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By The Public Sphere | The post Issue № 4 <small> | June 2009</small> appeared first on The Public Sphere.

The revolution”s generational consumption was completed in different stages. First, starting in June 1980, Marxists and political organizations with Marxist tendencies were massacred. Then the secular nationalists and moderate religious were banned and pressured. In 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini”s designated heir, Ayatollah Montazeri, was removed from power, and a few months after Khomeini”s death in the same year, the newly-elected government of Rafsanjani eradicated from parliament (the Majlis) those who were considered “leftist” inside the political establishment. During the 1990s there was a fight for power within the right wing of the Islamic Republic. For the first time elements of the traditional religious groups who had no revolutionary background found their way into the government and held key positions. The revolutionary left came to power again in June 1997, and the years between that date and today were the years of political struggle between the last of the revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s and the new generation of rulers trained not in the battle with the Shah”s regime but in the military camps of the Iranian Revolutionary Army. With the defeat of the Reformists in this recent “election,” and their arrest for supposedly inciting riots, the revolution is complete; all her children have been consumed.

In my Iranian childhood in the 1970s, the most memorable mouse and cat characters were not Tom and Jerry -whom I used to watch on the “American” channel- but the characters from a short story for children written by the fourteenth-century Iranian satirist poet, Ubaid Zakani. My sixteen-page book of “The Mice and the Cat” was a reproduction of an old lithograph print, which gave it a unique look among my other books.

Zakani, as is customary among the classics, began his story reminding the young readers that by the end of the book they should pay attention to the moral of the story: “Be smart and mind the story of the cat and the mice. You”ll be astonished about what the story might teach you. Even you, who are wise and prudent, listen to the tale and let it be like a jewel earring on your ear.” The playful language of the story and its funny unusual rhyme scheme made it easy to memorize and a joy to read. But the ending was not quite what one might expect from a children”s tale.

The story, as the name suggests, narrated the tale of mice, powerlessly oppressed before the paws of a brutal cat. At some point in the story, the cat”s conscience appears troubled by what he does to the mice. Taking refuge in a mosque, he prays, cries, regrets his viciousness towards the mice, and becomes a “man of god.” A mouse hidden under the “manbar” (pulpit) sees the repentant cat and takes the news to the other mice. The news about the cat”s spiritual change spreads among the mice. The joyful mice decide to show their appreciation by offering food to the cat. So they send their leaders to the cat to deliver him a message of friendship with trays of food. The message delivery, of course, gets interrupted; the new cat of god eats both the food and the messengers. This makes the mice extremely angry, unites them, and motivates them to change the course of their miserable life once and for all. They decide to fight back against the cat. The mice organize a revolution, defeat the army of the cats, and capture the cat that ate their leaders.

Up to this point, we have a regular Hollywood-style movie plot where the little guy rises up against an oppressive overlord and seemingly wins; the good and the meek defeat the evil and the cruel. The last few lines, though, undo such a happy ending. The mice take the cat to the stake to hang him. In the last minutes the cat frees himself from the ropes, kills the mice around him, and forces the army of mice to scatter. Brutality wins. Life goes back to “normal.” The “oppressed” remain powerless, and the winner is the one who uses hypocrisy, brutality, and ruthlessness.

I remember being nine years old and reading that story in 1977. Iran was pregnant with a revolution. The Shah was widely despised by the educated, secular intellectuals as well as many traditional Shiite clergy and their followers. For many members of the newly formed middle-class families of the 1960s and the 1970s, Islam was the alternative to reform Iran, a country supposedly corrupted by Western ideas. In those decades, many Iranian religious intellectuals tried to create a socialist and Marxist inspired Islam, a “modern” Islamic ideology. To many of them Shiite Islam was considered an authentic “Iranian” alternative to Western radical ideas. They believed a reinvigorated political Islam could be the revolutionary solution that makes Iranians independent of Marxism or any other Western ideology. Many of these intellectuals were more invested in the power of the idea than in their own faith in Islam. They believed political Islam would mobilize the masses against the Shah”s dictatorship. Others, perhaps more faithfully, viewed Islam as the true solution to any problem, even though they never could define how the religion would digest modern values. For the secular nationalists, liberals, and Marxists, it did not matter how Shiite Islam would become a modern political ideology.

The year 1978 began with the first serious anti-Shah demonstrations. Massive protests continued for the rest of the year. By January of 1979, the Shah left the country. In February of that same year the secular and Islamic revolutionaries, united under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, overthrew the Shah”s regime. The Shah”s army could not fight back.

On February 11, 1979, at the age eleven, I witnessed the collapse of one of the most brutal dictatorships of the century. I was elated that the mice had defeated the cat, that the oppressed could finally live free. The moral of Zakani’s story seemed to be wrong.

Things didn”t go the way the mice had intended. The next thirty years witnessed a Zakani-style victory of the cat. The king was gone but the kingdom reincarnated in the Islamic dictatorship called “Velayate Faqih.” In 1979 the first constitution of the newly-formed “Islamic” republic institutionalized a new position above the government and the president to overlook the acts of the republic and “guide” them according to Islamic Sharia: “Velayate Faqih,” meaning the Jurist Ruler, or as it is translated into English, the Supreme Leader. The story of post-revolutionary Iran became the struggle of a nation with its self-invented monster.

Today”s fight in Iran between the reformists and the hardliners is the result of a thirty-year struggle within the nation”s mind, a battle between those who finally recognize the face of the brutal cat in their self-made system and those who do not. No one knows if the story must ultimately end as Zakani would predict, the cat”s brutality triumphing, leaving a status quo of oppression on the mice. I still want to believe, as I did on February 11, 1979, that Zakani does not always have to be right.

By Mohammad Razi | The post On Iranian Cats, Mice, and Revolutions appeared first on The Public Sphere.

