33 posts tagged “america”

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.' 

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 love the craggy, unmapped moral landscape of social media:

Dear Answer Lady,

I need help. I grew up in Idaho, a pretty, if somewhat backwards, state. Recently, an acquaintance from high school posted this on Facebook: "Isnt this great? Americans have put a socialist into the White House - a socialist who wants to indoctrinate our youth with his socialist agenda. Hitler was able to spread his ideas by appealing to German youngsters. Dont let obama get a hold of our children. Socialism always fails."

This is why I can barely stand to look at Facebook.

But my real question is: Do I respond? And if so, how? My instinct is to stay out of it, because any response of mine will probably elicit a dozen angry responses from her right-wing cronies. I do think, though, that letting angry, uninformed attacks like this go unanswered is a problem. I cringe at my computer, and then do nothing. But is it possible to have a reasoned, thoughtful discussion about this? Without making her angry and without making me sound like the smug, condescending east coast liberal I have become?

I say: De-friend the shit out of him and don't look back.

The real issue here is that Facebook (which is objectively great, suck it contrarians) allows and encourages you to build and maintain friendships with people who, in 3D, you would have allowed to recede into the fog of acquaintanceship eons ago.

The greatest predictor of whether two people will be friends isn't whether they're from the same social class, or the same race, or the same age. It's simply, do they see each other every day? Proximity is friendship's petri dish. This is why you're fond of the people you work with, even though they don't have anything in common with you and steal your gouda out of the fridge.

The best -- and worst -- thing about social media like Facebook is that they simulate this proximity. You see your friends' pictures and updates every day. Oh, Susan has a new job! Mark's baby turned two this weekend! Ryan is out of toothpaste! This proximity, more than any of the technical features, is what makes social media so indispensable. All of us have Hometown Friends and Work Friends and Study Abroad Friends. It's objectively useful to store them all in one place, and to be able to communicate with them not just instantly, but constantly.

The downside of this, of course, is that sometimes you forget that your friend-list is lousy with people you only met once, or haven't seen in 10 years, or who you've been frenemies with for two years but can't lance because it would be too drama. Every once in awhile, by status update or general stalkery, you realize: I don't even fucking know these people.

One minor mitigator of this problem is the European approach to social media. You know someone at least reasonably well (last-name basis, say) before you add them anywhere. And, importantly, you delete often and indiscriminately. Americans seem to add everyone they pass by on the street, and hem and haw over leaving twatmonsters like the above on the cutting-room floor. Gays browse promiscuously and add each others' hot friends to their lists, operating on the premise that the blending of their work, social and dating lives is a labor-saving device rather than a recipe for herpes and exile.

Me, I'm sticking with the hard-in, easy-out model. If I'm gonna spend pixely time with these people, then as a starting point, it shouldn't be too much to ask that I like them.

One of the only ways Americans seem to know how to assess a public policy is by counting how many jobs will be lost. The increasingly coagulated debate over health care reform, for example, often hinges on the unspeakable risk that some insurance companies will go out of business, or that the industry will shrink due to inability to compete with a public plan.
 

I know the president can't say this, but fuck 'em. Name me one significant positive societal progression that didn't obsoletify a group of workers or an industry. The invention of the printing press deleted the entire profession of scribes. The installation of traffic lights cost traffic-directors their jobs.
 

I wrote a report on the Democratic Republic of Congo last year. A country the size of the US east of the Mississippi that has only 500 miles of roads. Why don't they build more infrastructure? Because every time a road-building project gets underway, there are massive protests by the road porters, who make their living carrying goods from town to town.

The insurance alarmists are showing precisely the same lack of foresight. A public plan, yes, would cost some jobs and businesses. It would also secure the health and lives of 40 million people.
 

Jobs are important, and it's legitimate to discuss economic effects as an unintended consequence of drastic changes in policy. But economies grow and change, professionals move on to other careers. These sorts of shocks are precisely why some countries have social welfare, worker retaining programs and other safety nets: So people who lose their jobs don't end up in poverty (and, ahem, without health care).
 

I'm sure that when the world began to pave itself at the beginning of the Automobile Era, there were loud voices of protest from horse stablers, carriage manufacturers and buggy-whip weavers. The politicians were correct to ignore them.

'So, um, some people have consumed so much extra energy that they are forced to surgically restrict this ability. Partly for their health, but mostly so people won't stare at them on the subway.'

This is a nifty series of articles by a dude who had stomach-stapling surgery and has dropped 55 pounds (what's that, 25 kilos?) in three months. Apparently you have to change your whole diet--not to mention your wardrobe--because the procedure pretty much ctrl+alt+del's your digestive system.

It's also totally heartbreaking to read about the social aspect:

When I was fat, I avoided meeting people's gaze. That's because I felt that I did not want to subject them to my ugliness. Occasionally, I would glance at a pretty person, but the moment the person glanced back--there is a spooky action at a distance at work in the glance dance--I would snap my head and look in a neutral direction.

