Bad Bunny held up not the official Puerto Rican flag but the lighter-blue flag of the island-nation’s independence movement. Only a minority of Puerto Ricans, for now, say they are in favor of independence—but let’s take a poll after a few more shows like this, and a few more years of US disintegration.

3️⃣ Balance

I was blown away by this photo project by Eliott Ross, a self-described Taiwanese-Anglo-American. In "A Question of Balance" he explores the relationship between the Diné (Navajo Nation) and water and that of Utah’s Washington County, some eighty kilometers away:

The water gap is an enduring legacy of Manifest Destiny; the infrastructure and legislation that came with it still largely define how water is used. Moving between the two communities, I find residents of Washington County largely unaware of the Diné plight, yet earnest in their dismay. For their part, the Diné express neither surprise at how much water people in Washington County consume nor anger at the benefits that water brings. They just ask for the same opportunity.

Endnote

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