The space program is largely mediated in the cultural imaginary, from news coverage of tickertape parades in celebration of successful space flights to Life magazine’s oversize, color portraits of the everyday lives of astronauts and their wives. With the exception of those who venture to the Kennedy Space Center for a shuttle launch or partake in the tourism offerings at Kennedy, Johnson, or the Space and Rocket Center, we know NASA primarily as a televisual spectacle. Anniversaries of historical events evince the relationship between media and cultural memory: how an event is framed by the media shapes the way audiences come to know history. Revisiting and reframing a particular historical event can change the way it is recalled in cultural memory.

The lunar landing was an extraordinary television event, witnessed live by millions around the world. Yet for those too young to recall the Apollo 11 mission, the image of the space program just as likely to come to mind is the explosion of Challenger shortly after takeoff in 1986. The image of the Challenger disaster is so vivid in cultural memory not just because of its horror, but because television viewers were subjected to replaying of the same sequence of events, as if caught in a catastrophic loop.

There are certainly space enthusiasts among Generation X, yet for most of those born between 1964 and 1980, men walking on the moon was taken for granted: most GenXers could not remember a time before, when it was not so. Nor did they have the lived experience of the Apollo program and the intense drama of the early years of the Space Race. In the cultural narrative GenXers grew up with, the lunar landing is tied not only to the Cold War but also to Kennedy’s call for a man on the moon. Like the Civil Rights Act, one giant leap is part of Kennedy’s legacy. GenXers have certainly had ample opportunities to see moon walk footage, but the blending of personal memory and cultural memory makes the Challenger footage more salient.

The cultural gap between Generation X and the Millennial generation plays out in perspectives on the space program. Millennials, after all, are a post-Cold War, post-Challenger generation. Not only is the space race a historical notion for them, they also have as much exposure to NASA’s tragedies as its triumphs. The dream of becoming an astronaut, while still somewhat common among GenX kids, is less likely to rank high for Millennials. In a media landscape deeply saturated by celebrity, young people are given cultural clues to bank their dreams on being professional athletes or pop stars before considering the space program as a site of unparalleled acclaim and financial success.

On the morning of February 1, 2003, residents in Deep East Texas were jarred by something similar to a sonic boom, as the shards of space shuttle Columbia fell to earth around them. For many, the event was a devastating national-and international-tragedy. Running alongside their sense of mourning was a feeling of privilege, or belonging, as their circumstantial participation in the shuttle disaster stitched them in to cultural history. As federal agencies and local volunteers began recovery efforts, a handful of East-Texas Millennials, seeing the event as more akin to a scavenger hunt than a tragedy for the space program, set out in search of souvenirs. This reaction can be read through different lenses. We can critique the souvenir hunters as lacking reverence for the space program and disregarding both the tragedy of Columbia and the federal laws that prohibit keeping any shuttle debris. Or, we can see the desire to have a piece of the shuttle as a desire to own a significant piece of the past, the same sensibility that inspires us to save baseball cards, wedding invitations, and commemorative issues of magazines focused on significant cultural events. The lunar landing is likely one of those events, as the hundreds of Apollo 11 collectibles up for sale on eBay suggest.

Across generations, we see a shift in the idea of astronauts having “the right stuff.” Tom Wolfe’s notion of the right stuff is the capacity to overcome death-defying odds without flinching, making it look easy. For Wolfe, courage in the face of death, on behalf of national honor, made the astronauts heroes. That sense of reverence for the astronauts diminished as space travel became routine. In the aftermath of September 11, we’ve experienced a sea change with regard to heroism, and it is difficult to think of astronauts as heroes. The astronauts of the 1960s were vested with ideological symbolism. The astronauts of today are scientists who, if they are lucky, get to go up into space. Space travel is still a risky endeavor, but with national pride detached from the undertaking, NASA’s symbolic power is minimal.

With federal funding always in flux, NASA strives to be popular, to win the hearts and minds of the public as well as the Congressional funding required for its costly programs. The shuttle program is winding to a close, and President Obama was slow in appointing a new NASA administrator, leading many to speculate that the space program may not be a priority for the White House.

Marking the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing grants NASA the opportunity to reframe, reconsider, and reconstitute the past for purposes in the present that aim toward the future. NASA can take advantage of cable programming devoted to science and technology, and they can offer documentary retrospectives on the space program. Such documentaries could act as a counter to those programs that argue the lunar landing is a hoax, staged by NASA on a Hollywood soundstage. Changing the minds of conspiracy theorists may be impossible, but changing the perspective of a tech savvy generation seems a worthy effort. The lunar landing is a momentous narrative, and one that is tainted by association with cultural contexts and tragedies. Reframing the moon landing can restore its place in cultural memory, reminding new generations of a valuable past that can have technological benefits for the future.

By Linda Levitt | The post Leveraging Cultural Memory: Can NASA Use the Past to Shape Its Future? appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Perhaps an argument could be made here for the ascendance of spectacle and celebration, for commemorative events taking on a meaning and importance based on ritual rather than remembrance.  Maybe we live in a time and a place defined by bullet points and power point presentations, where history is boiled down to a holiday, where the details fall by the wayside and public drunkenness and wanton celebration find justification in the commemoration of any event that allows us a bit of freedom from the Puritanism of our daily lives.  By this line of reasoning, such anniversaries are little more than empty vessels to be filled by the repressed desires of the celebrants, ciphers floating without reference.  One could even go so far as to argue that anniversaries in and of themselves have become nearly irrelevant; commemoration has been flattened across the public sphere to the point where everyone and everything can have an anniversary: people, animals, buildings, events, stores, corporations, products, television shows.  Anniversaries have been indelibly linked now to commercial language; indeed, one would be hard pressed to find an anniversary whose commemoration hasn’t been transformed into an occasion to buy, sell, or consume.