In any crowd of people, in a group conversation, in an interview, I always got the sense that my counterpart or counterparts were doing their best not to look at me. Why? Because they considered me to be ugly. And humans don't like to look at ugly things.

My God, to feel like that all the time.

It's funny how we, as a society, don't care how lazy or gluttonous you are as long as its not reflected in your appearance. There's no stigma against people who never exercise or constantly eat too much. Unless they're overweight, in which case we assume that's how they got that way and act disgusted. It's like my man Ta-Nehisi say: "The bigot's core refrain is never 'I hate you,' but 'Why are you making me hate you?' " 

One thing living in Denmark has taught me is that it matters how you're treated in public, even if it shouldn't. That brief eye contact with a pedestrian, the nod of that jogging passerby, the 10-second banter with the bank teller, it adds up to how placed you feel, how home your city is. Anyone who experiences a half-dozen rejections per day, no matter how micro, is going start to think 'maybe they're on to something'.

I know I mention this constantly, but every time I go back to America I'm struck by how many converse-lets (psychologists call them 'fleeting relationships', apparently) I have every day, and how much I fucking love it. My European friends all say these little 'have a nice day!' breaks are pointless. But if flirting with the counter-lady at the pharmacy is pointless, then why aren't your interactions with friends and coworkers and family? 

I've now come to the conclusion that Euros are just anti-banter because they can't pull it off. I've seen their continental kind attempt Fleetage. Without alcohol, it's all yes-no questions and 'so what neighborhood do you live in?' Criticize my National Culture of Superficiality all you want, Pierre, but until you've got the bant to make an insta-friend in line at Whole Foods, don't talk merde on those of us who can. 

Anyway, obesity. All I'm saying is, if you really wanna live the freedoms those terrorists hate us for, chat up the fat dude next to you on the airplane. At least you know he's not French.

I'd be trying to get a grant to write The Social History of The Mall.

This column, about the sloth-paced redevelopment of America's first mall, is an interesting start.

I grew up near this mall. It was my mall, I guess, my neighbor. It was the place I first bought non-elastic pants (age 10, against my will), first ate a Cinnabon (still working that one off) and first got arrested (long story). I wrote a report on this mall in the 8th grade,* and all I remember now is that in 1950, it was the first place to use 'magic eye' doors, the ones that open automatically when you walk toward them, the ones we're all used to by now.

'The world we live in now is as different from 1950 as 1950 was from 1890,' the writer says, and that's true in some ways but not others. We're not impressed by the 'magic eye' anymore, but we still don't want to open our own doors.  

Northgate got remodeled, what, three times over the course of my childhood? Chris Rock said every city has two malls: The White Mall, and The Mall White People Used to Go To. By the time I was independently shopping, Northgate was firmly the latter: Everything had kind of an Acme vibe. The food court had independent establishments instead of chains, you could still smoke inside, all the stores used plus-sized mannequins,  etc. Even The Sharper Image was like 'nah, we'll sit this one out.' 

I have no idea if the latest defibrillation will re-animate Northgate and turn it into anything but the parking-lot pimple I remember from my Junior Consumer-hood. But it says something about us, right? That you can't make a mall work anymore. What made us the kind of people who wanted to shop in a stale-climed fauxborhood full of basketball shoes and yesterday's department stores? What makes us the kind of people who don't want to do that anymore?

Anyway, if I didn't have a job. That's all I'm saying.

 

*Yes, Europeans, Americans do school projects on malls. You probably still have your overhead slides from your presentation, 'Brie: More Delightful Than Gouda?' so shut the fuck up.  

As a voter in a 'spectator state', I totally agree with this. It's about time presidential candidates started sucking up to me, rather than the Evangelitards in the swings. 

The Economist has an article on how cooked food was the evolutionary leap that has made your grandpa, homo erectus, so endlessly win for the last 1.8 million years.

Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It “denatures” protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.

[...]

Another telling experiment, conducted on rats, did not rely on cooking. Rather the experimenters ground up food pellets and then recompacted them to make them softer. Rats fed on the softer pellets weighed 30% more after 26 weeks than those fed the same weight of standard pellets. The difference was because of the lower cost of digestion. Indeed, Dr Wrangham suspects the main cause of the modern epidemic of obesity is not overeating (which the evidence suggests—in America, at least—is a myth) but the rise of processed foods. These are softer, because that is what people prefer.

This paragraph is one New York Times feature away from catalyzing fucking Dr Wrangham's Hard Food Revolution. 'Sorry, no banana for me, I'm on Hard Foods. Hand me those Ritz crackers.'

I know we're all lefties and we're all gay and we all dream about fixie bikes and minority state-heads, but can you guys tone it the fuck down for a second?