Showing posts with label US politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US politics. Show all posts

Friday, July 14, 2017

Junior

When that much-mocked NYT Style article about Donald Trump Jr. - you know, the one with him looking wistful, in flannel, on a tree stump - appeared, I couldn't believe my luck. My book had just come out, and here was this perfect example of the phenomenon that motivated me to write the thing in the first place. For here was a man who had benefitted from absolutely everything - rich, white, male, etc., but also Trump's son, and the one who shares his first name at that - but whose self-conception was so thoroughly that of the underdog. A scrappy, misunderstood everyman. And how did he make that case? By presenting himself as uncomfortable with city life, preferring the simple country life. A preference that manifests itself as incredibly high-end-sounding hunting trips all over the world, the likes of which make the hunts the aristocratic families on British TV shows go on to seem positively low-key. But does Donald Jr. see it that way? Didn't seem like it:

“For some people — you see that in New York a lot — they go hunting once every other year and they talk about it at a cocktail party for the next two years until they do it again,” Mr. Trump said in an interview. “For me, it is the way I choose to live my life.”
Rather than (accurately) presenting his hunting hobby as a highbrow diversion, he uses it as evidence that he's a man of the people. That his Manhattan childhood was somehow authentically American, in a way that more typical middle-class urban childhoods (without second homes or even, in NYC, first cars) are not.

Donald Jr.'s self-presentation as Mr. Ordinary - set against a backdrop of millions of not especially posh Americans getting cast as out-of-touch elites, just for living in cities - struck me as the epitome of the right's embrace privilege discourse. To be privileged, for the right, isn't about being rich, white, male, and well-connected. It's about whether, on "Frasier," you'd be more a Niles or Martin Crane.

(I have an unfinished thought about the relative indignation caused by Donald Jr.'s safari slaughter and - sorry, I know I said I wouldn't bring this up, but here we are - Lena Dunham rehoming and still financially supporting a rescue dog she adopted but couldn't properly handle.)

All of this was back in March, before this summer's big Donald Jr. revelation. There's sitting on a stump like a decadent aristocrat and being generally unpleasant, then there's colluding with Russia to get your father elected president of the US.

When something is indefensible on that level, the excuses are bound to be pathetic. And the excuse that 39-year-old Donald Jr. is a "kid" is plainly ridiculous. (I'm about to turn 34, and while I wish youth extended that long, I'm confident it does not.)

The question I'm stuck on is how much the ridiculousness of the just-a-kid excuse is about white male privilege, how much Trump privilege, and how much the two can even be disentangled. And yes, I'm thinking of the Bustle piece headlined "The Defense Of Donald Trump Jr Reeks Of White Male Privilege." In it, Dana Schwartz writes:
Don Jr. might be, by all accounts, an idiot. But then he’s also a 39-year-old, grown-ass man idiot. This enormous benefit of the doubt is conferred upon him thanks to the tremendous privilege of being rich, white, and male.
Schwartz gives examples of white women and people of color getting torn apart for far less, and of young white men getting relatively generous treatment. All true, and all very important to point out. (One white man she mentions, Brock Turner, has long struck me as an unambiguous case of privilege in action.) My concern is that there may be a downside to attributing gentle treatment at the level received by Donald Trump Jr. to his broad demographic categories. Why a downside? Because most 39-year-old white men wouldn't experience anything close. They'd have it easier than their female and non-white equivalents, but not on that scale. If we instead limit this to rich white men, we're getting closer, but... I still think what Donald Jr. can get away with is closer to what Ivanka the First could, than to the experiences of rich white men generally.

My issue with the framing is, it becomes all too easy to point out - and be right! - that typical white men aren't quite as privileged as Donald Jr., and in doing so, to dismiss the very real injustices that exist in the general (non-Trump) population.

Then again, Trumpism is certainly about the fantasy of being the sort of white man who could get away with anything, and that's a fantasy with disproportionate appeal to white men, very much including ones for whom that'll never be the reality. So, who knows.

Friday, January 30, 2015

"Prank"

Dashka Slater's article about a let's say hate-motivated crime on a bus illustrates the challenges of writing that type of piece. The story's both upsetting and timely - timely, that is, because it's about two different left ideologies being in conflict. Who gets your sympathy - the agender middle-class white teen who was set on fire and is now doing better but was still, you know, set on fire? or the teen who set the other kid on fire, who's black, working-class, and a self-identified homophobe? Or maybe they should just both get neatly-divided equal amounts of your goodwill - both being Others in this harsh and unforgiving world. Or maybe... setting someone on fire (the details are chilling) is sufficiently terrible as to fall outside the usual privilege analysis? Maybe?

Reading the comments - which take the author's lead in their approach - you'd think that the kid who'd lit the other kid on fire had, I don't know, failed to use the proper, liberal-arts-college language to refer to agender individuals. And not... set such an individual on fire. (Nice touch, though, how the one kid's lawyer refers to the victim as a boy in a skirt.) This isn't about cultural relativism, and how different communities understand gender, and the need (which does exist!) to be understanding of those not up-to-date on the cutting edge of gender self-identification. It's about violence. The right to, I don't know, publish offensive cartoons, shop at a kosher supermarket, or ride the bus as a gender-non-conforming teenager and not be physically assaulted.

And to those who point out that they, too, engaged in teen hijinks, and that their hijinking-while-white privilege saved them from falling into the criminal justice system... yes, that's a very worthwhile conversation to be having (and that is being had, if not nearly enough) about things like pot, underage drinking, shoplifting, etc. About attempted murder? Let me think about this for a moment... no. This is not a case where a no-big-deal act has been overblown because of racism. It's one where we can all well imagine getting angry if a white kid committed an equivalent crime and didn't get into sufficient trouble.