Given all this, what then is the utility of an anniversary?  Why are anniversaries still important, even after their rampant commercialization, indiscriminate application, and often specious interpretation?

Much has been made of the drive towards instant gratification as a defining characteristic of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  The statement that the internet puts the world at our fingertips has gone from a revolutionary idea to a cliché.  And yet, along with the expectation of access to everything all the time, another shift has quietly occurred.  It finds its genesis and its metaphor in a device/service offered by our cable and satellite television companies.

The digital video recorder, with its ability to pause and rewind live television, is subtly shaping the way we live our lives.  The marketing for this product promises that we will never miss anything again–should the real world intrude on our television watching, we can simply hit rewind and not miss a single moment of programming.  We can record our favorite shows and skip through the commercials with the press of a button.  The DVR has singularly revolutionized the way we watch television.  Once one gets used to the idea, it’s surprising how quickly it translates to other venues.  More than once I’ve caught myself reaching to push some non-existent button on my car stereo, attempting to rewind what someone has said on the radio.  And of course, while that button might not exist in my car, a few minutes on the Internet will likely yield that radio station’s website with an archive of the program in question, allowing me to listen to it again whenever I want.  The same is true of television and, if something is not on an officially sanctioned network website (or even if it is), it’s almost certainly on YouTube.  There is no such thing as missing a televised event now that everything ends up on YouTube.  The DVR is a metaphor for how we live our lives, where everything is instantly repeatable, instantly archived, and always accessible.  Nothing again will ever be “can’t miss”; indeed, nothing can ever be truly missed again, as everything is instantly documented, archived, and available with a couple of clicks.  History repeats itself, literally.  

Within this context, the anniversary does still hold value and meaning.  The anniversary makes the argument that time does matter, that time is real, that despite all our technology time is still the one thing we cannot change, alter, or halt.  An anniversary is the insistence that today is different from yesterday is different from tomorrow.  When we commemorate an anniversary, we are not just celebrating an event, we are recognizing the passage of time.  An anniversary marks an important event, but it is not just about remembering that event, it is an affirmation that what has happened between then and now is also important.  Anniversaries tell us that life is important, that life is not repeatable, rewindable, or redactable.  Time marches on and every moment is singular and unique and precious.

We may not have known it on that margarita-soaked night, but in its own way Cinco de Mayo commemorates the significance of time.  The Battle of Puebla took place on the Fifth of May, 1862, with the Mexican army successfully, if temporarily, forcing a withdrawal of the occupying French forces.  It is widely recognized that French General Charles de Lorecenz’s fatal error was beginning his campaign too late in the day.

photo credit: Bengt Nyman

By T. R. Kiyoshi Oshiro | The post Why Anniversaries Matter appeared first on The Public Sphere.

While hearing this kind of talk from amongst the professorial ranks is rare, the ability to offer proposals that draw the ire of one”s colleagues does not in itself amount to an actual platform of reform that is in the public interest. If Taylor has done nothing else, and in my opinion, by and large he hasn”t, he has nevertheless succeeded in launching an opening salvo for a broader conversation as to what the university endeavors to be. How and toward what end should our institutions of higher education operate?

Taylor”s argument presumes that the U.S. system of higher education is going through a fundamental crisis; one similar in nature to the financial crisis. Already in Taylor”s opening metaphor, he demonstrates the pronounced influence of the very sort of disciplinary specialization his proposals would eliminate.  As a scholar of Kierkegaard and other philosophers of religion, Taylor understandably sees the world around him through that particular disciplinary lens. In this academic theological parlance, a crisis (as in “crisis of faith”) refers not simply to a dilemma posed to a particular person, institution, or belief structure regarding how it ought to proceed; a crisis is a dilemma that both threatens and stems from the essence of what a person, institution, or belief structure most takes for granted. A crisis can only be resolved (and such a resolution is itself always and only temporary, the philosophers remind us) insofar as the person, institution, or belief structure in crisis abandons the very basis upon which it relates to the world. Moreover, no real assurances can be given that the person, institution, or belief structure which comes after the “leap of faith” will be any better or less problematic than the one that came before. After all, if a radical transformation seemed like a good idea from the untenable perspective that it was trying to abandon, then such a transformation would not be radical enough because it may still be wedded to the basic orientation of the original perspective.

Viewing contemporary social issues through the lens of specialized theoretical concepts may (or may not) be accurate, suggestive, or useful. For instance, “crisis” may very well be a good name for the state of financial institutions at present, and this is perhaps why Taylor compares the state of higher education to the financial crisis. The collapse of the housing market and the credit market (and the subsequent reverberations throughout the world economy) was not on the whole caused by isolated cases of fraud and misconduct. Propelled by the drive to ever-increased speculation that comprises their very essence, financial institutions kept making more and more bets on more and more bets that became increasingly distant from the actual transactions.  To offer an extended metaphor, it”s as if instead of betting on boxing matches seen in person, or boxing matches watched on TV, or boxing matches with results that would be put in the paper, our financial institutions were all betting on boxing matches for which the results would never be known at all–in fact, boxing matches that would never even take place. One doesn”t have to be Marx to see that this logic presupposes its own destruction.

To say that such a situation constitutes a crisis–if we follow out the Kierkegaardian line of thought–is to suggest that the only possible way of recovering from the current situation, or preventing a similar crisis from happening in the future, is to transform the fundamental basis for how we go about coordinating economic transactions. Given the deleterious effects that follow from speculative capitalism even when it is working well–e.g., ever-increasing disparities of wealth, the various forms of social stratification that result from these disparities, the transformation of the Earth into a place less and less habitable by various forms of life including human beings, etc.–a case could be made for Taylor”s Kierkegaardian “crisis” approach to the problem. The course of action counseled by this analysis (the “leap of faith”) would not be the ameliorative-incrementalist approach of utilizing the political system to place a series of regulations upon financial institutions in the attempt to prevent those institutions from realizing their inner need for destruction. The leap of faith would instead demand that we get rid of financial institutions entirely. After all, if we allow the continued existence of these institutions, it will only be a matter of time before their immense power and influence, which will always be accorded them due to the central role they play in capitalist production, will once again be utilized in order to manipulate whatever political systems dare to constrain them.

