"We Cannot Settle for Cosmetic Change"

Earlier this week, Piyush "Bobby" Jindal was sworn in as Louisiana's first nonwhite governor since 1872 (today's Onion jokes, "His parents must be so close to being proud").

"The fact that he's of Indian ancestry is a subject of jubilation," Vijay Prashad, professor of South Asian history at Trinity College in Hartford, told the New York Times. "But there's a very shallow appreciation of who he really is. Once you scratch the surface, it's really unpleasant." This week there has been a lot of talk of (and prayer for) change in Louisiana among Christian-convert Jindal and his supporters, but I'm reminded of The Nation's observations soon after his election:

Indeed, though there are weekly reports on the city's progress and struggles in the national media, Jindal's campaign ignored Hurricane Katrina and Louisiana's crisis of poverty and racial inequality, the issues the storm exposed to a horrified nation. Perhaps this is why Jindal won only 10 percent of the votes from the state's black population and why he lost in Orleans Parish. Apparently black voters did not see Jindal's prospect for victory as corresponding with their own, even though Jindal broke the conventional wisdom that only white politicians can win statewide office.

On Monday, Jindal gave his inaugural remarks, making no mention of race (and giving only a passing nod to "the storms"). "We cannot settle for cosmetic change," he said. "And we all must recognize the stakes."

It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's ... Hanuman?

Two related stories about mythology-inspired comic books and cartoons in India come from my Mom; as a kid who grew up devouring classic Amar Chitra Katha titles, I have mixed feelings on some of these new trends (though I get that "It's absurd to be purist about one of pop culture's most pleasingly bastard and vulgar forms," as my former professor Sukhdev Sandhu puts it). This story from NPR features Indian animators at Virgin Comics who are riffing on Hindu mythological tales in their work. Though I don't think Virulents (in which a regenerating rakshasa is discovered by American troops in modern-day Afghanistan) is to my taste, I think it's good news that a country that has long prized (and profited from) rote memorization is seeing the growth of companies that encourage such imaginative originality. I have similar feelings about feature-films like "The Return of Hanuman," in which the title deity "is reborn as a boy who goes to school in khaki shorts, uses a computer, combats pollution and, most important, smashes the bad guys to pulp." Again, yay for creative hybridity (as in this fantastic Indianized Spider-Man comic -- reviewed by Sandhu -- starring one Pavitr Prabhakar in a spider-suit with a dhoti)! And yay for elements of an ancient culture being perpetuated in novel ways (that aren't grossly offensive). But there's also a lot to be said for simply passing on the timeless tales of Hindu lore -- in all their unrevised rich intricacy -- without necessarily trying to "update" them. (Call me old-fashioned? ... ) One way or another, with the Indian animation industry (now said to be worth $285 million) projected to boom to a worth of $1 billion by 2010 (according to the Washington Post), this story may have just started.

Humorless Hindu Huckabee Cartoon

Mike Huckabee says the darndest things. The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg writes:

A few weeks ago at Liberty University (founder: the late J. Falwell), a student asked [Huckabee] what accounted for his rocketing poll numbers. “There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one,” he said. “It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people—and that’s the only way that our campaign could be doing what it’s doing.” To an evangelical ear, that might sound like simple wonderment. But to many other people it sounded like the ravings of someone who thinks God is his precinct captain.

This Ted Rall cartoon (click to enlarge) addressing Huckabee's religiosity comes via the SAJAforum blog. I wouldn't call it atrocious or offensive (as some of SAJAforum's readers have) -- just unfunny. It doesn't really work. Because its humorlessness and inefficacy come from the failed Hindu/Christian Fundamentalism comparison (which doesn't make enough sense to provide the punch line it's going for), to me, the whole thing is just irritating. Is this supposed to be a sophisticated -- or persuasive -- critique of religious fundamentalism in the Republican Party? I'm all for calling attention to Huckabee's cartoonishness (there's definitely something to Hertzberg's observation that "his dimpled face looks interestingly like that of Wallace, of Wallace & Gromit") but to "What if Huckabee Were a Fundamentalist Hindu?" I say, meh.