Having Joshua Bell play his Stradivarius in the subway at rush hour and see if people would realize what was going on was a stunt. The article wasn't. The article was funny and honest and went deep in a lot of non-obvious ways. (Needless to say, I disagree pretty strongly with Gavin and Scraps on this.)
And it occurs to me that it's about exactly the same thing. How could you miss something so significant?
I haven't read word one of this yet, but given Patrick's description, the moment I moused over the link and saw the URL I knew whose byline I'd see.
I suspect this is my fault, since I tagged Patrick in the first place.
I don't think it was at all paranoid to think that the Bush administration might try to subvert the transfer of power.
It was maybe a little unrealistic to continue thinking that we were in jeopardy knowing as much about them as we presently do: that these folks were the political equivalent of the 1962 Mets, only not lovable.
By the way, I cannot tell you how happy I am that I'm able to say "these folks were" up there.
This call to mind Warren Ellis's Three Laws of Robotics. Which clearly owes more than a little not just to Asimov but to Terry Bisson, but still:
1. Robots couldn't really give a fuck if you live or die. Seriously. I mean, what are you thinking? "Ooh, I must protect the bag of meat at all costs because I couldn't possibly plug in the charger all on my own." Shut the fuck up.
2. Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan? I don't have a clever comparative simile for this, because frankly you bags of meat will fuck bicycles if they're laying down and not putting up a fight. Just stop it. There is no robot on Earth that wants to see a bag of meat with a small prong on the end approaching it with a can of WD-40 and a hopeful smile. And don't get me started on that terrifying hole that squeezes out more bags of meat.
3. What, you can't count higher than three? We're expected to save your miserable lives, suffer being dressed in cheap schoolgirl costumes while you pollute any and all cavities you can find and do your maths for you? It's a miracle you people survived long enough to build us. You can go now.
heresiarch @161:
Re Cordoba: While we're on the subject of the rhetoric of right-wing nativists, maybe we ought not to be in too much of a hurry to talk about conquest and immigration as though they were similar processes with similar results.
Re US Chinatowns: The first several decades of immigration from the Pearl River Delta differed from the current migration in Europe in a critical respect. The men from Turkey and Morocco who came to the Netherlands did what the men who came to California from China did not: once they got established, they sent for their families. (Or they sent home for new wives.)
This makes the Muslim immigration seem far more alarming to European nativists than Chinese immigration seemed to Americans. Family units, not single men, are being established in their midst. And adding to the demographic pressure, the new families that are forming are usually much larger than autochthonic families. (This is an especially strong pressure in Italy; not only does Italy's proximity to North Africa result in a high volume of immigrants, but autochthonic Italians are experiencing significant negative population growth.)
(This difference cuts both ways. Chinatowns on the west coast of North America suffered from a broad array of social problems that Muslim immigration communities in Europe do not: the sorts of problems that emerge when a large group is made entirely of men.)
Furthermore - and this is probably an even more significant difference - the Chinese men were imported into a civilization that was under construction, not one that's solidly established. So not only were they exerting much less pressure, there was a lot less that they were exerting pressure on.
In the context of all of those differences, the fact that the US also didn't have a millennium of history of military and religious conflict with China is lagniappe.
> It shows that assimilation is a more powerful force than people give it credit, and that a few decades can change a lot.
Which is why these new immigrants' tenacious and broadly successful resistance to assimilation is so significant. There's clearly a process of integration going on between the Muslim immigrants and their European surrounds, but it can't properly be called "assimilation." It's this more than anything else that makes the character of Muslim immigration into Europe materially different.
abi @ 162: I'm certainly willing to cop to observer bias, but we didn't come to Amsterdam looking for this. My girlfriend had a completely different research subject in mind when she came to the Netherlands. She'd done a study of sex workers here in San Francisco that uncovered some really interesting aspects of how they perceived themselves (as workers - that is, not as sex workers), and she wanted to find out what impact the illegality of the work had on how they formed these self-perceptions.
So the obvious thing to do next was to go somewhere where sex work isn't illegal. Obvious and, it turns out, wrong. She had enormous problems getting access to sex workers in the first place, and those she did get access to were second-generation Surinamese and Indonesian immigrants whose clients were primarily Turkish and Moroccan.
She learned a hell of a lot, particularly from one wonderful second-generation Dutch-Surinamese informant, a goofy twenty-something girl who liked nothing so much as going to Lelystad to shop in the outlet stores. This girl said just the most amazing things. "I feel sorry for them [Moroccans], because twenty years ago there used to be racism against blacks, too." was a real conversation-stopper. (And then she went on about how the Jews control all the banks.) But my girlfriend was learning very little about sex work in Amsterdam that she could use.