In this essay, I am not claiming that an anti-capitalist revolution is the most sensible way of responding to the current financial debacle. ((Just as it is necessary to point out the likely failings of incrementalist regulation, it is also necessary to recall the conservative, Burkean observation that revolutions often serve to pave the way for counter-revolutions. However, the current approach to the financial crisis taken by our political representatives is neither the radical leap of faith of anti-capitalist revolution, nor is it the band-aid approach of confining the market’s impetus to self-destruction through strict regulation. The approach adopted by our political leaders (the “bailout”) could best be equated to the strategy employed by an alcoholic who drinks more and more every morning in order to get over the hangover from the night before. This strategy will continue to work in the short-term–again, as long as one defines “working” as the cycle of booms and busts that we have grown accustomed to–until one day when it blows itself up completely. Given their role in encouraging this process to reach its apotheosis, our leaders might very well be considered anti-capitalist revolutionaries after all. We might just all be exterminated in the process, but that’s the leap of faith for you!)) I chose to elucidate the revolutionary position regarding the financial crisis in order to demonstrate how the application of specialized theoretical concepts can help us to consider courses of action for addressing social problems beyond those which are the most obvious. By enlarging our discussion of social problems through the deliberate inclusion of a pluralistic variety of ideas, perspectives, positions, proposals and opinions (including many with which we disagree, perhaps even vehemently) we are more able to see the limitations of our habitual ways of encountering those problems. Professors, artists, and intellectuals of specialized training and temperament–especially those who have a difficult time marketing their labor directly in the consumerist economy-have a unique role to play in public deliberation. We need them to think up crazy, impractical, nihilistic, idiosyncratic, faulty, utopian, tangential ways of seeing the world so that they can share those perspectives with the rest of us. This social role of the university is performed best when the pluralism of its constituents is encouraged to the greatest conceivable extent. The university should be an asylum (or perhaps a zoo) without walls in which the freaks and outcasts who are its inhabitants are encouraged to come and go as they please and the rest of us are free to visit as long as we agree to preserve (and perhaps contribute to) the oddity of the surroundings.

It is in the public interest (and in the interest of the capitalist market as well, incidentally) for the university to function as an incubator and store-house for ideas that would otherwise be discarded because they are too iconoclastic, counterintuitive, or controversial to come into being equipped with their own revenue streams. The internet is an example of one such idea. From this perspective, the problems faced by U.S. institutions of higher education today are not best understood as the result of a fundamental crisis stemming from the university”s pursuit of specialized, impractical knowledge as Mark Taylor suggests. In fact, I believe that a better argument could be made for the converse hypothesis: the university”s present problems can be seen as the result of its failure to adequately preserve its own working ideal–entelecheia in Aristotelian terminology–as a sphere of infinite pluralistic debate that operates in relative autonomy from the immediate dictates of the market.

photo credit: seantoyer

By Marc Lombardo | The post The End of the End of the University appeared first on The Public Sphere.

A few different aspects of this situation frustrate me to no end.  First, and most selfishly, there is nowhere within easy walking distance for me to rent a movie anymore.  For most people in the country, this is not a big deal because they can just drive the extra mile over to the next Blockbuster or Hollywood Video or whatever.  I live in Manhattan and do not own a car.  For something as trivial as a video rental, if I can’t walk there within ten minutes, it’s not worth going.  When I complained of the situation to friends, their answer was simple, just join Netflix.  The movies come to you.  For a flat fee, Netflix sends one or two movies at time based on a list you compile on their website.  It’s a very simple, user-friendly process.  But that’s not how I rent movies.

When I was a small child relishing the miracle of my family’s brand new VCR, we would all pile into the car and go to the video rental place.  I learned the pleasures of browsing the shelves, looking at titles and poster art, debating whether we should get a comedy or action movie based on what we felt like watching at the time.  It was a social activity.  As an adult, I still enjoyed roaming from one genre section to another thinking about what kind of mood I was in and whether it was more conducive to an indie thriller that I’d heard was really good or the romantic comedy that I already knew I liked.  Or maybe something else entirely would catch my eye and be the perfect choice even though I hadn’t known it existed before.  Or feeling indecisive, I could just ask the film geek at the desk for a recommendation.  The options were endless.

For all its convenience, Netflix can’t provide the satisfaction of an impulse.  The movies come to you in a steady stream of titles you picked out at some point when you had a few minutes to mull it over and then forget about it.  How can you know what kind of mood you’ll be in when the movie finally shows up two days later?  Of course it’s lovely that there are no late fees, but that means DVDs arrive and sit around collecting dust when you don’t have the time or inclination to watch them and send them back.  Meanwhile, you continue to pay the monthly fee.  And if you change your mind at the last minute and decide you’d rather watch something else on your queue, or some other film entirely, you have to wait for the one you don’t want anymore to show up before you can send it back in exchange for the one you do want which won’t show up for another two days, by which time you may not want it anymore either.  It was so much easier to just walk into a store and pick up whatever caught your eye at that moment, and take it home to watch right then.  The digital world’s answer to this is the instant view function, which allows you to watch select titles on your computer or via a box that connects your television to one provider or another.  Aside from the questionable video quality, limited list of options, and necessity for even more tech gadgets; scrolling through titles on a screen just isn’t as satisfying or as informative as picking up a little plastic box with poster art on it and turning it over to look at pictures, review quotes, plot summary, and all the other miscellaneous details.

