And that’s where playgrounds come in. Maybe I’m getting nostalgic now that I’m closer to forty than thirty, but it seems that my childhood playground trips largely involved me hanging out with other kids, without any parental interference. In fact, I distinctly remember going to the playground by myself—without my parents—when I was about the same age as my oldest, who’s six. Granted, we lived in a small town that was mostly walkable, but the point is that I didn’t need my parents with me, guiding my every move to make sure I had a good time. In fact, it was the lack of supervision that made it fun. Going off on my own was probably good for my parents, too, since it allowed them some worriless free time away from children.

It’s not that way anymore. Going to the playground with kids involves constant supervision on the part of parents, supervision that is exhausting for all parties involved. Rather than being a place for play, where kids can get together with other kids free from the watchful eye of parental authority, the playground now largely just mirrors household organization in another space.

I observed this change this past weekend. There were, I would guess, about fifty kids at the neighborhood playground—but rather than making up games together or seeing who could get down the slide first, for the most part, they just “played” with their parents. It was an interesting, yet disconcerting scene: the members of each familial group interacting with each other, but not with anyone outside of their immediate circle.

Indeed, for the most part, the other groups present appeared to be a nuisance, intruders on the terrain of solitary, yet oddly public, family fun. The parents were, on the whole, protective, intent on establishing clear boundaries (“Be careful!,” “Watch where you’re going!,” “Slides aren’t made for climbing up!”). In response, the kids could only envision a morning governed by parental wishes (“Push me on the swing!,” “Play hide and seek with me!,” “Watch me do the monkey bars!”).

Let me be clear: I’m as guilty as the next parent, so I’m not trying to take the moral high ground here. And I’m certainly not knocking anyone who enjoys the structured back and forth of parent-child playground interaction. But I find it exhausting, and I would bet that most parents—and children—do, too.

I feel it, and I can see it on their faces. The parents, me included, rushing from one activity to the next, when all they want to do is sit on a bench for a while and have a normal conversation with another grown human being. The kids, looking for permission and approval, when they obviously would love to be left alone to do what they want, without guidance and, of course, criticism. They’d prefer, in other words, to climb the slide, without being told, “No!”

One might object that it’s important to keep an eye on things, so that no one gets hurt. It”s also important to teach children to behave properly. That’s why our kids need our constant attention, of course. Don’t misunderstand me, but it’s good for kids to get hurt now and then, and it’s good for parents to let their kids get hurt now and then. Besides, at most playgrounds, it’s virtually impossible to be seriously injured: the merry-go-rounds are now gone, all the edges are rounded, and the ground on which it all stands is akin to memory foam. There are, of course, exceptions, but exceptions should never determine the rule. As to teaching kids to behave properly, is it really that big of a deal to climb a slide?

All to say, perhaps we would all enjoy ourselves more—at the playground, but more generally as well—if we let kids be kids when and in the places they need to be kids, and parents be adults when and in the places they need to be adults. And that often involves both parties doing their separate things, without interference. Allowing that to happen is much better for the sanity of all involved, but also, I would argue, for everyone’s enjoyment.

* Photo: Children at play, from the collections of the State Library of NSW.

By Hollis Phelps | The post The New, Hard Work of Play appeared first on The Public Sphere.

The immigration crisis at the US-Mexico border is beginning to look like an episode of AMC’s widely popular drama, The Walking Dead (TWD). This year alone has seen a 500% spike in apprehension of families at the border, while it is estimated that over 57,000 unaccompanied children have been detained in fiscal year 2014. If these numbers, along with pieces such as Leni Velasco’s on the Filipino sugarcane crisis and NBC’s on Honduras’ gang-violence, are any indications of these travelers’ reality, which includes a search for place amidst hunger, danger, and dehumanization, this alarming correlation between TWD and the current immigrant exodus into the U.S. is not unwarranted.

In line with the experiences of many immigrants, TWD focuses primarily on its characters’ search for a new home and their fight to survive along the way. Although this zombie-filled show has its fair share of zombie-on-human crime, TWD is rarely about zombies, and is instead often at its best when showing the day-to-day struggle of a traveling group of survivors dealing with hunger and difficult social situations, travelers in search of a place to settle down after losing everything. At its roots, the show is a tale of desperate homelessness in a land where finding sanctuary is the hope, and the greatest impossibility.

This sense of homelessness, shared by the show’s characters and the very-real immigrants risking their lives to cross the border, is what I call dislocation: being cut off from one”s own land and the life that comes with it. Like a limb separated from its socket, with great pain, the characters become dislocated from their own homes, pasts, and often, loved ones. The show’s main character, Rick Grimes, knows that stability is important, and as the leader, his number one concern for and answer to creating such stability is to find a suitable place to live and start over, to call home. By the show’s third season, the zombies are almost an afterthought, and easily protected against. The real enemy, then, in both fiction and reality, becomes dislocation.

At one level, the threat of being dislocated from a land to call your own is simple: danger is everywhere on the road. Walkers (the show’s name for zombies) are always a threat; other hungry travelers are always trying to take what is yours; and the places you think are safe and inviting end up belonging to a horde of cannibals. If Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – another father-son tale of wilderness survival – teaches us anything, it”s that traveling post-apocalypse is perilous and unpredictable, which is why it induces so much fear among those forced to wander.

That fear, however, also operates in another register in current political rhetoric: the immigrant’s fear of landlessness is met with fear of the immigrant. This other register displaces immigrants from the place of the survivor, and paints them in the shade of the zombie. For example, Texas Governor Rick Perry sent 1,000 National Guard troops to the Texas border in early August, as if trying to eliminate a zombie threat or contain a contagion, while in 2008, former Senator Fred Thompson likened immigrants to zombielike, “ . . . suicidal maniacs [who] want to kill countless innocent men, women, and children around the world.” Also in zombie-movie fashion, Fox News ran a piece on the possibility of immigrants carrying communicable diseases, noting that some doctors fear that immigrants carry a drug-resistant strain of TB that is spreading in several counties in Texas. The immigrant, in this rhetoric, is the embodiment of an unknown menace, one that threatens the physical, moral, and economic health of America and its way of life—a rhetoric containing a dehumanizing zombification of the immigrant.

In conflicting manner, TWD embodies both this cultural fear of the immigrant and its paradigmatic tales of survival, in terms of a conservative reaction that focuses on setting humans apart from zombie-immigrants. Concerning the current immigration-crisis narrative, the characters in the show simultaneously serve as allegories for both the weary, immigrant travelers looking for new homes and for the conservative project that would keep these travelers on the other side of the wall.

