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Somehow I managed to find a cafe on Crown St. here in Sydney with a toddler-sized stack of mid-decade Harper's magazines. I spent pretty much the whole evening there, and the most striking article I read (the only one, actually, that I finished. Harper's is interminable) was this one on the new realities of the American education system.

In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.
[...]
The school board of another district, this one in New York State, referred to "the diversity" of its student population and "the rich variations of ethnic backgrounds." But when I looked at the racial numbers that the district had reported to the state, I learned that there were 2,800 black and Hispanic children in the system, 1 Asian child, and 3 whites. Words, in these cases, cease to have real meaning; or, rather, they mean the opposite of what they say.

This is actually pretty wise, and kind of funny. You never hear anyone call a group of people 'diverse' if it's, like, Swedes mixing with Belgians.

Then you get to what this is really about:

The dollars on both sides of the equation have increased since then, but the discrepancies between them have remained. The present per-pupil spending level in the New York City schools is $11,700, which may be compared with a per-pupil spending level in excess of $22,000 in the well-to-do suburban district of Manhasset, Long Island. The present New York City level is, indeed, almost exactly what Manhasset spent per pupil eighteen years ago, in 1987, when that sum of money bought a great deal more in services and salaries than it can buy today. In dollars adjusted for inflation, New York City has not yet caught up to where its wealthiest suburbs were a quarter-century ago. 

[...]

In another elementary school, which had been built to hold 1,000 children hut was packed to bursting with some 1,500, the principal poured out his feelings to me in a room in which a plastic garbage hag had been attached somehow to cover part of the collapsing ceiling. "This," he told me, pointing to the garbage bag, then gesturing around him at the other indications of decay and disrepair one sees in ghetto schools much like it elsewhere, "would not happen to white children."

I usually roll my eyes at that sort of thing, just because I don't think the government of the U.S., or really any country, is particularly racist. They un-care about all poor people equally, my argument usually goes. But man, it's hard to argue with this shit:

A tall black student, for example, told me that she hoped to be a social worker or a doctor but was programmed into "Sewing Class" this year. She also had to take another course, called "Life Skills," which she told me was a very basic course—"a retarded class," to use her words—that "teaches things like the six continents," which she said she'd learned in elementary school.

When I asked her why she had to take these courses, she replied that she'd been told they were required, which as I later learned was not exactly so. What was required was that high school students take two courses in an area of study called "The Technical Arts," and which the Los Angeles Board of Education terms "Applied Technology."

At schools that served the middle class or upper-middle class, this requirement was likely to be met by courses that had academic substance and, perhaps, some relevance to college preparation. At Beverly Hills High School, for example, the technical-arts requirement could be fulfilled by taking subjects like residential architecture, the designing of commercial structures, broadcast journalism, advanced computer graphics, a sophisticated course in furniture design, carving and sculpture, or an honors course in engineering research and design. At Fremont High, in contrast, this requirement was far more often met by courses that were basically vocational and also obviously keyed to low-paying levels of employment.

Mireya, for example, who had plans to go to college, told me that she had to take a sewing class last year and now was told she'd been assigned to take a class in hair-dressing.

Fucking hair-dressing, dude.

Two things occurred to me while I was reading this, probably not the two things that were supposed to.

1. This would make a fantastic TV show.
Where the fuck is Hollywood on this? If you read the whole article, there's so much drama here waiting to be mined. Quantitative test scores! Beleaguered principals! Newbie teachers! Kids struggling against the system!

I'm not talking the kind where the magic white lady reforms the puffy-jacketed academic ruffians through Hamlet and a personal-growth arc ('No... they were teaching me'.). Why is 'The Wire' the only artistic work to genuinely confront this issue in the last decade?

2. Why am I reading about this in Harper's?
All of these cities, presumably, have a newspaper. Harper's cites a number of quantitative indicators (enrollment, budgets, dropout rates) that should have raised red flags in any newsroom with a pulse. Dude from Harper's strolls into these schools, chats with the kids, leaves and writes it up. Journalists: You live in these cities. Where the fuck are you?

Overall, the whole thing just made me think of my University of London's professor's old catchphrase, 'You can blame people for their choices, but you can't blame them for their options.' Maybe the American version should be 'Don't talk shit on hairdressers. It's better than being a seamstress.' 