That said, nuance is needed, because of the issues (to put it mildly) with trying underage teens as adults. But this is a question of how a society should respond when someone under 18 commits a terrible crime. The answer to that question can't possibly be reducing everything a 16-year-old does to the status of "prank."

Tuesday, January 06, 2015

Of GOOP and GOP

There have been brunch protests. They involve black people and non-black allies going into posh brunch places, speaking for a few minutes, then leaving. (From the video I saw, it's approximately as disruptive to brunch as when a live band suddenly starts playing at a coffee shop. No waffles, it seems, were harmed.) Gawker commenters are discussing whether the place anti-racists really want to target is upscale NY restaurants, whose patrons are (the commenters' assumption, ahem, not mine) progressives, and not the predominantly white, working-class establishments where one might (again, paraphrasing the commenters) find racists, cops, racist cops. That line of argument... makes me very pro-protesters.

Because when I first saw something about this, I wasn't sure - it sounded like hipster performance art. Hating brunch is cool, not because brunch is racist, but because it is - for lack of a better term - basic. I mean, this even comes up in an early episode of "Girls" - the Lena Dunham character is assuring her (also-white) on-again off-again dude that she doesn't want a guy to take to brunch.

But taking a broader view, the percentage of people avoiding brunch because they think they're above it is tiny in comparison to those who are avoiding it because it's expensive, because they have to work when it's brunch time (perhaps... at a brunch-serving establishment), because they have family responsibilities, because it's not a thing in their neighborhood, etc. The demographic brunching at these places... the Gawker commenters don't quite have it right. It's not that the customers aren't racist - it's that they probably aren't resentment-racists. It's a safe assumption that they're of the demographic that identifies neither with a young black man shot by the cops nor with the cops.

Protesting at brunch - and not, as the Gawker commenters suggest, a white working-class hangout - is a way of challenging the all-too-common view that systematic racism is upheld by the white people who, all told, benefit the least from (again, for lack of a better term) white privilege. Rather than addressing the GOP set, these protestors are talking to the GOOP crowd. Doesn't seem like a bad idea.

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Imperfect but possibly useful historical analogies time

Léon Blum : Vichy :: Barack Obama : Ferguson/Staten Island

Thursday, May 22, 2014

In descending order of importance

-I suppose as a not-black American, I'm supposed to have a contrarian take on Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations." But from what I could tell, reading it quickly late last night, it seems quite reasonable. Yes, other groups in the States, including my own, have faced racism, not just abroad but here. But anti-black racism is the racism in this country; if you doubted this, a good place to begin would be Coates's article. Or N.J. Transit. The only objection I could see having to the overall idea is if, on the whole (as much as this can ever be assessed of any group), African-Americans themselves find the idea off-putting. Anyway, curious to know what WWPD's readers, whatever your origins, thought of the piece.

-Banana Republic is for peasants. This was the not-all-that-between-the-lines message of Alexandra Jacobs's Critical Shopper column. I remember a scandal a while back, when a different Critical Shopper fat- and class-shamed J.C. Penney. Here, it's a bit of a different angle - Banana Republic is, after all, a somewhat expensive store. How expensive I couldn't say - like Jacobs, I haven't shopped there in years, but from what she writes, my guess is, she didn't just switch over to Uniqlo when that cheaper-and-better chain became a possibility. (Actually, we sort of know this.) But Jacobs's grievance seems to be with - for lack of a better term - mall stores:

“The Heritage label: what does that mean?” I asked one associate, who was talking smack about her boyfriend as she listlessly folded a stack of capri pants by the so-called concierge desk. 
“What do you mean?” she said with a blank look.
Horrors! That, and there's vanity-sizing. Of course, the question at this point is, compared to what? At this point, it's all mall stores, many lower-end than BR but others higher-. Basically anywhere you're going to get day-to-day clothing in Manhattan has a branch in at least one New Jersey mall. If you're a bit more fashion-y, maybe you choose J.Crew or Zara over Banana Republic or Ann Taylor, but these are the stores in even the most fashion-y parts of New York (ahem, lower Fifth). So this isn't even a YPIS of Jacobs - I'm genuinely curious where, if not stores like Banana Republic, anyone shops for most items.

-A rabbit has taken up residence on the patch of grass outside the living room. Squirrels are in mating season. I don't think the poodle can handle this.

Monday, August 12, 2013

A kind of mentorship

-My new poodle chew-toys are fabulous. Purchased for the admittedly less-than-fabulous reason of, the previous ones similar to this, bought several years prior, had disintegrated. But nevertheless. 


-By tomorrow I need to have decided between Cory Booker and Rush Holt, both of whom seem like reasonable people. Does anyone have strong feelings about this? Tepid ones? I've Googled a bit, but mostly, I've learned that Booker is a celebrity and a Rhodes Scholar (and the one who's going to win), while Rush Holt "IS a rocket scientist," as the bumper stickers attest. (I'm in rocket scientist country - half the cars have them.) An astrophysicist with a PhD from NYU! In the case of a tie, this will stand in his entirely subjective favor. Or, that he's apparently the furthest to the left, and I've become a hippie in my old age. 