TWD presents the dueling narratives of the zombification of immigrants and of control and counter-immigration particularly well. We simultaneously see a group of survivors and separatists. This conjunction is quite telling at times, especially in exposing what both groups share: a concern for land and place. Throughout the show, this concern cuts through the ambiguous division of good and evil, human and zombie. As far as the zombies are concerned, the only thing that separates them from humans is the latters’ hope of shedding vagrancy and settling down, a further reiteration that the zombies are not necessarily the enemy, but fellow travelers forced into survival against their will. Hence, the worth in calling the zombies “walkers” and “roamers”: they are creatures who wander around, look for food, and kill to survive, much like Rick and his group. Whether Rick is biting the neck off a guy to save his son, or group members are covering themselves in zombie-flesh to disguise their smell and avoid the roamers, the show often plays with the dark similarities between survivors and walkers.

The difference between the dead and the living further collapses when the group discovers everyone is infected and will inevitably turn into zombies when they die. “You KNOW that when we die,” Rick powerfully explains in Issue 24 of the comic book parallel to the show, “we become them. You think we hide behind walls to protect us from the walking dead? Don”t you get it? We ARE the walking dead! WE are the walking dead.”

The arrival at Terminus at the end of Season 4 clearly shows this lack of difference between zombie and human. Terminus is undoubtedly a colony of cannibals, representing the breakdown of the only thing that truly separates walkers from (sometimes) smarter, less flesh-hungry human walkers. Here, people eat other people, formidably bypassing the need to turn into a zombie to act like one. Terminus, which means “end destination,” suggests that cannibalism is the end point on humanity’s devolving path from people into monsters. Terminus is what it looks like to survive in the apocalypse, which means becoming more like the dislocated zombies who roam about.

Despite this dark revelation of their path to zombiehood, Rick”s group is in constant search of what sets them apart from their zombie co-inhabitants of post-apocalypse Georgia, refusing to accept that people can”t be good and live together in peace. That hope is anchored in finding a place to make a new home, a real community in a permanent place. The characters of the show are happiest and most stable when they know they have safe keep. If the most humanizing aspect of TWD is finding a place and a home and forgoing wandering around searching for food like the zombies, then it is clear why places like the prison and the town of Woodbury are so coveted.

But as we have seen, there are pitfalls to even the most stable communities, especially when their sense of community is predicated on fear of the other and on their unity in keeping everyone else out. As much as Woodbury, a protected community with heavy-handed leadership, values place, and people”s attachment to the safety and humanity it brings, it ultimately falls apart from greed, exploitation, and a failure to live with the other. Terminus also seems a stable, safe place to settle down, but the end of the fourth season revealed that it is only a static hub for weary travelers to come and become dinner. In this way, Terminus still relies upon and, literally, feeds off, transient culture.

Whether the show is telling the story of conservative walling off or immigrant survival, or both simultaneously, it is surely concerned with the effects and struggles of people looking for something more while juggling whether or not to let others, outsiders, join in that search. At many levels, TWD expresses our inner brokenness and capacity to devour those around us without concern. In the end, the show powerfully suggests the risky, yet beautiful, reality of letting others in from the outside to live and survive in the land together, a reality ironically and somewhat unevenly expressed in the prison and its farm. Here, Rick and Herschel come to realize land and place are vital to survival, which is what makes them different from the wanderers on the road, both human and dead alike.

The similarities we’ve seen between fearful humans and rootless zombies play into the viscous nature of the characters and their attempt to stay away from such violence. More precisely, I think both human and zombie remind us what we could become if we continue to act in an exclusionary way. That is, if we are unwilling to rethink our own constructed borders, we may find that we, too, are the walking dead.

By Josh Barfield | The post Roaming the Land: The Immigration Crisis and The Walking Dead appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Television documentaries such as Jump Britain have described this activity as ‘urban ballet’ given the sense of ceremony or ‘Tai-Chi’ like deliberation which comes with the performed movements. On a more realistic level, and one away from the television cameras, however, it appears as a hybridized leisure activity – incorporating elements from gymnastics and break-dancing to enable elegant and graceful movement over ‘obstacles’ found in the urban environment. Having studied a group of Parkour enthusiasts for the past couple of years in Nottingham, UK (NottsPK) I have become as intrigued by their ‘sport’ as I have been with public reactions. Because Parkour takes place mostly in urban space, it has been seen as a kind of reclaiming of the streets. Although this is undoubtedly true, it is the reclaiming of the body which I find of particular interest and the implications this has for health. Before expanding on this further though, we should take a brief historical look at how the body has been used elsewhere to construct identity.

Many socially marginalised groups have positively employed the phrase, ‘The personal is political’ for celebrating their identities. Within sections of the gay community this is best exemplified in the ‘hanky code’ whereby different coloured bandanas signal individual sexual preferences and interests. Encoding sexual activities enables conversations to develop in which they are ‘talking’ rather than ‘listening’. I see this as a political act,  taking control of your own identity. The resulting sense of self is visual and proud and, in its defiant construction around sex, celebrates [and subverts] a common prejudice used to marginalise gay men.

Similarly the feminist movement in the early 1970s attempted to reclaim ownership of the body through the politics of abortion, ‘access’ and diet. Taking control of the body and using it as a boundary enabled a certain level of self-control, particularly in relation to identity.

By this logic, voluntary mistreatment of the body must also be thought of as political and personal expression. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the MTV spin off show Jackass. (1996 – ) The programme revolves around a group of men recording a series of humiliating and dangerous pranks on camcorder such as BMX jousting, shark hugging or being shot at. The group leader, Johnny Knoxsville, warns with subtle irony ‘Do not try this at home.’ This bodily mistreatment clearly struck a chord with the public as Jackass: The Movie (2002) grossed US $64 million.

While Jackass may be read as another example of the ‘levelling-down’ process, an analysis of the body in Jackass provides an alternative explanation. Using the body as a cultural text, self harm and mutilation give material expressions to certain cultural anxieties, like the supposed ‘crisis of masculinity,’ and are a basic inversion of the destructive machismo which epitomised 1980s classics such as the Rambo and Rocky films. Both explanations are plausible, but Jackass also entails a rational assessment of risk. As people encounter greater daily intervention into their lives from bureaucratic forms of governance, such as ‘health and safety’ legislation and the whole ‘culture of blame’ which this has created, the message of Jackass is simple:  This is my body and it is the one thing which you can’t control, so sit back and watch me smash bottles over my head and fire nails into my arse.

I situate Parkour within this tradition of bodily empowerment and as a more nuanced reaction to similar anxieties. In Jackass the body is treated with contempt, as something expendable, which could be seen as indicative of a wasteful capitalist modernity. In Le Parkour we see an inversion of these values so that self-preservation, finesse and agility are favoured. The goal is to move as fluidly between objects with the minimum of fuss and hopefully no injury. Through this experience a kind of oneness is achieved with the body, mind and environment.

Le Parkour can be thought of as an urban philosophy as it has a clearly defined manifesto but rather than having one specific ideology, it is formed out of multiple narratives drawn from a wide range of influences such as fantasies, escapism, cult icons, films, books, comics etc. It also extends into philosophies of self-improvement and self-awareness drawn from both the West and the East. In many ways this is emblematic of many new forms of modern identity which have grown out of internet forums and chat rooms; thus Parkour as philosophy is a kind of cultural sponge which is able to absorb information and influences without ever losing its shape.