Did anyone else die laughing when they saw this image from '2012' in the New York Times?

It's like Thomas Kinkade started taking commissions from end-timers.

I really appreciated this column by James Fallows on the Fort Hood shooting:

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the "expert" talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre "mean"? A decade later, do we "know" anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They've got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don't mean nothing.

This doesn't mean that these sorts of things can't be prevented or minimized, of course. That's why we have things like law enforcement and social services.

We're supposed to think that this particular man-made natural disaster is more 'relevant' due to the fact that the shooter was Muslim:

I am not arguing, of course, that American Muslims, as a whole, are violently unhappy with America (I've argued the opposite, in fact). But I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here's a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

Other than this shooting being rather poorly timed, given the political context, I don't see his point.

Here's another Atlantic blogger:

If we grant that Hasan was motivated by religion, what does that actually tell us? What is there  beyond the fact that people will, at times, interpret religion as a justification to commit heinous acts?

Jeff asks what we'd say if a devout Christian had attacked Planned Parenthood. Fair enough--we have a pretty good corollary in George Tiller. I could be wrong, but I don't recall a lot of "media elites" trying to divine what Tiller's death said about Christianity, itself. Again, beyond the fact that some wacko interpreted Christianity to mean he had the right to shoot people, what else would there be to say?

That's really my issue. What is the big "thing" that we should be seeing, in this case? What are those elite blinders preventing us from seeing?

This, in better expression, has always been my issue with 9/11 and the 'Clash of Civilizations' it's supposed to symbolize.

Religion motivates people to do really awful things. So do politics, race, sex, money and World of Warcraft. If a group of militant left-handed people flew planes into buildings tomorrow, that wouldn't symbolize some sort of dominant hand-based Clap of Civilizations. It's just be a bunch of crazy-ass people doing crazy-ass shit.

I'm not saying that 9/11 or Fort Hood shouldn't be investigated, or that we can't take any lessons from them. But the real issue for us to confront is, how do we prevent crazy-ass people from taking out their crazy-ass shit out on the rest of us, regardless of their motivation? I know we all hate the term 'War on Terror' now cuz it's gotten us into sandy, mismanaged wars, but it's is actually an accurate name for what the West needs to wage, as long as you accept that terror is a methodology, not a belief.

If we think our cities are at risk of earthquakes, we retrofit our buildings and devise systems for predicting them before they happen and repairing the damage after. Fort Hood and 9/11 don't symbolize a Muslim threat to Christianity any more than Columbine symbolizes the trenchcoat's threat to the T-shirt. 

I'm reading Edmund White's 'States of Desire: Travels in Gay America', which I found in a bookstore outside of Sydney for $2. It was written in 1980, the final year of un-ballasted gay hedonism. It opens with a passage about L.A.:

The almost Oriental politeness of the West Coast is one of its distinctive regional features, in marked contrast to the contentiousness of the East Coast. On e may grumble at a television performer out West but never at someone appearing 'live'. So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated by glass (either a TV screen or an automobile windshield), that the direct confrontation renders the participants docile, stunned, sweet.
[...]
The polite friendliness of Californians is an ambiguous quality. Within the first ten minutes a visitor is showered with affection and familiarity, but that may be as close as one is ever likely to get to someone out West. This openhanded but superficial civility, linked to an obdurate and profound reticence, is precisely the granite wedge that all those hostile forms of California therapy are trying to dynamite. There is, however, a great public if not personal benefit to be derived from uniform good manners. People are able to cooperate. They can accomplish things.

This reminds me of Seattle, how everyone you meet is instantly welcoming and impressed with you, but that's as far as you ever get. Denmark has poured some bitter black coffee into the sweet cream of my West Coast superficio-ductions, but I still catch myself doing this.

I also liked this part about a New York acquaintance moving out to LA.

His tenement pallor is giving way to a tan. His monologue pauses occasionally now for reflection or even for listening, and he has discovered in California that politeness I have mentioned, which he mistakes for acceptance.