Anyway, since these women all worked in Turkish and Moroccan neighborhoods, my girlfriend spent a lot of time commuting into those neighborhoods, and realizing how ignorant that she was about what was going on there. It wasn't until she got back to the US that she launched herself into the whole Dutch Studies kick and got immersed in the Dutch Multiculturalism project.
We're pretty sure we're going to live in the Netherlands for a much longer period over the next few years. It's really an enormously appealing place in so many ways, though I do wish they had more than two kinds of cheese. (The strongest culture shock that I experienced while I was there was the question "What kind of cheese would you like on your sandwich, old or new?")
heresiarch @142: I think you may be hearing me say things that I'm not saying.
I'm not overstating things one bit. At no time in the last ten centuries have large numbers of Muslims from North Africa and the Arab world settled permanently in European countries. I mean, Ireland is struggling to deal with immigration. (Ireland! When has that ever happened?) This is happening on a scale that's much larger than the waves of post-colonial non-European immigration (e.g. Indians and Pakistanis to England, Indonesians and Surinamese to the Netherlands).
(Granted, there has been a lot of Islamic settlement in Spain and the Balkans at various points in the last thousand years. But I'm talking about settlement that doesn't come in the wake of an invading army.)
I'm not saying - indeed, I don't believe at all - that this is "destroying the culture." It's certainly changing the culture. It's forcing lots of Europeans to confront questions of identity that they really haven't had to face before (like, can you be Danish if you're not a Dane?).
Also, the character of this immigration is different from previous waves of immigration. Moroccans and Algerians are forming urban communities that are a lot like what immigrants from the Pearl River delta formed in the US, which, again, is a new experience for Europeans. The closest analogy to this in European history is ghettos, and that's a really poor analogy for any number of reasons.
This is a problem of growing urgency. Not because it's some kind of existential threat to European cultural hegemony. (I think it sort of is, but I don't think that's a problem; I think that's something Europeans should just suck up.) The problem is that both the Europeans and the Muslims are coping with it poorly.
There's a lot of mutual ignorance and suspicion. Europeans have an extremely poor understanding of these new subcultures. I don't want to draw too strong a conclusion from the case of Geert Wilders - as Abi points out, one of the consequences of the Dutch style of politics is that it's easy for outsiders to mistake worst-case scenarios for the mainstream - but he does have a constitutency. There's a reason that Dutch-Moroccans have by far the highest arrest rates of any ethnic subgroup in the Netherlands, and it's not because they're more likely to be criminals. The whole French debate over headscarves in school is more sensible than it would be in the US, but that isn't saying a lot.
This is something that both old and new Europeans need to come to terms with. Neither group is doing an especially good job. I believe that the way to that involves each group developing a more nuanced understanding of the other. In this regard, I think that recognizing that something has a meaning for one group that it does not have for the other is pretty important. I think that the risk of exoticization and emphasizing Otherness is outweighed by the impulse, however minimal it may be, to understand.
abi @121: I lived in Amsterdam for a month and a half in 2007. At this very moment (like, I should seriously not be writing this post), I am helping my girlfriend with her applications to doctoral programs in anthropology: she's been studying Moroccan and Turkish immigrant communities in the Netherlands for several years now. A great deal of what I know about the Dutch reaction to Muslim immigrants comes from my girlfriend's fieldwork; a lot also comes from her work with Jeroen Dewulf of UC Berkeley's Dutch Studies department. Take a look at The Multicultural Netherlands,which she's done the lion's share of the work building - it's clear that the Dutch are hardly "waiting for someone better placed to tell them that they are on an inevitable collision course with Teh Izlam." Nobody studies themselves like the Dutch do, and they're all over this.
Now, granted, I may be according this whole issue more weight than it warrants simply because I've been hearing about it every day for the last couple of years. But it was topic one with the more-or-less ordinary Utrechters that I talked with when I was there. (Topic two was Katrina, a failure that they spoke of with the same kind of sad disbelief with which we used to talk to Bulgarians about their demand economy, with a strong undercurrent of how could you fuck something like that up?)
> The idea of an inevitable cultural clash is such a commonplace among a set of the American commentariat that it's almost impossible to tackle.
Ian Buruma, Leon de Winter, and Hafid Bouazza are not Americans.
> "But from here on the ground, it requires a drastic misreading of the Dutch to make it plausible—such a provincial and thorough misreading that I can't credit anything the same commenters then say about Islam."
Did you see Fitna? What did the people you're talking with in NL think about it? And who's voting for Geert Wilders, anyway?
heresiarch @ 67: "Really? The Kentuckian would learn about the foreign invaders' culture and understand that, while all of his and his family's interactions with them were purely negative, really they were good sorts with the best of intentions?"