Secondly, I’m irritated and disappointed with Blockbuster and its kin in the world of traditional media corporations.  This is partially because I work for one of those corporations and, I’m pretty sure that in about ten years, my job will be obsolete.  But it really comes down to the widely recognized and basic fact that they didn’t see it coming.  All of the huge multibillion dollar, international, media conglomerates never anticipated that at some point, they would have to evolve.  Now, they’re all either playing catch up or shutting down, which just leads to more inconvenience for me.  As a result of the online digital revolution and deficient and/or greedy business strategies, there are fewer and fewer places to go shopping for media of any kind, but especially music and movies.  I freely admit that iTunes is a wonderful thing.  It is amazing that you can open up a computer program and buy music, movies, TV shows, and what have you from all over world and from a wide variety of sources and then put in all onto a little device that fits in your pocket.  It truly is a miracle of modern technology that we pretty much take for granted now.  Just like I took video and music stores for granted my whole life.

When I first came to New York as a college student, I was impressed by the size of music stores here.  An HMV at 72nd Street and Broadway had two floors.  That was nothing compared to the Tower Records near Lincoln Center whose classical music section alone was the size of any entire music store in the malls back home.  When the Virgin Megastore opened up in Times Square, some of my fellow students and I made a pilgrimage to check out the reason for all hype.  One of my companions looked at the multiple escalators, flat screen monitors and aisles upon aisles of CDs, and breathed, “Yeah, it’s pretty mega.”  He was right. Walking into that store wasn’t just shopping, it was an experience.  Listening stations lined the walls, a DJ played a more diverse song list than most radio stations, you could find just about anything that had ever been put on a CD or DVD, and it had a multiplex movie theater right inside!  But each chain, had its own brand and its own personality.  HMV was dark with moody pink and purple highlights, a Brit pop rebel that never quite got over the 80s. Tower, on the other hand, felt like the super cool, sunny California native that it was, with huge windows and airy spaces. None of these retail chains exists in the United States anymore, but they can all be found on the internet, where the shopping experience is exactly the same as at any other online store, the only difference is the logo on the home page.

Which brings me back to my point that for a culture so obsessed with shopping, we are gradually losing our venues for it.  Yes, I know, anything you can find in a store, you can also find on a website.  Point, click, type in a few crucial numbers, click again and eventually the item will show up at your door, or possibly your office mailroom.  But that means you have to wait for it to get to you, wait until it is already yours, before you can touch it, look at it, or decide whether or not it fits or the color is right.  And if you don’t like it, you’re either stuck with it or you have to go through the process of sending it back.  What’s wrong with the old fashioned method of going to a store, walking around, looking at the options, standing at a listening station, asking a salesperson’s or fellow shopper’s opinion?  I love the immediacy of seeing something in a store and knowing that I like it and want it and can walk out with it in my hand.  I enjoy looking around and seeing what other people are looking at or listening to or talking about.  And what’s more convenient than being able to run to a store and pick something up?

Several weeks ago, I was assigned a project at work that required me to watch a handful of specific movies within a pretty short time frame.  I sent my production assistant out to get the DVDs.  They were all mainstream titles that should have been easy to find, except that our old standby, the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, was closing and therefore no longer restocking.  The Union Square location had similarly slowed down on restocking.  Both stores had sold out their copies of one of the films on the list and wouldn’t be getting new ones.  We suddenly realized that, with the closing of the Union Square Virgin Megastore, New York City would no longer have a large dedicated music and video store.  I don’t want to diminish the value of the handful of local independent places that are still holding on.  If anything, they are more valuable than ever.  But their resources are limited, almost by definition.  And their numbers have been dwindling for years.  In a city that has long been associated with the creation of music and film, it’s getting harder and harder to find places that actually sell the stuff.  Currently, Best Buy is making a notable effort to fill that void, but DVD shopping there is not unlike shopping at Sears.  Your favorite movies are just twenty feet from the vacuum cleaners and dishwashers.

And that leads to the third aspect of my original story that drives me nuts.  When my neighborhood independent video place shut down, it was not for lack of business but because their landlord wouldn’t compromise on a rent hike.  And, as it turns out, the US Virgin Megastores are not, in fact, victims of the recession or even the struggling music industry.  As a chain, they had been able to prop themselves up by expanding their retail offerings and they were consistently profitable.  In 2007, Virgin Entertainment Group North America was acquired by a partnership of two real estate companies.  Those companies decided, quite early on, that the spaces the stores occupied were worth more than the stores themselves.  So, just as with my little local video rental place, it all came down to real estate.  That place was driven out over two years ago, right around the peak of the real estate boom.  The storefront has been empty ever since.  The situation at the Times Square Virgin is a bit different, since the owners secured a new tenant before even announcing that the store would shut down.  A year from now, that site will be home to the largest, and no doubt most obnoxious, Forever 21 clothing shop that anyone would ever want to see.  Apparently, cheap trendy clothes bring in a lot more money than music or movies these days.  I can’t argue with that.  But it does make me sad.

Change is hard sometimes.  As much as I appreciate downloading songs off iTunes (and of course there was no other way to get Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog), I also enjoy shopping as a social activity.  It was a great thing to walk out of a movie with a friend and wander into the Virgin to see if anything interesting had come out or discuss the merits of a DVD’s special features.  And, of course, artist in-store appearances are a thing of the past.  Even if I rarely went to them, it was nice that they happened.  What it comes down to is that I don’t like losing my options.  What bothers me even more is the idea that this is just the beginning.  How long before Kindle and Amazon partner with real estate developers to kill off Barnes & Noble?  At least two Barnes & Noble locations in Manhattan have already been shut down thanks to the real estate industry’s irrational exuberance.  One of those was among the chain’s most profitable stores, and its space has been vacant ever since.