This is possible because Parkour centres around emotive rather than factual language and thereby opens itself to interpretation and play e.g. one word which pops up more than others is ‘fluidity’, which itself implies the ability to change and transform smoothly. For fluidity to be achieved, participants must overcome four obstacles: mental, social, martial and family.

The mental obstacle – and perhaps the most difficult of them all – entails conquering your fears and gaining the necessary mental strength and confidence to make a particular jump. As different movements vary in complexity and risk so too the rate at which strength and confidence are perfected depends individually. Working together as part of a large cooperative helps as each group member is able to guide and reassure the other. When one member performs a particularly risky jump it then motivates another to try.

Overcoming mental obstacles leads to a certain degree of confidence arguably will translate into other areas of personal life. It is for this reason that Le Parkour can be seen as a philosophy of self-help and realization. The underlying message is if you can make a jump which seemed impossible, what is to stop you from sorting out emotional and mental problems in other areas of your life.

It should be noted that some movements are clearly built upon physical agility and power and therefore easier for older, taller and more disciplined bodies to achieve. Self- confidence in itself is not enough. But the fact that you are able to realise these limitations of your own volition is important as it is only by emotionally relating to something that we are able to fully comprehend it. Far too often in life restrictions are imposed on people without allowing them to discover for themselves. It is perhaps for this reason that Parkour enthusiasts on forums such as Urban Freeflow, turn to the wisdom of movie idols such as Bruce Lee. ‘If you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits.’

Le Parkour is described as ‘the way’ on the UF website, which suggests that it is a particular way of perceiving reality. While Parkour’s ideologies are influenced by films such as The Matrix (1999) these may also have had a physical influence as well. One thing which The Matrix, comic super heroe’s such as Batman and Spiderman, and computer games all have in common is that the characters can do super human things with their bodies as they swing and fly through the metropolis. Technology has been criticised for creating inertia, obesity and an artificiality in everyday human existence. Yet could it not be the case that engaging in such fantasies has inspired individuals to redefine and expand the limits of human potential? Le Parkour in trying to overcome mental objects and achieve seemingly impossible movements seeks to reverse the potentially negative effect of technology while heightening human experience and the body in the process.

As Le Parkour is performed in public space, individuals must be prepared to overcome certain social obstacles or stigmas such as people staring, pointing, ridiculing etc. In letting go of inhibitions and ignoring negative comments by passersby (who are rare I should point out) can lead to more confidence in other areas of life. However, in my experience it is the observers rather than the participants who go through the real anxiety. On numerous occasions I’ve seen people try to coerce one of them down from a wall because they might injure themselves only to be shocked when they exit with such panache.

Martial obstacles come in the form of authority figures who move participants on because they’ll ‘cause damage’ or are unwittingly on ‘private property’. As frustrating as this may be, the group I studied never argued back or were rude. Arguing with authority figures who weren’t listening because they were ‘just doing their job’ was seen as a waste of time and stopped them from doing what they were here to do. It was easier to just move somewhere different.

Contemporary sub-cultures like Le Parkour are often described in terms of moral decay whereby social regulation has broken down, metanarratives have crumbled, and youth have been left to run wild. But Le Parkour clearly refutes such claims. In explaining their ‘art’ to law enforcement agencies, they are learning to reason. They are also learning humility, tolerance, and understanding, thereby re-embedding a sense of order in a supposedly atomised and increasingly fragmented society. Indeed, they are actively encouraged to show concessions towards authority figures in arguments over space as in effect they are ambassadors for this relatively new discipline. Failure to be civil could lead to the activity being banned in certain areas and thereby ruining it for other enthusiasts.

Perhaps the most formidable of hurdles to overcome is the negative attitude of relatives, in particular parents. This can be intensified by negative representation in the media which tend to favour the more extreme aspects of the discipline rather than the more everyday practise that I witnessed. But you only need to watch this group of kids working with each other to realise that everything is calculated risk and clearly well thought out and planned before anything serious is attempted. Similarly, there are endless videos and training advice on the UF website. As one member of the group once pointed out to me, ‘my mum’s just glad I’m not doing drugs or getting’ in fights’.

The ability to persuade loved ones to trust and support the decisions you make with your life helps to develop communication and reasoning skills which will spread into all areas of lived experience. These may seem like a new set of values but really all recreational activities, in particular sports, promote a certain degree of friendship, fair play, respect, team work, problem solving etc. However what differentiates this urban sport from more traditional sports is that it is built around cooperation rather than competition.

Risk clearly has an important role to play in Le Parkour as it has to be managed to minimise injury and courted to fully enjoy the extreme experience. But what it really offers participants is the opportunity to draw a thick line between life and death. There are many false or thin risks in modernity which have made death appear ubiquitous: killer bugs in hospitals, terrorism, GM and processed food, overzealous health and safety intervention, etc. The list is endless – but such ‘risks’ make everything seem to be a potential danger.

Le Parkour reacts against this gross and perhaps inevitable trivialisation of knowledge. The constant intervention by the state and its systems ‘for our own good’ (and often it is), has meant alternative forms of expression and self diagnosis have emerged. As history has proven time and time again, how we use our body and the boundaries it enables us to make are as integral to our mental and physical health as they are to our identity.

By James K. Walker | The post Le Parkour: The Body as Politics appeared first on The Public Sphere.

I did not have a lot of opportunities to “return.”  My parents did not go back so often that my siblings or I would be able to accompany them.  When they did go back, the cost of a trans-Pacific trip was too prohibitive for my sister, brother, or me to be able to join them.  My brother was the first of my siblings to visit the Philippines, and he went with Dad after his sophomore year in high school.  He had a great time meeting our relatives but complained about having been a feast for the mosquitoes there.  After they returned, I told Mom and my sister that someday we would have to make a girls’ trip to the Philippines as this was only fair.  At that moment, my brother became one of “them,” someone who had “been back,” and I admit that I envied him.

I used to feel this interminable divide between Filipino-Americans like me who were born in the United States and Filipino-Americans who immigrated mostly as small children with their parents to the United States.  I often wondered if they were somehow superior Filipinos, and that they were somehow culturally predisposed to be more proficient in Tagalog and have an undiscerning taste for Filipino cuisine, no matter what ingredients and strange animal parts were involved.  Being U.S.-born, I felt that there was some ineffable, missing element that made me more of a poseur than a “real” Filipino-American.  In fact, for a time, I insisted on identifying myself as just “American” because I was born in the United States and did not see the point of placing my parents’ national origin in my own ethnic identification.  I also saw the label “Filipino-American” as something of a lie – how could I dare to label myself with a country I have never seen with my own eyes?