I also need to have sorted out how to get to the polling station, which is like three blocks away, but not blocks, because this is the rural suburbs. Without a GPS, this looks like one wrong turn away from ending up in Pennsylvania. (A lovely state, but not one where you can vote for NJ senators.) It's the perfect distance away for a jog, however, which is far more compatible with stopping periodically to check directions. This is not about having a bad sense of direction. It's sport

-I am at long last reading Lean In, not just about it. I've reached the part where Sandberg discusses having been "mentored" by a woman who was one of my high school classmates. Somehow - and nothing against this classmate - this passage detracts from this book's ability to inspire me personally. Reading that passage was like some kind of crushing high-school-reunion nightmare. I haven't done nothing in my 30 years on this planet, but I most certainly haven't made a billion dollars in tech, nor have I mentored Sheryl friggin' Sandberg. I've... taught my poodle how to walk on her hind legs on command. It's a kind of mentorship.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

On Weiner and centaurs

The hip thing to do, in response to Weiner's infinite capacity to embarrass himself, is to adopt the stance that WWPD's most loyal commenter, Petey, does to all things, and be all jaded-like. Whereas the mainstream media, or tourists horrified by Times Square and not because of the commercialism, or those in strict religious sects, or who even knows... whereas the pearl-clutching contingent is oh so scandalized by Weiner's antics, where you want to be on this issue is, you've seen it all, or at least heard of it all, and Weiner's totally G-rated by your standards. Andrew Sullivan and Dan Savage both point us to Amanda Hess's Slate piece about, well, ostensibly about how in this day and age, everyone has stuff they wouldn't want revealed publicly, but also about how very dull and everyday Weiner's sexual interests appear to be. Seems he has a fetish for women's feet. "High heels! Can you believe this freak?," Hess asks sarcastically.

So there are two issues here. I'll start with the second. In this age of the Savage Lovecast, with the centaur fetishists and poly triads looking to incorporate a tail (without an animal attached, rest assured) into their lovemaking, in this age of Google, no matter what goes on or doesn't in our own lives, we who have not been living under a rock are aware that everything's out there. So a married man who carries out imaginary affairs on social media or via text with young but of-age women, this is not shocking from a proclivities perspective. People are into stranger things than that. (Even Dear Prudence brought us the incestuous male twins, and will no doubt arrive in centaur country soon enough.)

While a blasé attitude is called for when it comes to what goes on in people's minds, or (and fine, opinions differ) on their computers in a not-so-interactive sense (i.e. porn, as vs. offering a real, identifiable other human being an apartment), it's really not a given that every middle-aged man is doing what Weiner was. If some couples have arrangements where this is acceptable, fair enough, but I suppose I'm square enough (or, as Sullivan might say, female enough) that I wouldn't take for granted that this specific thing is completely typical behavior. On the centaur-to-missionary-position spectrum, yes, this is unremarkable. But not on the behaviors-one-must-put-up-with-in-a-partner one.

The first and more basic issue, then, is the question of private moments revealed. I'm not sure how relevant that is to a case of exhibitionism, of a man who on some level (erotic, power-games, some combination) enjoys risking scandal. This isn't as if someone was secretly recording his goings-on, or as if the NSA was like, hey, look what's on this guy's computer! Sexy photos of women in high heels! A family man has had thoughts about women other than his wife! What was notable was the indiscretion. He could have been sending really chaste but romantic messages to tons of women about how pretty he finds them, and it would have been similarly remarkable behavior for a married politician.

Nor is this a case of youthful stupidity catching up with someone. If you send an explicit photo (or consent to having one taken) when you're too young to have thought about the consequences, that kind of does - at least for those experiencing adolescence in the smartphone age - put you in the same boat as so many others your age, and not really indicate exhibitionism or even bad judgment. (Is there any other kind of judgment at that age?) I mean, it's not that Weiner wasn't caught, but that risking getting caught - or getting caught and then succeeding all the same - is his game

In any case, it would seem that the issue with Weiner and perversion isn't that we're such a uptight society that we can't imagine a married middle-aged man would fantasize about sex with some random 22-year-old woman. This is assumed to the point of beyond-cliché. It's that this little discretion, paired with so much ambition, suggests a perverse desire to be... not above the law, exactly, but to be someone to whom the rules of bare-minimum image-maintenance don't apply.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Why you should study nuclear engineering at UMich

If you're reading WWPD, chances are you know more about constitutional law than I do. You may even have been cited in the dissent. So yes, very pleased with the DOMA decision, but no, not able to explain its particulars to you above and beyond what you already know. There are, it appears, other places on the internet doing this.

What's more in my area: the arrival of transparency to graduate study. First, as Flavia told us, was the Ph.D. Placement Project. Now, see also GradPay, which seeks to answer the other question on everybody's mind: What's normal for grad-student pay?

This may seem a silly thing to concern one's self with, because surely college seniors/recent grads are rational actors, comparing options as vs. cost-of-living in different locales, and examining their own financial situations. What matters isn't what's normal, but whether this will do.

But there's an aspect of grad pay that tells you how competitive your program is, and how desired you are by that program. Just because you can swing it (perhaps with the help of independent funds) doesn't mean you should. Depending what it is you hope to get out of it.

I'll also repeat my usual spiel on this, which is that in my experience, if you're of the set who need to support themselves financially, but not anyone else, there's a sense in which any pay 'to read books' seems like a ton if what you were used to was paying to read books (or parents/loans paying on your behalf), and hoping that whichever side jobs would make a dent in that cost. If you're still thinking along the lines of woohoo, a scholarship!, if you're in the mindset of only needing a tiny little room somewhere and a roof over your head, the fact that your tuition is paid and you're getting money above and beyond that can seem like, how on earth would you be anything but eternally grateful? And then a few years down the line, the thrill of $10k or whatever (I exaggerate. As you'll see if you go to GradPay!) may drop substantially.

One thing that could be useful, with GradPay, is to know the cost of living in these places, and the (subsidized?) housing situation. NYU grad students often make what would be solidly middle-class salaries elsewhere, but there's that pesky requirement - at least during coursework and teaching - to live in or very near New York. Another: lots of grad-student funding comes from additional patched-together fellowships, summer funding, and such, above and beyond the stipend. How much of that students have access to varies school by school, I'd imagine, so there are situations where grad students making as much as $40k who, on paper, seem to be making $20k. (Try explaining situations along those lines to a rental agent, though, who will indeed view the stipend as the salary, because anything else may not be guaranteed in a contract.) Another: health insurance? Not all grad students are under 26 and on their parents' health insurance. But this is certainly a start.