There is an inherent value in doing things in person, value in the tactile turning of a page, reading of liner notes that are not electronic files, and being handed a pen to sign your name on a receipt.  Right now, we still have the option in most cases, of taking part in these tiny human moments.  But as a culture, we are in transition in ways many of us don’t even realize.  In our thirst for cheaper, faster, more convenient consumption, we are gradually giving up things that are more basic and just as valuable.  The physical act of making eye contact, or sometimes just as significantly avoiding it, is one of the most basic and most crucial elements of human society.  As we turn to wider uses of all our wonderful technology, we must also maintain opportunities to engage with each other and the world around us because all our gains do have their costs, and we are wise to be mindful of them.

By Paloma Ramirez | The post I Am Indignant!: Why Am I Forced to Buy Media on the Internet? appeared first on The Public Sphere.

U.S. involvement in the Philippines began with the Spanish-American War of 1898 and continued with the Japanese occupation during World War II.  Philippine liberation in 1945 directly led to large-scale Filipino immigration to the United States in various waves following the war.  The aggressive Americanization that  twentieth-century U.S. military occupation in the Philippines gave Filipinos an “anything American is better” mentality that later gave Filipino immigrants to the United States a unique head-start to assimilation.  Filipino cultural traditions seem to be practiced by immigrant grandparents and parents but appear to be entirely abandoned by their U.S.-born grandchildren.  I suspect this is an unfortunate consequence shared amongst countless other immigrant groups.

Filipino-Americans have always suffered a mild inferiority complex in the United States in regards to their status in both the Asian-American community and U.S. society at large.  Filipinos in the United States have settled for a strange complacency about being overlooked when it comes to recognition and representation in the greater Asian-American community.  It may seem like a presumptuous statement to make about all Filipino-Americans, but their obscurity persists in a nation that is finally warming to its inherent and inevitable ethnic diversity.

In my lifelong struggle to reconcile my Filipina identity with my U.S. heritage, I”ve simply become accustomed to being under-noticed, underappreciated, and simply overlooked as a Filipino-American in U.S. culture and history.  Filipinos come from a region considerably ravaged and irrevocably transformed by U.S. colonization, military intervention, and desperate poverty.  Millions have immigrated to the U.S. for better lives with the promise of opportunities nearly impossible to achieve in the Philippines.

It is no surprise that most people in the U.S. are simply unaware that the Philippines was a U.S. Commonwealth from 1898-1946.  The United States took the Philippines as a prize after the Spanish-American War in 1898 much to the dismay of the Filipino freedom fighters like rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo who sought freedom from centuries of oppressive Spanish rule.  Although Aguinaldo and his rebels proved crucial to the U.S. victory, their efforts were thrown in their faces when the U.S. decided to colonize the country instead of liberate it.  It was an especially cruel bait-and-switch that compelled Aguinaldo to oppose the U.S. push for sovereignty.  Again, he led rebel forces, but this time against the very soldiers who were once his allies.  The Philippine-American War lasted for three years resulting in American victory and subsequent colonization that lasted until the end of World War II.  The Philippines did not truly gain independence until July 4, 1946, in the wake of calamitous destruction from battling Japanese and U.S. forces.  Manila, once the shining metropolitan jewel of the Pacific, was flattened on a Dresden-level scale by Japanese bombers and, to this day,  has never quite recovered

It is no question that Filipinos exulted in their long-awaited independence after two major world powers shaped disparate island communities into the unified, developing, and politically struggling nation of today.  U.S. intervention was a critical factor in achieving this freedom and opportunity for a unified self-rule.  Yet the imbalance of a third world nation having close links with the world”s main superpower naturally sent millions of Filipino immigrants to this country.  When restrictions on Philippine immigration were lifted following the Immigration Act of 1965, an expected surge in the number of Filipino immigrants to the U.S. quickly followed.

Children of Filipino immigrants share the somewhat embarrassing peculiarity of being unable to speak their parents” native languages, whether it is Tagalog or any number of the regional dialects spoken throughout the Philippines. I find it embarrassing because most of my second generation Asian-American peers, who had Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, and Laotian backgrounds, are fluent in their parents” languages without having any trouble speaking English as fluently as I do.  The fact that most of my classmates were first generation Mexican-Americans who switched between English and Spanish with enviable ease only compounded my sense of failure at not being bilingual.  For most second-generation Filipino-Americans, our aptitude in any native Filipino tongue is limited to understanding major vocabulary words (especially swear words), the general gist of conversations, but never truly understanding or parsing the language.  Lack of fluency in my parents” language has served to distance me from my parents” culture in a way they probably never intended.

The reasons why most second-generation Filipino-Americans grew up only speaking English are certainly related to the U.S. colonial influence on English-language education in the Philippines.  When the United States annexed the Philippines as a commonwealth, they established a comprehensive educational system that made English a requirement of scholastic success.  By contrast, when the Spanish ruled, only the white peninsulars (people born in Spain) spoke Spanish among themselves and the language remained in the upper classes with a fair number of words seeping into local dialects.  Today, high rates of English literacy in the Philippines has made it a popular alternative to India for outsourced call center support.

Mastery of the English language has given Filipino immigrants the ability to assimilate to U.S. ways and lifestyles much easier than many other Asian immigrant groups.  Those same inquisitive Thai and Vietnamese nail salon clerks have told me on several separate occasions that they are jealous of how well Filipinos speak English.  I have noticed that Filipinos do largely belong to the middle class, and a high percentage of us have college degrees.  My parents, born in the mid-1940s during the catastrophic devastation of World War II and its aftermath, grew up speaking English from grammar school to university because it was and continues to be the primary language of instruction.  Even when the U.S. left, the Filipinos caught onto the “lingua franca” upswing of the English language.  Nearly everyone in the country is fluent, making many Filipinos tri-lingual by being able to speak English, Tagalog, and sometimes a local regional dialect.