As originally planned, we Espineli women finally set off on our own Philippine journey on June 7, 2007 with the intention to canvass a selection of its thousands of islands in a scant two weeks.  Like some kind of strange time warp across the International Date Line, Mom, my sister Lauren, and I left Los Angeles for Manila in the early evening of a Thursday and arrived in Manila early Saturday morning.  The sixteen-hour plane ride was punctuated with many hot meals – an unexpected treat given the fact that all U.S. domestic plane trips no longer serve meals.  The hot meals were Filipino dishes which helped make it all the more real that we were finally going to visit our parents’ home country.   I remember feeling nervous about meeting my large extended family and wondering what they will think of us.  Mom is the fifth of nine children, so we had plenty of aunts, uncles, and cousins to meet.  Dad only had three siblings, all of whom are now in the United States, but his uncle had eleven children and his aunt had sixteen. So this makes for many more cousins, many of whom are scattered around the world (such as in Norway).

As per usual, Lauren and I procrastinated about packing, and we each ended up each packing a huge suitcase, a decision we regretted as soon as we landed.  In addition to all of our suitcases, we had a huge cardboard box, filled with gifts and supplies for relatives.  If you have ever passed the Philippine Airlines counter in the international terminal, you have probably seen many passengers waiting to check in huge cardboard boxes called Balikbayan ((“Balikbayan” literally means “returnee” or someone coming home after an extended stay.)) boxes.   These boxes are a long-standing tradition which also adds to the cost of a trip to the Philippines – because you can’t just go there empty-handed.  We brought old clothes, little gifts and souvenirs as well as foodstuffs like instant coffee, corned beef, and Coffeemate that are very expensive and hard to come by in the Philippines.

As we deplaned and made our way to the baggage claim, we felt the profound humidity engulf us as we tried to find our bearings.  So this was what the tropics really felt like.  Our first trip to the bathroom was an experience!  We had to tip someone in the bathroom when we finished using the facilities…the last time I encountered this was going to the bathroom at a nice hotel so it was a bit unexpected in an airport.  Thankfully, we had been warned in advance to bring our own toilet paper as this convenience is very much a Western one.  As soon as we gathered all of our luggage, we needed to find our connecting flight to Tacloban.  Our first stop on our journey was to go to Mom’s hometown of Calbayog on the island of Samar.  Samar is part of the middle region of the Philippines known as the Visayas.

As we dipped beneath the thin layer of clouds, we got our first peek at the lush greenery that awaited us.  I had seen some photos of Mom’s hometown but they were mostly of people and of buildings so my imagination forgot to fill in the fact that it was enclosed by all of this amazing nature!  I wondered why my mother never mentioned this…then again, it was probably something she saw as normal and not something worth pointing out to us.

Fortunately, we got help in acclimating to our new environment.  Our uncle Tito Ecot (Mom’s brother-in-law) and our cousin Francis met us at the airport in Tacloban.  Tacloban is on the island of Leyte and is best-known for being the humble birthplace of Imelda Marcos – this was a factoid with which we were immediately supplied.  Tito Ecot and Francis hired a van for the day to pick us and our luggage up since it was a five-hour trip by car to Calbayog.  I think that our luggage outweighed us so this was good planning.  Tito Ecot warned us that it would be a bumpy road, but that was an understatement.  The potholes in some places were so deep that the driver would drive on the dirt shoulders which were actually smoother than the roads themselves.  We were amazed that this was the main highway of Samar!  When we asked why the roads were in such a state, Mom explained that due to political corruption, the funds for public works were siphoned off to more personal interests.  This got me to thinking about how much I took for granted in the United States.  Despite the frequent potholes I encounter in the Boston area, I don’t complain about them anymore.  Having a road in good repair is not a right but a privilege in my mother’s home province.

When I asked about whether they would ever do any repair on the road, my uncle and cousin laughed.  They explained that the road had been and would always be dangerous to travel and that they avoided taking this route when possible.  Our cousin Francis also mentioned that there was a possibility that Calbayog’s airport would soon offer flights to and from Manila (it does today).  It was great to see Francis, having only known him through photos and relatives’ stories.  I knew he was a little older than me and that he and his twin brother Terrence were both married with kids.  I looked forward to connecting with him and all of our cousins.  I could not help but wonder what we would talk about, if we had any interests in common, and what they would think of me and Lauren and our American ways.  It was a nice surprise to discover that he had so much to share with us about the Philippines, including local attractions and historic sites that he wanted us to see.

Before we started out on our treacherous five-hour journey to our relatives’ hometown, Calbayog, we took a quick trip to a nearby monument.  General MacArthur’s words, “I shall return,” was one of the few tidbits I remembered learning about the Philippines in my high school world history class.  It was a surprise for Lauren and me to learn that we could go to the exact spot where General MacArthur had indeed returned with forces to liberate the Philippines at the end of World War II.   The monument’s statues of MacArthur and his officers looked to me like performance artists standing in water.  It was meant to duplicate how MacArthur and his men waded through the Pacific waters to return to the Philippine shores marking the fulfillment of his promise of his famous words.

Just as I had once felt awe standing  in front of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris where so much of the history of that city had taken place, I felt chills about what a momentous occasion this moment was for both the United States and the Philippines that had only happened 63 years previously.   Now here were my sister and me, making our way to the country that our parents left behind to pursue a brighter future in the United States.  Would they have left the Philippines behind had MacArthur not returned as promised?  The Philippines would never be the same and still struggles with the repercussions of that moment today.  Gone were its Japanese oppressors and in came the democratic saviors.  But at what cost?  Did the United States seduce the Philippines with so much of its culture and language that we first-generation Filipino-Americans feel even more of a disconnect between our ethnic origins than other first-generation Asian-Americans?  I couldn’t help but think of all of the implications that MacArthur’s return had for both the Philippines’ destiny as well as my own.

We crossed a bridge connecting Leyte to the island of Samar, and I was blown away by this island of palm trees.  It looked completely untouched by human hands as the palms grew thick and wild to the very ends of its shores.  How many islands were there like that in this archipelago of thousands?  In crossing this bridge, it made me think of the threshold I waited for so long to cross – to be one of those Filipino-Americans who have been “back.”  Of course, I did not feel any differently, but I knew that thereafter, I would never be the same.

(Sheila Espineli’s travels in the Philippines will be continued in a later issue)

By Sheila Espineli | The post My So-Called Asian Identity: I Shall Go: In Search of My Filipina Roots appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Describing the Spanish that we used as “broken” is like saying water is wet. Our mangled word pronunciation, notoriously bungled syntax, and grammatical non-sequiturs were linguistic train wrecks in the making every other second that we opened our mouths to “articulate” our breathlessly pidgin Spanish. In contrast, Nona and her adult children spoke a sturdy and grammatically flawless Spanish. So all things considered, our grandmother had a world of patience for the linguistic disasters that we sent crashing her way during our everyday conversations with her.