Sunday, May 05, 2013

They took our jerbs!

If ever there was an article to inspire grad-student rage, it was this one about post-scandal politicians (and a certain Nazi-sympathizing fashion designer) landing plum (well-plum-ish, more on that in a moment) jobs as "professors" (again, more in a moment). Writes Ariel Kaminer, "The traditional path to an academic job is long and laborious: the solitude and penury of graduate study, the scramble for one of the few open positions in each field, the blood sport of competitive publishing." Consider the point driven home. These big-shot neer-do-wells are, surprise surprise, all men, and in similar surprisingness, the money they can make as adjuncts is so drop-in-the-bucket-ish that one of these guys was like, meh, I'll give it to charity.

Meanwhile, the article's maybe a bit misleading, because it gives the impression that tenure-track jobs are being handed out to whichever formerly Great Man has most recently solicited sex in a public restroom or tweeted his genitalia or expressed admiration for Hitler. It seems more like, they pop in and teach at most a class or two. It's not quite that they took our jerbs.

But in any case, the real reason for outrage is not that grad students work hard for little pay, only to have our would-be jerbs taken by those who find the pay hilarious, the task second-rate. Nor is it even the implicit those who can't, teach - the notorious anti-teacher slur - reference: those who can but make asses of themselves can also teach. No, it's that grad students live in fear that micro-missteps will cost them a job. Things like, oh, having a Facebook page on which they admit interests other than critical theory. Things like, if female, having a male significant other. (Which - see Letter 2 - means one is a dabbler.)

And my sense - but what do I know? - is that grad students vastly overestimate the amount their professors - let alone this broader class of individuals, All The Professors - are thinking about them in the first place. (PhD Comics sometimes gets it right.) According to anecdotal evidence spanning beyond myself, you won't not get into grad school, not get a fellowship, because you have an internet presence that, while tame, reveals that you have thoughts other than how unfortunate it is that the library isn't open 24/7 and doesn't have all the books you need for your dissertation. Maybe it's radically different when it comes to jobs, but that seems unlikely. Somewhat different, maybe.

Still grad students will worry about things like whether they mentioned another scholar in class, and this is someone everyone knows the professor thinks has it wrong - everyone but this one grad student, whose fate is now sealed. And there probably is some truth to the minor-missteps-will-end-your-career-before-it's-even-begun concern. So there's something painful, I suppose, for those dead-set on an academic career, watching those principally known, at this point, for some embarrassing screw-up being "professors," however tangentially.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Meet - or not - the parents

The child-free should not tell parents what to do. Fair enough, if we allow for exceptions.

The Guardian just published this incredible whopper of a(n incredibly common) parental complaint: a mom distraught that her daughter is not as brainy as she is. Naturally, she blames the girl's father, and clings to the idea that this is not academic mediocrity but a disorder of some kind. Same old, same old, with one detail: the author? "Anonymous." As it should be. The daughter, should she grow up and learn to read, will Google herself, perhaps her mother as well if her mother's a writer. Better for this not to come up.

Meanwhile, the bad-parenting debate reaches a new level with this discussion about whether we may fault the Boston bombers' parents for their descent into terrorism. Will Saletan correctly notes that these parents are mighty unappealing. The shoplifting's a curious detail, but the father's ability, in so few words, to insult the United States on account of this country's not condoning domestic violence, well, it would have been Borat-esque if it weren't just so depressing. When criminals like this are siblings, one does wonder if they were brought up right, and in a case like this, the more we learn, the more the answer seems a definitive not-so-much.

On the other hand, isn't this asking a bit much? Both "boys" were adults. 26-year-olds are definitely grown-ups, probably even in the Lena Dunham universe, and all the more so if they're married-with-kids. Are we to be equally suspicious of dude's wife? And parents are notoriously blind to their kids' not-so-ideal behavior (except when, like Anonymous, they're not). Go to any thread about health and The Youth, and you're likely to find parents insisting that their kids would never go near alcohol/tobacco/sex/whatever. Children, including adult children, are angels. If parents have trouble imagining their kids being normal, how exactly are they supposed to wrap their heads around a crime like this? And it seems altogether irrelevant that some broigus uncle (and oh, does this scenario ever define broigosity!) thinks the kids are/were bad seeds. Not that the uncle's wrong - he's of course 100% right - but if there's pre-existing estrangement, he's not really comparable to non-estranged (but plenty strange) parents. So it doesn't work to say that some relatives caught on, while the parents themselves did not.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Prepare to see a lot more where this came from

This from cleverly-named NYT commenter "A. Taxpayer," of - of all places! - Brooklyn:

It is highly probable that they came at an early age to become citizens to become familiar with American customs and major east coast cities in order to conduct terrorism/treason later. Their trip home was for training on bomb building.
Note that not only has this commenter decided both brothers - not just the older one - went back on a possibly suspicious trip to the old country, and that both, not just the younger, became U.S. citizens. But also, a kid who came over at around eight - as per the very article this genius is apparently commenting on, and in principle read - did so with intent to pretend to be an all-American stoner, with the intent to fake speaking American English, while secretly, underneath it all, at eight, this plan was in the works.

Meanwhile. If your great fear is foreign terrorism (and we'll set aside the relative danger of that vs. being shot by some idiot with bad coordination and no particular ideology), shouldn't you be more wary of playing up the foreignness/unassimilability of immigrants? Wouldn't that sort of thing seem to encourage alienation and then whichever % of the alienated will radicalize? Am I missing something here?