In the midst of writing this piece, I came across a serendipitous validation of my cultural dilemma on a recent Philippines-themed episode of chef Anthony Bourdain”s show, No Reservations.  For this show, he travels to locales far and wide around the planet to meet foodie locals and indulge in authentic local cuisine.  In Season Four, the Philippines was the very last country in Asia featured on the program.  Mr. Bourdain admitted that he had to capitulate to pressure from outraged, neglected, and very vocal Filipino viewers of his program.  In this episode, he interviewed a young second-generation Filipino-American man named Augusto.  He shared my concern about being caught in a strange limbo of not feeling truly Filipino, because of the distance and inability to speak the language, while not feeling truly American either.  Mr. Bourdain himself asks the various locals in the program, “Who are the Filipino People?”  He speaks for a great deal of people in the U.S. who are genuinely curious but know very little about Filipino culture and cuisine.  Augusto gets to the heart of the matter in a statement, “Filipino families will put another culture before theirs just so their kids can get along.”  I asked my parents why they never forced us to speak Tagalog or thought it was important that we speak their language.  They believed that it was the best way we could speak with non-accented English and have easier lives at school and at building a new life in the U.S.

Perhaps all those years of Spanish occupation set in the mentality of making the best out of limited circumstances.  But now we are in an era that celebrates difference and change.  I am recklessly optimistic that the tide is changing for Filipino-Americans. President Barack Obama”s recently passed stimulus package is righting a wrong that occurred 63 years ago: President Truman signed the Rescission Act taking away full veteran benefits to Filipino World War II soldiers who volunteered to fight when the Philippines was a U.S. commonwealth.  CNN.com reports, “A provision tucked inside the stimulus bill that President Obama signed calls for releasing $198 million that was appropriated last year for those veterans.  Those who have become U.S. citizens get $15,000 each; non-citizens get $9,000.”  Out of 250,000 Filipino men who volunteered to fight for the United States, only 15,000 survive and most of them are in their 90s.  The NPR program “Morning Edition” interviewed an elderly Filipino World War II veteran who, in response to the long-delayed reception of benefits, merely proclaimed, “America has come to its senses.”

The Obama presidency also has another Filipino-American connection close to home: the White House head chef happens to be a Filipina.  In the March 2009 Vogue cover story, First Lady Michelle Obama shares her enthusiasm about her new life in the White House by sharing, “I am excited about the potential of the White House kitchen being a learning environment for the community.  The current chef, Cristeta Comerford, is the only female chef in the history of the White House.  She”s a young Filipina woman, a mother with a young child, and I am excited to get to know her and for her to know us as a family.”  Ms. Comerford was appointed by Laura Bush but the Obamas elected her to stay on to be the main cook of all family meals and state dinners.  I am curious whether she”ll whip up some of my favorite, delicious Filipino food concoctions for the Obamas.  President Obama, after all, did grow up in the multicultural melting pot of Hawaii where the Filipino population is substantial.  Given his Southeast Asian roots in Indonesia, I think he is open to more recognition of the general region.  Indonesia is a sister country to the Philippines (given our shared Malay and Muslim roots) that could also use more exposure and representation.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder made some controversial remarks effectively accusing the U.S. of being a “nation of cowards” for not being able to recognize the racial rifts that still plague a great deal of this nation despite all the encouraging progress of recent years.  Mr. Holder says that the U.S. is  “…[a] nation has still not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have.  To our detriment, this is typical of the way in which this nation deals with issues of race.”

My singular quest may be Filipino-specific, but I feel a particular spark in my soul to heed Mr. Holder”s call to “engage one another more routinely” about the issue of race because “there will be no majority race in America in about fifty years.”  I hope that Filipinos, and many other invisible minorities who have practically zero representation or recognition, are able to be vital and valued members of this astonishing and inevitable multicultural future.  The historical tendency to “Americanize” through the forced use of English deprives many Filipino-Americans of today the ability to speak a Filipino tongue.  However, it does not mean that Filipinos, as an ethnic group, have to be excluded from the cultural dialogue.  Someday soon, as people learn more about the vital historical connections between the United States and the Philippines, more people will start to ask me and my sister, “Are you Filipino?”

SOURCES

• “Chronology for the Philippine Islands and Guam in the Spanish-American War”
• “Filipino American.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_American
• “Full Text: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Remarks on Black History Month, “Nation of Cowards””
• Macabenta, Greg. “An undiscovered market [3-4 million Filipino-Americans].” Free Republic, July 12, 2008.
• “Philippines.” No Reservations broadcast on the Travel Channel. February 17, 2009.
• Skillin, Don. Magdalo: The Story of Emilio Aguinaldo; Revolutionary Hero of the Philippines. PublishAmerica, 2006.
• “Stimulus To Repay Debt To WWII Filipino Veterans”
• Talley, André Leon. “Leading Lady.” Vogue. March 2009.
• “TV Sweep:  Asian Faces Now Showing”
• “U.S. to pay “forgotten” Filipino World War II veterans”

photo credit: berlinpiraten.de

By Lauren Espineli | The post My So-Called Asian Identity: The Invisible Minority Report appeared first on The Public Sphere.

If they wish to survive, the Republicans must confront five major issues: (1) they must re-think religion as it relates to politics and the social sphere; (2) they must re-think race and ethnicity in the context of traditional conservatism; (3) they must broaden the term “life,” as in pro-life, so that “life” is not reduced to an ideological debate concerning only conception and fetuses; (4) they must come to grips with the fact that gay people are not a threat to their lives; and (5) they must see that guns, in fact, are a threat to their lives (this is, ironically, the easiest claim for a liberal to make, and the hardest for a conservative to accept). If they could do these things, while staying true to the ideals of individualism and fiscal conservatism, they may be able to avoid being subsumed into the Libertarian party, or, possibly, becoming extinct altogether.