There was one exception. In Peru, the term for grandmother is “mamavieja,” an affectionate if rather formal compound title comprising four syllables that translates into “Old Mother.” My older brother by nine years and his contemporary cousins enunciate this word perfectly. Alas, “mamavieja” was at least three if not four syllables too long for us latter born “americanos” to ever come within a Peruvian kilometer of pronouncing even semi-correctly.

So here our grandmother, one of the most practical people I have ever known, intervened at a point in time before I myself was out of diapers and drew the line with the then present and all future grandchildren. “Nona,” which means grandmother in French and other cultures, was so comparatively easy to say that not even we could blow the pronunciation. So “Nona” her title would be, and “Nona”she always was to us, even after her death in 2002.

Being that my grandparents lived with my mom, my brothers, and me, in an extended family household until I turned sixteen, Nona played a towering role in the world that I grew up in. Because my mom worked the night shift during my early grade school years, Nona was the one who got me up for school in the morning, and Nona was the one who waited for me when I ambled home from school, as my mom got in what rest she could before she would be off again to her night time job.

Nona was old school strict and old world tough.  She grew up in the 1920s on a wind swept and isolated mountain ranch located in the nether reaches of the northern Peruvian Andes far above Peru’s second largest city of Trujillo.   The glorified hamlet of about 150 people that was her ancestral hometown carried a Quechua name, Paranday.   Paranady in the 1920s more closely resembled say, Fargo, North Dakota circa 1890 than the relatively antiseptic 1980s era California surroundings that I walked out to every time I left the family house.   In fact, Paranday was so geographically and technologically shut off from the rest of the country that its entire location, along with all of the surrounding mountain ranches like Nona’s, were completely inaccessible by car until after 1981, nearly sixty five years after Nona was born.  Until that year any hardy soul trying to reach Paranday from the nearest sizeable population center had to do so Old Testament style, traveling twelve hours by donkey just to make it to the town limits.

Nona’s upbringing was forged in the crucible of this frontier like environment.   She grew up living a utilitarian and hard-scrabble life that put iron in her blood.   Six of the seven children she gave birth to were born right on the ranch she grew up in, without the benefit of epidurals or any other kind of modern anesthetic.   All things considered it is safe to say that Nona brought her frontier values with her everywhere she went and this was as true in how she raised me as it was for anything else. One thing that meant was nothing ever went to waste. Let me repeat: Nothing. Wasted. Ever.

This was most especially true in the area of food. Nona”s rural upbringing, which meant she was intimately familiar with the back breaking manual labor involved in cultivating agricultural products, and Nona”s legendary cooking wizardry in preparing her home-cooked meals, combined to form in Nona”s heart an exalted appreciation for the sanctity of food. Thus, for Nona, throwing away food was akin to an insult against God’s benevolence and an affront to the starving Ethiopian children depicted in what at the time felt like an infinite loop of World Vision television commercials.

In my early grade school years I was often Nona’s captive audience for one of her home-cooked meals. Ever faithful to her Spartan values and rural heritage, Nona naturally considered me morally obligated to eat all of the food she served on my plate. This stayed true even if the designated meal-time consequently tumbled into an overtime period of interminable length because of my passive resistance to what I then considered Nona”s culinary tyranny.

Those endless meal times often devolved into a test of wits between Nona and I. However, school morning breakfasts were especially perilous for my second-grade self because Nona insisted on serving me a daily bowl of Quaker Oats oatmeal, and there was a school bus to catch, so I was up against a clock, in addition to Nona’s formidable resolve.  Now, Nona always mispronounced this non-Spanish word for oatmeal as “Quack—errr”, dutifully left out the Oats part, and she saw it as her For example, if your company is a manufacturer, it will be important to use the coming from sensors to monitor the purity of chemicals being mixed in the production process. grandmotherly duty to make me ingest this particular kind of breakfast meal down to the last soggy oat. As for me, I was just as determined not to. In fact I felt I had a sacred responsibility to my kid palate not to drink the despised Quack–errr to anything like the bottom part of the bowl, where all the doomed soggy oats submerged to rest in watery oblivion.

However, I could not argue this point with Nona directly. I never did, as I had been raised not to. At this particular point in my family”s immigrant experience the rules were so strict that young children could never for any reason so much as say the word “No” to any responsible adult. So despite my kid”s eye view of the tragic injustice involved, no way and no how was I going to start the soundtrack of “No” with Nona around the consumption of Quack–errr.

Instead I employed subterfuge and tactical misdirection wrapped up in a metaphorical falafel of non-violent resistance. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organized historic sit-ins for racial integration. John Lennon choreographed a televised 1969 bed-in for peace. And at age seven I began staging spoon-ins for escaping the de facto jail that Nona”s kitchen table was to me.

You may ask, what was a “spoon-in”? While Nona watched (or more accurately stated, pretended not to watch) me “finish” my breakfast from the business side of the kitchen (where the oven was), I dramatically and repeatedly buried my spoon deeply into the tilted bowl and pretended to scoop out every one of the surviving oats to eat them all, and thus in Nona”s eyes justify my getting off the kitchen table. My goal was to sustain my spoon-in pantomime just convincingly and long enough so that Nona would soon be distracted by a phone call or a bathroom break or some other minor miracle that would result in me being outside her line of sight. This in turn would allow me to jog sight unseen to the kitchen sink and flush the offending Quack-errr oats down the drain before Nona would be the wiser.

My spoon-ins were occasionally successful but in truth, Nona usually achieved her goal of making me eat everything she set on my plate.   She could and often would wait me out my spoon-ins because right after breakfast she walked me straight to the school bus stop.  Even at age seven I knew the school bus waited on no one, not even anti-Quack-err kid crusaders like myself.  And seeing as how Nona physically stood in the middle of the only possible route to the kitchen sink, unless Nona was distracted or otherwise called away from her ambush spot, my spoon-ins were doomed to fail.   Of course, the quiet irony is that at this current point in my life I would gladly trade any number of material things in exchange for being able to again taste any and every part of Nona”s cooking and to hear, even if only one more time, the soft grandmotherly laugh that she would so often share with me at the beginning of our meal times together.

Nona had a wonderful meal time laugh, I assure you.  Her laugh was vibrant, infectious, and carried within in it a love of life that found its original expression in Paranday and brought its resilience and generosity to my little childhood corner of Pasadena.    No matter where I am, I can hear its echo in my memory and know how blessed a grandkid I am to have had her in my life.   Nona’s laugh was graceful, loving, and communicated the elemental essence of who she was, how she lived, and where her truest treasure could be found.

By Cesar Gomez | The post Becoming Nona: Memories of a Grandmother appeared first on The Public Sphere.

All the while I ask myself: what is a large eye? A small eye? What is a normal sized eye?

Two hundred years ago, a young Austrian medical student found himself with the same question. He was struggling in school, and he was jealous of those among his class who so easily excelled at memorization. In interminable lectures he watched these men trying to figure out what made them different from him, why it was so easy for them to remember and so difficult for him.