******

Speaking of self-doubt, I have an easy answer for David Brooks re: gender and confidence: it might be better for society if there were more self-doubt, but it sure is better for the individual to be self-promoting. And there are plenty of cases where good things get done only because an individual wants to put himself (on occasion, herself) out there. I'd also send him this, but I might be too demure to be that self-promotional.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Such good English

The Americanness or lack thereof of the still-living accused Boston bomber is really several different questions. The first was straightforward enough: who is this person? And when that wasn't known, one possibility of course was that he and his brother arrived from abroad specifically to carry out a terrorist act. That's not an unreasonable or xenophobic outcome to list among the possibilities when news reports emerge connecting Chechnya with an act that sure looked/looks like terrorism.

But once we did learn the story - a 19-year-old American citizen of Chechen origin who'd been in the States since age 8 - it seemed to me that this guy is of course American. Perhaps (well, definitely, assuming allegations are true) a terrible American, a genocidal maniac or a pushover prepared to become one to impress his older brother. But yes, sorry, an American. Who isn't an American 'of X origin'?

Which is why I couldn't figure out the coverage. He speaks (or spoke - seems he's not saying much) good, American English without an accent? Well how on earth else was he going to speak? He had lots of American friends? Yes, as does tend to happen if someone attends school for that many years in the U.S. This wasn't some kind of elaborate cover for a future act of terrorism, some kind of disguise hiding his authentic self. Presumably, given that timeline, this was his authentic self.

And I'm reminded of the expression, "an assimilated Jew," a phrase that suggests that all Jews, no matter their upbringing, start from some fundamental, 100%-Jewish state, and any evidence they give of having any other primary identity (American, transgender, vegetarian), anything they wear that isn't Hasidic garb, is some kind of sneaky artifice. This young man is not like an American. He is an American. One who all signs point to, just committed a truly atrocious crime.

The question, it would seem, is then whether this crime was a way of announcing treason, announcing intent to wage war on behalf of a foreign entity. But that should be a question, not a default assumption when a criminal is... white but not Christian? White but with a foreign-seeming name? Someone with relatives living abroad?

And then there's been this other aspect of the coverage-broadly-defined, about how the attackers were ungrateful to this country that welcomed them. I mean, if you've lived somewhere since childhood, is this even a matter of gratitude, or gratitude above and beyond what anyone born in the U.S. might feel? Should your debt to America be different from that of someone born here? Should you be on best behavior above and beyond the usual? Put another way: it's evil to commit a crime of this nature no matter what. But is it somehow more evil if you happened to have been born on foreign soil?

The obvious issues this brings up are how they go about this specific trial, and immigration policy more broadly. But the less-obvious, no-less-important one is national identity. Who gets to count as all-American? (The older brother's wife, says a British tabloid.) Given how many Americans have hyphenated identities, given the negligible cultural difference between someone born in the States to foreign parents and someone who came over as a young child, where exactly is this line to be drawn, if not at citizenship?

Do we really want to slide into being like so many (all?) other countries, in which one is a "foreigner" regardless of one's papers, regardless of how many generations your family's been in the country, assuming one is not of the majority religion and ethnicity? Do we want to be like Europe, where if your family isn't from that square kilometer since forever, you may be blamed for failing to assimilate, when in fact you were never in a million years going to be allowed let alone encouraged to integrate? No we don't - my pride in America comes largely from the fact that we don't do this. Or: of course we do this, but not nearly so much as other places, because of our (almost) everyone's descended from immigrants heritage, because of such things as birthright citizenship, and simply because political correctness here - and this is a point in PC's favor - discourages claims that only one group of citizens counts as authentic. Our relative lack of radicalized Westerners-of-foreign-origin comes precisely from our (relative) willingness to accept that anyone can be American. Good luck with that in France and so forth.

Which brings us to a certain complicating factor. Who exactly is this unhyphenated majority? Who are these Real Americans whose crimes might be blamed on such unhyphenated-white-guy concerns as mental illness (not that only white Christian men suffer from it - merely that this is the go-to explanation for bad behavior when one cannot point to the inner city or Islam) and hatred of liberals? I do like the woman who's so American that she wants no. more. foreigners., but she's from, oh, Greece. And then there's the inconvenient fact that one of the victims was a Chinese national here as a graduate student. Being honest-to-goodness foreign is no shield against being murdered in America for representing wholesome all-Americana... if, again, this attack was even about hurting America-as-a-nation.

Clearly, powers-that-be must investigate all angles, and sure, maybe it turns out they were part of some larger operation. But in terms of how we talk about it in the mean time, might something be gained by referring to this as an act of domestic terrorism? Not attributing to two evil doofuses (or "losers," as their amazing broigus uncle put it) something as profound as an act of war.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Your friends, your politics

The anti-same-sex-marriage-from-the-left arguments keep on popping up (along with passionate arguments about whether it is sheep-like or a nice gesture to replace one's profile picture with an equal sign, but these I don't find so interesting) on the ol' newsfeed. This, most recently. And somehow, reading this latest installment, it occurred to me what this reminded me of: anti-Zionism from within the Jewish community.

In both cases, what happens is, communities do - should! - determine for themselves what it is they want. LGBT rights shouldn't mean marriage just because straight people think that's how it goes, nor should pro-Jewish mean pro-Israel just because non-Jews not too educated on the issue assume The Jews everywhere want what's best for Likud. Internal debates are important.