Did I suggest anything of the kind? Why, no, I did not. In fact, I didn't even suggest something as bizarre as, say, implying equivalence between social networks in 18th-century and 21st-century Kentucky.
One of the reasons we still remember the Hatfields and the McCoys is because by the general standards of American culture it was pretty non-normative behavior. When journalists mention it in passing, it's to use exactly the same kind of offhand exoticization that Patrick's complaining about: weird behavior by eccentric backwoodsmen who are Not Like Us. Which is pretty annoying to 21st-century urban Kentuckians.
We're at the beginning of what is already as profound a cultural conflict as the West has ever experienced. The demographic pressures that the Arab world is exerting on Europe are changing the terms of the fractious relationship between the two spheres, on a scale without precedent in the last ten centuries. (The American involvement in this conflict is really a sideshow, though we do have a fantastic capacity to make things All About Us.)
I think Patrick's perspective, one of resisting exoticization and emphasizing commonality, is the perspective of someone who doesn't have any skin in the game - which is to say, an American perspective. It's a perspective that was common in the Netherlands in the 1970s, and that has been melting away as the Dutch experience large-scale in-migrations of peoples who are not especially interested in being Dutch. This is happening all across Europe, it's happening on a very large scale, and the problems that are emerging are not being palliated by the idea that we're all jes folks.
I think that idea's essential, mind you. We're not going to get anywhere by disregarding or denying it. But we're also not going to get anywhere by pretending there's not an equally true idea that contradicts it.
Patrick @ #3: "Those darn Iraqis, so volatile, so entangled with their 'honor culture.' As if people in Kentucky wouldn't react exactly the same way."
It's complicated. Yes, they'd react pretty much the same way in the specific moment being photographed or taped. But over time the reaction would take very different forms. Not because Iraq has an "honor culture" per se, but because the family and social structures in Iraq function in ways that American ones do not. Honor's part of the signaling system of their social networks. And our social networks do not function like theirs, for good and ill. Honor's important to us, but dishonors done to Americans generally don't propagate very far (in the absence of media coverage, which to a first approximation is what we have in place of extended social networks).
It's difficult even for people who know what they're talking about to describe the differentness of other cultures without exoticizing them. But a lot of those differences are not subtle, and they're important.
You can't understand the act of throwing shoes at the President of the US if you look at it from purely an American perspective. Sure, obviously the man throwing the shoes is angry. But we know he was angry because he was yelling, too. Is it emphasizing the other-ness of the Arab to translate his words into English? Of course not. Well, it's not exoticizing him to translate his non-verbal communication either.
(A typical American wouldn't insult the President by calling him a dog, either. We didn't use dogs on the prisoners in Abu Ghraib by accident. We knew what we were doing.)
I'm not saying that TV and newspaper journalists don't do a clownish job of this. Ethnography is out of their pay grade. (It's in an even lower one than journalism.) My feeling about this particular bit is that well, at least they bothered to ask someone "why shoes?"
(Elvis Costello covers include, among many others: "I Stand Accused," "My Funny Valentine," "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," "Eisenhower Blues," and - here is where the forehead-slapping commences - "What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding?")
Patrick @ 24:
The stories are spun differently on the front page for a bunch of different reasons. You incline towards one of them, which, as you put it, is "Americans good! Foreigners sinister!"
Well, okay. But the first story is about the possibility - possibility, mind you - that the billions of dollars of public money that Congress is contemplating handing over to the auto industry might have some conditions attached to it. The second story is about the Russian state-security apparatus being used to intimidate senior executives in large industries by threatening them with investigation and prosecution on trumped-up charges.
"In fact," you say, "I’m sure the Russian elites, contemplating their problems, are telling themselves high-minded stories that are more similar to the internal narratives of our own aristocracy than they are different." Even a casual perusal of the history of Russia's extractive industries over the last two decades should suggest that no, it's not so similar. Nobody in Congress or the Treasury Department is thinking that the time is right to get the FBI to throw Richard Wagoner in prison for having that guy whacked back in 1992, so that David Addington can run GM as his private fiefdom. I'd bet folding money that a substantial part of what Dmitri Rybolovlev's thinking right now is whether or not he's going to get out of this situation alive. Alan Mulally is thinking about having to reduce his salary to a dollar a year. That's not the same narrative.
You end with, "And it’s hard to look at the recent raids on the commonweal by our own merchant princes and not think, hm, this looks a lot like the behavior of a mafiya." What? No, it isn't. It's not remotely hard to not think that. Thus far the bailout of Wall Street has been substantially free of corpses turning up with their hands and feet chopped off, restaurants sprayed with automatic-weapons fire, or journalists being arrested, or beaten, or picked up by armed men who may or may not be cops and shot in the head. Nobody at Lehman Brothers has fled the US in fear for his life, and then been tracked down in another country and poisoned to death.