The first problem with Republicans is that they are confused about Christianity, or at least what to say about Christianity. They are first and foremost a Protestant Christian Party with a strong Evangelical voice. The problem with this “Christian” proclamation is that it is exclusive of, and, therefore, necessarily off-putting to, religious minorities in the United States. The first thing Republicans would have to do is admit, whole-heartedly and without shame or guilt, that they are, primarily, a Christian party. This would be an honest claim and it would be the first step to winning back the center. Then (and this is the hard part) they would have to say they are absolutely, positively committed to religious inclusion. Christianity can be one significant point of power within the Republican Party, but multiple spaces, which are inclusive of varieties of religious experience, must also be respected. For example, a concerted effort must be made to build alliances with Muslim religious communities. Subsequently, any person who believes in the “American Dream” of individualistic achievement through hard work could, in the context of her or his own personal faith, take his or her place alongside the good Christians of this glorious nation. This would be the first step in bringing a dead party back to life.

The next problem is race and ethnicity. The November 2008 election showed, beyond reasonable doubt, that minorities are moving further and further away from the GOP. In terms of social inclusion, this problem with American conservatism runs parallel to its problem with Christianity, though it may be a bit harder for a right-winger to admit that (I’ll give Bob credit score check for faithfully presenting David’s arguments as a unified whole). their party is, racially, a white (of [Western] European descent) party. After all, it is not as bad to be called a “religionist” (if there is such a word) than it is to be called a “racist.” Nevertheless, Republicans must come clean and admit that they are presently a white-centric party. This of course, is a naming of white privilege, and so more rethinking must be undertaken past this admission. As would be the case with Christianity, multiple points of racial power would have to be posited. Everyone can “come to the table,” no matter their race or ethnicity, as long as they believe in individualism and fiscal conservatism. There is a bit of a paradox here: members of all races are welcome, but they might want to check their race at the door before they sit at the table as autonomous individuals. In this case, a “default” setting of whiteness (and, for that matter, Christianity) may kick into gear, and force all people to assimilate into a monolithic edifice of conservatism – the same problem that got the Republicans into their current mess. Such a Compatibility horoscopes Sagittarius doesn?t see the development of the relationship in the long run. shift to a multiracial party will require considerable work from Republican strategists. There must be a concerted effort, then, to engage in an honest dialogue about the complexities of race, while maintaining an ideological and practical commitment to individualism. As such, the aforementioned paradox might be negotiated without reverting to the either/or extremes of either a racial identity or a completely privatized individualism.

Next, the Republicans must confront the “wedge” issue of abortion and life. The wording of this previous sentence is precisely the problem for Republicans: a false dichotomy is set up between “abortion” and “life.” What does it mean to be “pro-life?” Some Americans think that Republicans care very much about conception, embryos, fetuses, and trimesters, but they do not care very much about the actual persons that are brought into this world. They may be pro-life, but do they genuinely care about the well-being of a life? One can preach “compassionate conservatism” until one is blue, but at some point the rhetoric will have to be put into practice. And if Republicans are truly going to be pro-life, then they have to completely change the party line on the death penalty. How is it that a life must be brought into this world under any and all circumstances, but this same life can be taken away if it sins or commits a crime? Conservatives believe that they must never go “soft on crime” and they must never become “pro-choice.” Of course criminals should be punished for their individual transgressions, but they must be allowed to rehabilitate themselves, and they must be permitted to atone for any sins that they might commit.  But if Republicans are going to care for life, then this may be an area in which some “message consistency”– life must be cared for under all circumstances — may serve to bolster the claims of “compassionate conservatives.”

As for gay people, Republicans must move toward secularism on this issue, even if they cling to the notion that Christianity is a powerful force within the party (and this assumes that true Christianity is anti-gay, which may not be the only “Christian” perspective). Gay people should be treated as individuals. Individualism is the very pillar of U.S. conservatism. If a particular church or temple will not allow for same-sex couples to marry, this is fine. But church and state must remain separate. Under the law, governed by reason and rationality, any two people must be allowed to enter into the institution of marriage, and they should be afforded the same rights as any other married couple. There is no slippery slope here, no imminent danger of a person marrying a sibling, or an animal, or a lamp. This should just be a simple issue of two people wanting to enter into a life partnership, and the state should have a limited control over the policing of individual civil rights. The Republican Party can cling to its Christian roots, but just as there are to be multiple centers of religious power, there must also be multiple interpretations of “love” and “partnership” between two people.

Guns. Getting through this issue is like trying to break through a steel wall that is ten feet thick. The NRA has a quasi-transcendent power in the United States. And certain people in the U.S. love their guns. They may appeal to the Second Amendment, but the deeper psycho-social issue at play is the deeply ingrained feeling of paranoia and alienation among some U.S. citizens. The problem of alienation is a by-product of the modern institutionalization of everyday life brought on by the dynamics of advanced capitalism, but these issues are beyond the scope of this essay. For now, suffice to say that those who are pro-life and pro-gun, believe that the best way to protect a life is to shoot anyone who threatens, or is perceived to threaten, a life. But police officers will tell you that they are being out-gunned by assault weapons in the streets of our cities. Does the NRA care about this? Do you really need an automatic weapon to defend yourself or shoot for sport? Of course not. Like all the other issues I have mentioned in this essay, this is a contentious point, and if the GOP can confront it, they will have to negotiate difficult solutions. I am simply throwing out some ideas. It is the job of the experts to put together a platform. I wish them luck.

photo credit: auburnxc

By Nikhil Thakur | The post Five Republican Problems: Some Friendly Advice for the G.O.P. appeared first on The Public Sphere.