But! Those who argue internally and only internally can lose sight of the broader debates about the issues that pertain to their community. With Israel, if you're only ever arguing with fellow Jews to your political right on this topic, you can miss the extent to which 'plight of the Palestinians' is, from certain non-Jewish quarters, code for anti-Semitism; unrelated to sorting out the actual problems facing any actual Palestinians, and; I should add, entirely compatible with anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bigotry. Similarly, if you're only ever discussing same-sex marriage in friendly environments where nobody doubts the humanity of gays and lesbians, perhaps only in spaces where everyone is him/herself gay or lesbian, you may naturally minimize the significance of hatred to the broader debate on this issue.

So what happens, in extreme cases, is the famous extreme-left meets extreme-right. While I am far from the first to mention that phenomenon, I haven't seen this particular explanation for how it comes about anywhere else.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

News and commentary

I know I should follow the Supreme Court news from the newspaper. And I am. These are exciting times!

But the Facebook response is so compelling. Friends who've replaced their profile photo* with equal signs of different colors. Some, I think, post one, then switch the color. Some of these profile-switches get more likes than others. Is this about how gay-friendly their friends are? Or how many friends they have, how much their friends like them? Or how late in the day they got around to doing this? Time zones? Is Facebook advocacy inauthentic if not backed up by in-the-trenches support, or better than nothing? What does it all mean?

More substantively, a friend of several friends, a person with I suppose not so strict privacy settings, has produced an epic tirade attacking same-sex marriage and straight allies... from the left. And not just the usual critique from the left, that marriage is a limiting, religiously-tinged institution for boring straight people. This person seems to think straight support for same-sex marriage is some kind of conspiracy to deny AIDS patients medical care, and that to be an ally, you need to fight capitalism. 38 people, last I checked, like this. (So much for the gay, married, and capitalist.) I was on the cusp of considering posting something myself - against my general rule of not getting involved with solving-contentious-issues-on-Facebook - until I realized that the thread didn't originate with anyone I know or even know of, and thus that settings were such that this thread was, for me, read-only. For the best!

I've seen no evidence of anyone on my list (which does have some political diversity, what with my own political meanderings over the years, and what with UChicago) opposing same-sex marriage from the right. I remember a NYT story recently about the existence of young anti-SSM activists, but there are NYT stories about people who eat only farmers'-market food year-round and other ideological micro-minorities. Is my newsfeed devoid of opposition because it's become socially acceptable for conservatives/Republicans to support gay marriage, so whichever percentage opposed it for party-line reasons (as opposed to religious reasons, why-has-sexuality-been-split-from-reproduction reasons, or simple bigotry) now get to either support it or not care either way? Yes, fine, an unrepresentative sample if there ever was one, but it's uplifting all the same.

*My profile picture is my dog in profile, but I am, for the record, in favor of marriage equality. I asked Bisou (note to self: dissertate from a library or coffee shop, not home), and she's on board, although she remains miffed that the boy-dog she chases around the dog run definitively prefers being chased - and caught - by another of his kind. In this way, poodle female adolescence resembles the human variety.

Thursday, November 08, 2012

Asians are the new Jews: political edition

Bloomberg has the scoop:

Romney won among all voters making more than $100,000 a year by a margin of 54-44. Asian-Americans happen to be the highest-earning group in the U.S., out-earning whites, and they generally place enormous emphasis on family. A perfect fit for Republicans, no? 
No. Asians voted for Obama by 73-26; they were more Democratic than Hispanics.
Sounds familiar! How, then, do we explain it? Here's how Bloomberg does:
The GOP is overwhelmingly white and insistently, at times militantly, Christian. Democrats, by contrast, are multiracial with a laissez faire attitude toward religion and spirituality. If you were a black-haired Buddhist from Taipei or a brown-skinned Hindu from Bangalore, which party would instinctively seem more comfortable?
I, black-haired, white-skinned, and third-or-fourth generation American, hear that. But I think there's more to it. Which candidate represented meritocracy? Romney and his side talked the talk, whereas Obama & Co walk the walk. So there was the Obama talking about helping the unfortunate - the not-so-bootstrap words. But there was also the Obama existing as a living example of ascent via education. That's a narrative that'll resonate more than, say, what Romney had to offer by way of noblesse-oblige. And for the record (the vaunted WWPD record, whatever that is), no, not all Asian-Americans are meritocratic Amy Chuas. But the question here is really about why high-earning Asian-Americans voted as they did.

And this isn't even particularly about the fact that Obama looks ethnically ambiguous (or unambiguously non-white, depending who's asking), whereas Romney is probably the whitest-looking person since Ward Cleaver, spray-tan notwithstanding. It's not not about race, but it's more that the Obama narrative will seem familiar if aspirational, whereas the Romney one, not so much. Meanwhile, obviously most who voted for Romney can't identify with having a car elevator. But they maybe can identify with ending up in life more or less where their parents did.

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

"Exotic" Jews and more

-Electricity returned, Obama won. Lights are now flickering again. Is Romney, too, planning a surprise return?

-A friend forwarded me Roy Greenslade's enthusiastic endorsement of (the eternally wonderful) Hadley Freeman's take-down of Stephanie Theobald's evidently bizarre (but behind-a-paywall) article about The Jews, an "exotic" people in Britain, it seems, not in the days of Walter Scott, but in good ol' 2012. There's evidently a reference in Theobald's story to "the attraction of the monetary rewards connected with being Jewish." As a seventh-year PhD student in the humanities, you see where I'm going with this.

But I'm not sure I'd put it as Freeman (sarcastically) did: "We Jews really are so very Other, what with spooky voodoo ways and our foreign accents." Because, like, yes, there's the Jews-these-days-are-undifferentiated-white-people (in the US or parts of it, at least - Freeman is, I believe, an American who lives/did live in the UK) argument. But non-Western religions and accents, these wouldn't merit an "exotic," either.