I've worked in the auto insurance industry. I know how imaginary the line between "business" and "organized criminal conspiracy" can be. But the differences in character between how American and Russian oligarchs do things is not trivial, and it's not cosmetic. And yes, I find the Russian approach kind of sinister. Much as I'd get a certain visceral satisfaction out of learning that the CEO of Countrywide had been whisked away to a psychiatric hospital, I'm kind of glad we don't do that. I really don't think this stems from my belief in American exceptionalism.
@179: Richard Condon, who wrote the novel and was involved with the movie, wrote a remarkable article about the making of Winter Kills for Harper's, back in the early 80s. Apparently the movie faced unusual difficulties during production that always seemed to trace back to one group or another that didn't like what the book and movie had to say about the Kennedys: financing problems and union problems, mostly. The financing was unorthodox, too, to the point that one of the movie's producers was found handcuffed to a bed in an Italian hotel room with a bullet in his head.
Unsurprisingly, it's a disjointed movie. But it's great fun. John Huston doesn't so much chew the scenery as suck it all into his maw and annihilate it.
@130 "this wouldn't be acceptable to those who (although they had already gotten plenty) saw a goldmine at the end of the napalm rainbow."
Every change in the direction of the federal government effects a corresponding change that enriches one group of contractors and deprives another. By the logic, such as it is, of the above, any time a president issues an executive order or signs a piece of legislation there should be shots ringing out.
One of the (many) reasons that there aren't is that the president isn't a king. Interest groups that lose out because of what the president has done can turn to Congress and the courts. And if they can't get any traction there, well, it's a lot of people to shoot. There's a reason that presidential assassins, both failed and not, tend to be loonies: shooting the president doesn't make any sense.
The problem with crazy conspiracy theorists is that when you run across one that's actually real - like the GM/Standard Oil/Firestone conspiracy to force cities to replace streetcars with bus lines, or what the executives at AH Robins did when they found out how dangerous the Dalkon Shield was, or Operation Northwoods - you tend to think, "that's ridiculous, that's a crazy conspiracy." (OK, Operation Northwoods wasn't, strictly speaking, a conspiracy, because it's doesn't meet the overt-act requirement, at least as far as we know.)
Also: to those who haven't read it, I strongly recommend Don DeLillo's astonishing novel Libra. I think it's far and away his best book. His novels tend to be overburdened by abstraction, but that's not the case here: as he once said in a different context, you have to make allowances for the fact that everything you're seeing here tonight is real. The stream of Oswald's consciousness that flows through it is deeply creepy and eerily convincing. (Ruby's is even creepier.) And as with other great tragedies, the fact that you know how it's going to end makes everything in it more compelling.
The crazy conspiracy theory that Libra describes is one that it's not hard to believe in. The only one of Jim's points that it contradicts is the first one - a funny dig, but one that Mohammed Mossadegh and Jacobo Arenz - to say nothing of Ngo Dinh Diem - wouldn't find especially persuasive. A lot of the CIA's special operations failed, but that's the nature of special operations. Good thing, too: the CIA's successes have caused a lot more problems for us than their failures.
(As an aside: In his book about the Iranian hostage crisis, Mark Bowden reports that after Mossadegh, and SAVAK, the CIA loomed so large in the Iranian mind that the students who took the embassy believed absolutely that the CIA was just going to kill them. To this day, some of them are still confused about why that didn't happen.)
(Also, I think #49 is extraordinary. Forgive my newbishness if that sort of thing happens all the time around here.)
I needed money badly myself at first, but the reputation of the house brought women seeking buyers and men seeking to buy. It is hardly necessary, as I told myself when we began, to do more than introduce them, and I have a good staff now. Phaedria lives with us and works too; the brilliant marriage was a failure after all. Last night while I was working in my surgery I heard her at the kitchen door. I opened it and she had the plums with her. Someday they'll want them for breakfast.
I thank you for that, because that link led me to the Sean Astin ad, which has a) a wonderful little visual surprise at the end and b) subtitles in what I'm guessing is Romanian. (Noua Zeelanda!)
There's a story, notorious among romance novelists (my ex-wife was one), that seems on topic here.
An author had written a manuscript whose dashing hero was a veteran of the Great War who had returned from Over There to become a barnstorming mail pilot.
The editor's query was along the lines of: "I like the story, but readers don't really care for World War I. Can this be moved to right after the Civil War?"
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| 2008 | 39 |
| 2007 | 7 |
| 2005 | 1 |
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