It was the eyes, he decided. They all seemed to have larger eyes.

This young medical student was Franz-Joseph Gall, and this simple, odd insight would within two decades bloom into an unstoppable cultural force. Convinced of this causal connection, Gall began to look for other correlations between mental attributes and physical appearance. “Proceeding from reflection to reflection,” he would later write, “from observation to observation, it occurred to me that, if memory were made evident by external signs, it might be so likewise with other talents or intellectual faculties.” Gall set out looking for other correspondences between physical appearance and personality, and from then on, “all the individuals who were distinguished by any quality or faculty, became the object of my special attention, and of systematic study as to the form of the head.”

Gall’s obsession drove him to search for a visible means of discovering the brain’s secrets: a process he called “cranioscopy”—what became colloquially known as “bump reading” and what his pupil Johann Spurzheim would rechristen “phrenology.” It was predicated on a few simple principles. First, Gall theorized that, all other things being equal, size determines propensity: A bigger brain implies a higher capacity for intelligence. This was, Gall asserted, equally true of different parts of the brain—if the segment of the brain devoted to memory was larger in one individual than in another, then it stood to reason that the former would have a higher capacity for memory. Second, it was well known that the skull, like all bones, is initially malleable upon birth, only gradually becoming more rigid. So it stood to reason, Gall theorized, that the ridges and folds of the brain might imprint themselves on the bone when it was still pliable and that one could come to know the brain by understanding these imprints. From this apparent insight Gall began to explore the possibility that the brain’s workings might be made visible by the patterns it made on the skull. Each part of the skull became assigned a different aspect of personality—mirthfulness in the temples, sexual propensity at the base of the skull, and so on. With precise measurements of the size of each of these areas, Gall theorized, you could develop an entire picture of an individual’s character.

One’s identity, in other words, was written in the bumps of one’s head.

The rest of the story of phrenology is well known enough: blossoming into full scale quackery, it became a juggernaut of an industry unto itself, even as it was more and more discredited by legitimate science. By the twentieth century it was all but abandoned, but in the nineteenth century it was perhaps the most popular mode of understanding the human brain. In his preface to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman proclaimed, “the anatomist chemist astronomer geologist phrenologist spiritualist mathematician historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.” It seems odd that the one profession on this list that actually purports to deal with who we are, why we’re motivated to do what we do, and how we define ourselves, is the one profession that seems so startlingly out of place nowadays. But it makes some sense that the rest of the disciplines on Whitman’s list are hard sciences, since phrenology presents itself as the hard science of the mind, a system of objective measurements and offers, in its own way, a certain amount of rigor. Phrenology has none of the messiness of psychoanalysis or modern therapy; the phrenologist doesn’t care about your dreams, needs no narratives about your past, your abusive parents, your failed aspirations. Everything the phrenologist needs is right there, laid out in a perfect, analytic grid. Your mind revealed in the same topographic language the lexicographer would use.

For all the ridiculousness of such a premise, there is a simple elegance in such a map of identity, where everything is so neatly arranged, so perfectly knowable. I’m not the only one who’s drawn to the trappings of Gall’s pseudoscience—lately, phrenology charts have popped up everywhere, from CD covers to bicycle helmets. They’re a graphic designer’s dream: iconic, ironic, eye-catching, nostalgic. But as much as layout artists may fetishize Gall’s chart nowadays, no one is eager to revisit the science. I’m not bothered that phrenology—with its dubious method and explicit racism, sexism, and all the rest—has disappeared. Good riddance. But what intrigues me is that such a ubiquitous measure of personality has literally disappeared off the face of the earth in less than a century. Compare the number of people who can read Egyptian hieroglyphs or ancient Greek to the number of practicing phrenologists—there are dead languages and there are dead languages, and the language of phrenology is about as dead as it gets.

And this is where my problem begins. For the past year, I’ve been trying to teach myself phrenology, this now-dead art.  At first I assumed this would be a fairly easy task, far easier than reconstructing Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone. After all, the relics of phrenology are visible everywhere; libraries and online resources still preserve the literature. It’s everywhere in popular memory—the pseudoscience to end all pseudosciences, the template for every self-help scheme from The Secret to the Master Cleanse. How hard could it be to learn it?

It was easy enough to track down what I thought would have been the Holy Grail: Lorenzo Fowler’s “Self-Instructor in phrenology.” Lorenzo and his brother Orson did far more to popularize phrenology in the United States than anyone else, selling their now-iconic busts and performing thousands of readings out of their New York headquarters. The title says it all; who needs phrenological experts, when the book promises to let you teach yourself?

“To TEACH LEARNERS those organic conditions which indicate character is the first object of this manual,” the preface boldly proclaims. “And to render it accessible to all, it condenses facts and conditions, rather than elaborates arguments because to expound Phrenology is its highest proof states laws and results, and leaves them upon their naked merits; embodies recent discoveries, and crowds into the fewest words and pages just what learners need to know, and hence requires to be STUDIED rather than merely read. ‘Short, yet clear,’ is its motto. Its analysis of the faculties and numerous engravings embody the results of the very extensive observation and experience of the Authors.”

The library copy I acquired, an original from 1850, even has its first owner’s chart, filled out by Lorenzo Fowler himself, with each region given a number on a scale from 1 to 7. His pencil marks faint but still visible; I found myself wondering what a graphologist would make of them. But as tantalizing as Lorenzo’s presence in these pages is, it is also the problem: the book’s owner did not phrenologize himself. As the preface goes on to explain, the actual work is done by the examiner, in this case, Fowler: “The examiner will mark the power, absolute and relative, of each function and faculty, by placing a figure, dot, or dash on a line with the name of the organ marked, and in the column headed ‘large,’ or ‘small,’ according to the size of the organ marked, while the printed figure in the square thus marked refers to those pages in the book where, under the head ‘large,’ ‘small,’ etc., will be found description of the character of the one examined in respect to that organ….”

This is the problem—the Fowlers don’t teach you how to read heads, they teach you how to interpret their readings. And the bust they sold is great for learning where the various propensities of Amativeness, Philoprogenitiveness, Adhesiveness, Inhabitiveness, Alimentiveness, and all the rest are located, but it’s useless for separating a “3” from a “4.” You still need a phrenologist, one who knows how to classify the size of each bump.

In all the phrenological literature I’ve scoured, there’s not one description of bump size in objective terms, no measurements that can be applied to a contemporary head. How does one even objectively measure such bumps? In centimeters? In degrees? What is the “normal” shape of the head, from which one could single out a noteworthy bump? Once proprietary trade secrets, now these secrets of identity are likely lost for good. As with any dying language, without a living community practicing phrenology, its mysteries have disappeared from the storehouse of knowledge.