-A nice sentiment, or oddly trickle-down?

-I'm on, somewhat baffled by, Linkedin. (And hoping that via relatively passive means, I'll find places to publish my musings on YPIS and parents who write about their own children. Otherwise, assertiveness might god forbid be in order.) You can see who's viewed your profile? Given that upon getting on the site, I went and viewed the profiles of everyone I'd ever met, ever (or, everyone suggested or a friend-of-a-friend with whom I have even the faintest professional overlap), and only just now changed the settings, hmm. So, on the off-chance that whoever these individuals may be (and I can honestly say I've since forgotten), I promise that notification you got is in no way evidence of my having, you know, looked you up. But if you read this and are a writer/editor of some kind, whom I know however vaguely...

-Speaking of the parenting-memoir, some impressive dirty laundry was Fresh-Aired recently, and I got to listen while on the slow-motion commute. This was a tough one, though - I felt totally sympathetic to the parents of a gay 16-year-old son who, despite their acceptance of him, tried to commit suicide. You really get the sense that they want the best for their son, and for others in their situation. With maybe a hint of, they want to make it abundantly clear to the world that despite their son's difficulties, they've been thoroughly not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-that from the get-go. There's something about the interview where you keep thinking that the kid being described is either a) currently a young child, b) so mentally incapacitated as to be unlikely to find this memoir/podcast, or c) long since grown up, happy ending, proud of his parents for writing this book. And then you realize/remind yourself that this is a reasonably intelligent 16-year-old kid, who knows about the project and, according to his parents, consented to it. As much as any kid still at home can have a say in such a matter.

The interview got me thinking about just what it is that I find so unsettling about this genre. I suppose what it comes down to is, whose story is this to tell? If you were/are diagnosed with a mental illness, been put on anti-psychotic medication, if you've tried to kill yourself, these are things you might one day choose to disclose - to a close friend, a partner, maybe in a memoir if that's your thing. But these are not facts about yourself that you'd necessarily want others to know before meeting you. They'd impact all kinds of things - who will hire you, date you, etc. - but even assuming a world of perfect open-mindedness, maybe you just want to keep some stuff to yourself. (Setting aside the question of whether any teen, gay or otherwise, however out in day-to-day life or on Facebook or whatever, should have his sexuality discussed in a memoir, on NPR. And I really do mean straight kids also - at 16, I wouldn't have appreciated my own first-crush stories being shared by my parents on public radio.) Dude has a common-enough name, but not that common.

Sunday, November 04, 2012

Class, politics, class

All is back to normal-ish in these parts. Tree limbs are looking a bit less precarious, and I've calmed down some from my maniacal cooking-and-baking-because-OMG-electricity extravaganza. The storm's truly minor inconveniences are now making themselves apparent, most notably that all this happened when I was on the cusp of getting a drivers license. Parallel parking for hours on end becomes kind of a silly use of fuel, given current limitations, not to mention that the streets are tough enough to navigate (branches, debris, lack of traffic lights) for experienced drivers. I'm now day-to-day focused on the various challenges, for myself and my students, of getting to class. (NJ Transit on a special schedule should be... interesting, but at least it's now running? And walking from Penn Station to NYU isn't so far, right?)

So, the election. Polling places have changed in Princeton and elsewhere due to the obvious, and unless you happen to have/pick up a land line and/or have with-it friends posting about this on Facebook, you will go to the wrong spot. This, along with the number of others on Facebook unsure if they are even registered to vote (and I'm thinking they may be thinking about this too late), is somewhat distressing, when one considers the larger-scale implications. It seems entirely possible in this day and age to seem politically aware, yet for one reason or another, not vote. Oh well. I'm not sure I seem anything-aware, post-storm, but unless NJ Transit screws up in some unanticipated way, I'm voting on Tuesday for sure.

Anyway, to my storm-addled mind, some of the storm news stories brought to mind the nanny-murder coverage, especially the one about the crane accident "at what is supposed to be the city’s tallest building with residences and which has become a trophy address for some of the world’s richest people." Although with $90 million apartments, and with the story being quite different (not about singling out individuals but rather a building itself, and no mommy wars), this I didn't find so controversial. But the location of the storm brings up "coastal-elites" anxieties. Was this a story about nature as the great equalizer? Or was it one about disasters being only disastrous for the poor?

The reality is, of course, a bit of both - there are many times when it helps to be rich (loss of a summer home =/= homelessness), or not-poor (the option of occasional meals/coffee out when electricity fails at home but not in town nearby), and others (the falling-tree-limb example comes to mind; as does the difficulty of fleeing from anywhere, upscale or not, if roads are closed, trains aren't running, and fuel's in short supply) when it does not. The SNL bit about white people in NYC being upset that they can't watch HBO started clever but ultimately in poor taste, not to mention inaccurate (Staten Island, ahem). I can see this mobilizing people over the 1%, or the 0.001%, but my guess is the Conversation to come out of this will be more about infrastructure and climate change. This storm showed that the butler-will-deal-with-it class contains not so many people, even in the coastal Northeast, after all.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

WWPD, honorary Belgian

Back from a whirlwind trip to Belgium for my brother-in-law's lovely wedding. I traded roadside deer for roadside (but penned-in) cows and sheep. I think I've filled up enough of my Belgium punch-card that I now count as an honorary Belgian.


My students asked where I'd be (I'd warned them that attendance would still be taken in my absence) and their reaction was... exactly what mine would have been, pre-having Belgian family. Belgium, wow! For me, it's still the country of amazing food and incredibly tall people, but it's no longer exotic. Not Long Island, but more Long Island than Mars at this point, for sure. 