I'm only on page fucking 21, and I can't stop quoting this thing:

'The real problem here,' [He's now quoting a gay psychotherapist in LA] 'is that smart people don't know each other. In a large nomadic population such as the gay group in this city, the rules must be kept very simple. In Los Angeles the one rule is sexual display and curiosity. Even the most brilliant man, once he is at a party, will succumb to the general vapidness. From nine to five these people are bright, clever, grownup, but after five they become emotional morons. At parties there are no serious conversations and little real warmth. People arrive an hour late (a sign of hostility) and leave saying it was a terrible bore. Of course they were disappointed; what they needed was companionship but what they thought they wanted was sexual adventure.'

You have to resist the impluse to nostalgize this period in contemporary gay life. It's tempting to reclaim the pre-AIDS period in 'those were the days' terms. But they weren't, objectively. A lot of these men were profoundly damaged. No one was out of the closet. The cops openly harassed gay bars and assaulted patrons. Legal and civil rights were nonexistent, as everyone in this book would discover in the next decade. Still, it's hard to not to find a wistful sigh on every page. 

I'm in Singapore this week, and I picked up Antony Beevor's 'Berlin: The Downfall 1945' at Heathrow on the way over. Most of the book is a painstakingly detailed account of the Red Army advance through east Germany, complete with heteroese terms like 'batallion' and 'rightward flank'. You only find the good bad guy vs. bad guy stories in nonfiction.

The best parts of the book are the descriptions of life in Berlin during the Russian advance. Here's a city of 3.5 million people (plus probably 500,000 refugees) that has been the center of a rapidly expanding, and now dwindling, empire-let for the past four years. All the residents' husbands, and now sons, have been conscripted, often literally at gunpoint, and they know that they're going to lose the war. The only thing they're hoping for is that the Americans get to them before the Russians do.

The book contains passages like this:

Air raids were so frequent, with the British by night and the Americans by day, that Berliners felt that they spent more time in cellars and air-raid shelters than in their own beds.
[...]
The complex of shelters under the Gesundbrunnen U-bahn station had been designed to take 1,500 people, yet often more than three times that number packed in. Candles were used to measure the diminishing levels of oxygen. When a candle placed on the floor went out, children were picked up and held at shoulder height. When a candle on a chair went out, then the evacuation of the level began. And if a third candle, positioned at about chin level, began to sputter, then the whole bunker was evacuated, however heavy the attack above.

Beevor says there were more than 80 raids in just the first four months of 1945.

Here's Berlin right before the 'Ivans' arrive, on April 21:

That morning, the ordinary women of Berlin emerged to queue for food after the air raid. The sound of artillery fire in the distance confirmed their fears that this might be their last chance to stock up. The sunshine buoyed the spirits of many. 'Suddenly one remembers it's spring,' wrote one young woman that afternoon. 'Through the fire-blackened ruins the scent of lilac comes in waves from ownerless gardens.'

The sheer recentness of the history in Berlin makes it almost unique among European cities, and it's one of the reasons I like it so much. Beevor's book is a good reminder that in Germany, like every other country, history is the word we use when we talk about the derailing--and curtailing--of millions of lives. That 'ownerless gardens' thing gets me every time.

Have you guys seen the clip of the Japanese hidden-camera show where a dude is tricked into thinking that a sniper is picking off everyone else in the room? It's pretty great huh.

You can never really say how you would react to extreme, surreal stress, but six years after the invention of YouTube, I can't help but think that the first time something genuinely terrible happens to me, my first reaction will be 'OK, where's the pinhole camera, asshole?'

Come to think of it, this is probably how I will die. Someone's gonna come into a subway car waving a handgun around and I'll yell 'Cut! Worst Punk'd'ing ever!' and get shot. The only ones screaming will be people who never upgraded from dial-up.

They were the expression of a minority demographic group asking a president to deliver on the promises he made to us.

We're not comparing Obama to Hitler. We're not making things up or hopelessly exaggerating reasonable policies. We're not saying that gay marriage has to be legal at the federal level by Halloween.

All we're saying is that you should make demonstrable steps toward the shit you told us you were going to do. Some of that shit is easy, and some of that shit is hard. We understand this. Our advice:Start with the easy shit.   

It's not fringe when a group that the president has directly addressed asks him to enact the promises which were the reason we voted for him. Those words were the reason we supported you and, simply put, now is the time to put substance behind them. That's all we're asking.