So I spend my time trying to reconstruct this data, taking my measurements, looking for enough statistical data to form a working knowledge of an elusive “average” by which to judge the remainder of humanity. Not unlike the work of the Egyptologist, there’s an archeological aspect to this work, a reconstitution of a forgotten discourse.  I have no dreams of spreading the bump-reading gospel. The question for me has never been: how do we resurrect phrenology? Rather, the question is: what does it say about our ideas of identity when a “science” (however dubious) can go from such importance to the dustbin of history, in such a short space of time? The disappearance of phrenology suggests that the study of identity isn’t like biology—it doesn’t necessarily move inexorably forward, building on past discoveries. Each age has its own ideas about identity, and its truths are always in flux.

By Colin Dickey | The post Bumps: Confessions of an Amateur Phrenologist appeared first on The Public Sphere.

“Remember Mortimer, there are no small actors. Only small parts.” — from the play, “The Fantasticks” (end of Act 1)

Much to my parents’ and black community’s surprise, I found friends among my peers in my private, predominately white elementary school. That’s fine for children, said some of the elders at my black Pentecostal church. For even before the civil war, white children played with the black slave children, they would say. However, these elders would say in hushed tones, once the children became of age, those friendships were impossible. And so it will be with you, the elders said, as I came of age in the early 1980s. Some boundaries, the elders said, are impossible to cross.

In college, some of my roommates who shared my theologically conservative upbringing were skeptical about my secular peers, especially my friends who were neo-atheists, and, in come cases, Wiccan wannabees. My conservative friends were fine with having relationships with “non-believers,” as long as I was trying to convert them to Christianity. Other than that, my religious friends said, these relationships were impossible and would eventually fade once the superficial boundaries of dormitories and classes ended with graduation. Some boundaries, my friends said in quiet, prayerful tones, are impossible to cross.

Much to my delight, while having dinner with two college friends in the early 1990s, we realized that our friendship had lasted more than ten years. We marveled at how our college-era acquaintanceship had evolved into lasting friendships. We were from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, and all of us had grown up in communities that cautioned us against alliances with the communities that we each represented. During that dinner, we talked about how we were able to cross the impenetrable boundaries that we had been raised with, the fences that were supposed to keep us within communities often defined more by who we were not than who we happened to be.

At first, we thought we had been friends because we were able to forgive each other. We had other close friends in college, some of whom we assumed we’d be friends with for the rest of our lives. However, disagreements, busyness, distance and shifts in ideology ended many of those relationships. Despite our ability to forgive each other for various clashes, this did not seem to define why we had managed to remain friends into adulthood.

Perhaps we were friends because the world had changed so much that the boundaries of our childhood were no longer applicable. Those ethnic and class boundaries that once confined us to a station in life were now looser. A shared college degree from the same institution also leveled our playing field. We found that we had arrived on the doorstep to adulthood with more baggage from college than from childhood. Perhaps we were surprised at how four years at the same institution created new bonds that now redefined our communities of origin. The old fences of ethnicity and religion still mattered; however, four years in the same place created new alliances and boundaries.

And in the new communities formed by this common experience of college, we discovered that we as a group of friends shared something that barely registered in today’s multicultural discussion. This “something” is probably what gave us that additional comfort level with each other. The best way I can describe this “something” is that my friends and I all come from ethnic and religious communities that had once been on someone’s list for being wiped from the face of the earth. Now, this aspect of our identity is not the kind of thing you introduce yourself with; hello, my great grandparents were once forcibly detained in some manner (concentration camp, reservation, ghetto, sexual, ethnic or religious discrimination laws, immigration status designations) for some difference deemed dangerous by the majority culture. Although these nineteenth and twentieth-century atrocities are rarely discussed in polite company, even among Jews, African Americans, and Native Americans, this legacy of oppression still defines these communities. These narratives of communal and shared oppression are often talked about among close family members and friends. The stories of pain are spoken in whispers over dinner and drinks, often while reflecting on the latest news of some genocide, somewhere in the world. Our whispers tell stories where our family members were not the main characters, but the secondary, unnamed cast members, the corp, the nameless masses, the expendable people who were not important to some oppressor’s major plot point. And this aspect of our identity as the secondary character in someone else’s story of glory and power is a powerful moniker.  For the lack of a better metaphor, this aspect of our identity as someone else’s minor character is like being the doomed “Red Shirt” character in a popular television series.

The Red Shirt character is a colloquial reference among fans of a 1960s era television science fiction program. In Star Trek’s opening scenes, two or three of the lead characters (often wearing yellow or blue uniforms) would land on a planet, accompanied by one or two characters wearing red uniforms. Within the first ten minutes of the show, generally someone wearing a red uniform died, and her or his demise introduced the central conflict of the episode’s plot. So, at the beginning of the episode, if someone appeared in a red shirt, you knew that this person, no matter how likeable, competent, or regardless of how much this character connected for the moment with the yellow and blue uniformed lead characters (often the stars of the show), this Red Shirt was toast.

When I first walked into my private, white religious school as a sixth grader, an African American from the inner city, my classmates probably looked at me with a mixture of shock and pity. They had designated me a Red Shirt in their meta-narrative of their educational experience which was suppose to result in a high school diploma, the gateway to college, business or some kind of suburban success. This suburban success would elude me, the new black kid, because, I was slated to eventually suffer some kind of fate early in the narrative of our shared school experience. This new black kid, they might have thought, is probably a nice person, but the poor girl is doomed. She’s probably a future welfare mom, I imagined people would think, or, perhaps they thought I would become a member of the service industry that would help cater to someone’s suburban success. I remember being treated politely, but eventually, people stopped reacting to me at all. I became invisible; maybe my expected short and irrelevant existence was too much to bear. As a Red Shirt, I could not be an equal in a community where the white children were groomed for the leadership and privilege that no minor character could acquire. My presence was merely to be a prop, or a token of their kindness. Eventually, for the convenience of the plot, I would be dismissed, either in actuality or existentially through being ignored and rendered invisible. I suppose this is much better than being wiped off the face of the earth. Then again, there is not much difference. Either way, I was being removed from the plot.

Perhaps the warnings about crossing boundaries to make friends came from the reality that if you are the designated Red Shirt in someone’s narrative, the initial camaraderie could quickly devolve into the experience of genocide on a personal or communal level. The warnings were quite accurate, and there was wisdom in not becoming too comfortable with your friends until you understand where you fit into someone else’s narrative. Being a Red Shirt created insanity, psychosis, neurosis, paranoia, addictive behaviors, all related to the strangeness of knowing that you are the extra, easily disposable character, in someone else’s epic narrative. It’s probably why so many marginalized people end up being designated the “crazy” Red Shirt person. As part of the elimination process, the crazy Red Shirt person is blamed for their own negation, thus relieving the main characters of guilt and insuring their roles as heroes in their own meta-narratives.