On the flight back I read a French women's mag, a hastily-selected "Marie France," which had a long article by a "philosophe" about love (with quotes from classics like Descartes on the subject); a profile of various French women of foreign ancestry (including one who was the product of not one but two mariages mixtes between Jews and Catholics); and a makeover featuring a woman of I'd assume North African extraction, which involved the magazine instructing readers on the importance, if you wish to look sophistiquée, of straightening your hair already. A woman with unusually gorgeous curly hair (think natural ringlets), subjected to a middle-schooler-style inept flatironing job. This article also claimed that straightened hair gets greasy more quickly, which is just bizarre - it's naturally straight/fine hair that does this. If you have thick/coarse poufy hair, style it however you please, the apocalypse will come before greasy hair is something you need to worry about. This is the immense upside of hair that is not, by Western standards, wash-and-go. 

And, in case anyone is curious, Belgians are following the US elections perhaps more closely than most Americans. It's apparently - understandably - amusing, in a country with an active Socialist party, that Obama's referred to as such.

In other, no less blue-state-ish news, expect posts on an anti-YPIS (not by me, alas, and not using that acronym) article in the Guardian, and one about racial and socioeconomic tensions at NYC private schools in the Times. 

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

The tristate area

Cropped for emphasis. The "are you Jewish" set were way off their game that day, going right past me twice and asking the question instead of baffled European and/or Latin American tourists. 


On the Upper East Side, handbags are babies. I think that's the message this window display wants us to come away with.


Meanwhile in Pennsylvania... Idiot that I am, I saw this billboard and thought, yay Obama! The small-when-you're-driving-by-it print suggests that is not the intended message.


Meanwhile, back in New Jersey, there's nothing silly happening whatsoever. No poodle fresh from the groomers', no Halloween-themed bandana. This is entirely in your imagination.

Friday, September 07, 2012

The politics of YPIS

Who is it who uses the expression, "your privilege is showing"? In those words, or that message phrased otherwise?

YPIS, we may imagine, is the cry of the underdog. After so much 'well, we all know how it is to have yacht troubles,' someone who sure does not will finally reach a breaking point and inform the group as much.

Or we figure it's a phrase picked up at liberal-arts colleges, once awareness has been raised of the fact that not everybody was fortunate enough to go to high school at Andover, to have parents with advanced degrees, to be white. It's born, in other words, of liberal guilt. It's liberal haves trying to create safe spaces for (largely theoretical) have-nots. As in, sure, everyone in the room has a yacht, but let's remember that if someone yacht-less were to enter, they'd feel really bad if their yachtlessness were highlighted.

Both of these are about the calling-out of cluelessness, and are ways of upholding (or introducing) political correctness. They're about alerting the oblivious to structural inequalities. In doing so, maybe they're inspiring some sort of movement to level the playing field, or maybe not. Bringing us to...

I tend to think YPIS falls further to the right of the left-right spectrum than we might think. This for two reasons. First, there's the fundamentally conservative use of YPIS, or more to the point, of the (not universally appreciated) expression, "first-world problems." It's the assumption that by verbally acknowledging privilege, inequality has been sufficiently addressed, removing the need for any social-justice concerns. It reinforces the divide between an "us" that has and a "them" that does not. It seems to be about being ill-at-ease with one's own privilege, but actually gives the impression that this privilege is in no way precarious.

Second, of course, is scrappiness oneupmanship. This is when YPIS is used to demonstrate that, while Party B is where he is in life just 'cause, Party A, you know, "built it." This is important because YPIS is generally used among those who now have, either by or on behalf of those who claim they once didn't have. Even if it's rarely the cry of the actual self-made (who, when not trying to make it as politicians, tend to play down their humble origins), YPIS is a plea in favor of self-made-ness.

All of this comes back to, and was partially inspired by, the Brooks-Douthat noblesse oblige argument. What, for some conservatives, makes a Romney better than an Obama is that a Romney knows knows knows knows knows he's privileged, whereas an Obama - who well remembers what it's like not to be in that world - maybe does not. Romney has no self-conception as scrappy, whereas Obama might.

If it's the classic cluelessness - not knowing how to do basic chores, say - then a meritocratic elite would seem to win out. But maybe not? Precisely because today's meritocrats don't get how much they have (goes the argument whose conclusion I don't buy, as I'll get to...), they don't create a stoic, austere life stage for their young. Thus, most glaringly, today's college experience. Students have the audacity to live in Target-furnished splendor.

As I see it, though, the reason meritocratic elites aren't interested in having their college-student offspring sleep on splintery boards isn't that they're trashily nouveau. It's that they understand that their status is precarious, even if it's not as precarious as all that, although In This Economy... Knowing you're from a well-established family is quite different, you-can-just-relax-wise, than knowing your parents both went to law school. Psychologically, at least. There's not the same psychological need, then, for meritocrats to embrace artificial rituals intended to mimic hardship. Even in a poorly-functioning meritocracy, there's the sense, however unfounded it may be, that one could lose everything at any time.

So does this mean that we should resign ourselves to born-leader-ish leaders, to graying Ken dolls out of Nick at Nite who gosh darn get things done? Far as I'm concerned, that doesn't really solve the YPIS issues. If the meritocrats (born-rich and otherwise) imagine they're less privileged than they really are, the patrician always-hads, for their part, tend to imagine that their own experience might be defined as "normal." This was, at any rate, my experience at school with people from Romney-like families. They on the one hand knew to feel grateful for what they had, but on the other, imagined that everyone with less was "poor." Making them, of course, middle-class. Noblesse oblige is an interesting idea, but if the nobles fail to see the gradations, if they believe anyone who can't afford to send a kid to private school is basically tragic, if this, then... And as I finish some must-do tasks now, I shall let commenters finish the thought below, or let lurkers finish it silently.