So, in an effort to find true friends and avoid insanity, I heeded the warnings, I made friends cautiously, and tried to live out my own meta-narrative where I was the lead character and conquering hero. I had not planned on the narrative’s transformation. The change started after college in the 1990s, when my Red Shirt status expired and was replaced with a new narrative shaped by the shared experience at an institution that treated me not like a minor character, but as an equal with my peers. My new uniform after graduation was not red. I was no longer the character whose demise was required by the plot of the larger narrative. I had become a productive member of society with a college degree and thus no longer a threat to the meta-narrative of US culture…sort of.

While I enjoyed this new narrative status, I found that most of my friends felt similar about their former Red Shirt status. The Red Shirt status crosses ethnic, religious, and gender boundaries, as was also the case with the science fiction show. I remember taking comfort that it was not always the black character who died in the first ten minutes, but it was the Red Shirt character, who might be a man or woman, or a black or white or Asian character. The Red Shirt status of non-existence was an equal opportunity position.

For my friends (whom I have known for almost 25 years), this former Red Shirt identity was often a coat that hid our original ethnic and religious attributes. For some, the assimilation process was adopted in an effort to stay off the Red Shirt list. For others, assimilation was adopted as part of living out our own personal meta-narrative while ignoring the majority culture’s efforts to assign us to the role of the doomed Red Shirt (like, for example, attending college and gaining access to networks of privilege). I found that beneath the surface of my friend’s skin lurked Catholic guilt, habits honed in former British colonies, a hidden ability to dance rhythmically shaped by a Celtic heritage, or perhaps a secret and unexpressed taste for kugel, bratwurst, and kimchi.

I vacillated between the paranoia of being someone else’s minor character in their major culture epic narrative and my new found identity outside of my previous Red Shirt status. As I grow older as an African American, I must not forget my Red Shirt reality, that in someone else’s meta narrative, I am not suppose to exist. I must hang onto the sane part of my paranoia as a reminder that someone’s meta-narrative once required my demise. This paranoia is not needed to keep me safe from false friends or tokenism anymore. What I hope is that by remembering my former Red Shirt status, I won’t absentmindedly write my own meta-narrative that assigns the role of the Red Shirt to some kind, jovial, and unsuspecting person out of convenience or in a delusionary attempt at some kind of suburban nirvana.

By Valerie Bailey | The post Of Red Shirts: The Saga of the Minor Character in Someone Else’s Epic 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.

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.

Imagine my surprise when the movie turned out to be brilliant. Brilliant, note—not enjoyable. The cinematography was fantastic and every one of us was retrospectively amazed that the whole thing was accomplished using a mere five actors. So yes, an incredible piece of work. The technical coups, however, were only icing on the cake. Its true distinction lay in its patent ability to discomfort the viewer in ways that I no longer thought possible, in a show-all, tell-all world.

Disclaimer: I can’t proceed without plunking down a massive spoiler. You’ve been duly warned; if you haven’t already seen the film, and you want to be surprised, stop reading, go out and watch it, and join us again later.

Now, then: as I mentioned above, the basic summary that I had received only covered a minute fraction of the overall narrative. Mainly, the film consists of a fourteen-year-old girl drugging and torturing a man who—and we don’t know this for sure until well near the end of the movie—enjoys picking up woefully underage females and, to use an outmoded euphemism, corrupting them, sometimes worse. The height of tension comes as we (and the depraved villain) realize that a safe, hygienic, and considerately anesthetic castration will soon take place, courtesy of the enterprising heroine’s prescient purchase of a medical reference and a book bag packed with all of the requisite tools to perform the operation in the comfort of one’s own home. The only thing we see while this procedure is ostensibly underway are shots of the respective players’ faces; the lack of visual confirmation of bloodletting and corporal restructuring still set off tangible winces, cringes, and waves of general disgust and terror through the audience. The males in my group were especially uneasy with each new development, screwing themselves up into contortions that would seem to indicate the receipt of a good, hard kick to the groin. Even after we learned that our bright young gal has only faked the procedure—she’s merely made him believe that she’s removed the visible representations of his manhood and sent them through the disposal—the sense of moral indignation, of shock and outrage, was still palpable among our little assembly. Why did we need to see that? What possible reason could anyone have for creating such a thing? That’s revolting.

The collective sense of having been abused was, I think, undeniably justified. But then—simultaneously, disturbingly—it also wasn’t. A curious sort of appreciation began to make its ugly appearance inside of me, accompanied by the hopefulness that my feelings about the film were “right,” that the writer and director and whoever else was in charge also had hoped to convey the message that was gradually taking shape inside my head. Stay with me.

Throughout most of my adult involvement in cinema and literature, I’ve regularly had to endure portrayals of rape, whether in print or on celluloid, while trying to remind myself that it’s not real, that it’s all a condemnation of human brutality. In discussions about these scenes, in class or informally, I’ve had to sit there and pretend to be objective, try to get through the ordeal and successfully hide the fact that those artistic encounters with rape have left indelible bruises on my psyche, punched empty spaces into my stomach that will never really fill themselves in again. I try to dismiss the foolishness of feeling personally small and hurt and beaten down by the action. And resignedly, I realize that there’s not much protest to make after others (usually men) have ended the conversation by walking away congratulating themselves that they’ve been able to float past all of this pain to an appreciation of the greater significance of the piece—having  defended the sacrality of Art and brought me to a higher plane of awareness in the bargain.

I’m tired of having a man condescend to explain to me that art can’t ignore the violence in society, that these scenes portray reality and thereby refuse to talk down to us by hiding the evil of the world from us. I’ve had enough of hearing such episodes justified by an assertion that, in showing the cruel truth of life, the purgative powers of horror will bring us to some sort of realization and change us into better people because of it. That, according to the guys down the hall, for example, the mental scars that remain fifteen years after viewing A Clockwork Orange constitute a small and worthwhile sacrifice compared to the new, profound considerations of ethics to which the film supposedly exposed me.

Every time I hear such schlock, I’m reminded, in spite of all of our contemporary rhetoric of equality and worth, of the still-present, senseless ways that (mostly) men can demonstrate what they perceive to be superiority over (mostly) women. It’s not merely the act of rape itself, then—or the vicarious humiliation of a viewer faced with its reenactment—but the noble-sounding defense of its inclusion in art that seems so insulting. The justification believed, so smugly, to be representative of advanced rationality. The authority so convinced of his instruction on the proper way to feel about (portrayals of) something so unforgivable.

Admittedly, these proponents of Truth in Art might not change their tune, where Hard Candy is concerned; if so, I’ll at least congratulate them on their consistency. Based, though, on the reactions I saw in the guys around me, I would expect a different sort of argument to ensue, at least a pause or a momentary lapse of certainty. Because I’ve witnessed these same men sit through more “traditional” rape scenes, visions of slaughter, war crimes, and so forth, and even while acknowledging, on some level, the dread of it all, not displaying any sort of physical discomfort, or expressing a post-viewing condemnation of the project’s creators as sick.

I’m guessing, in other words, that with this film, art has brought us as close as possible to allowing males to appreciate the emotional reaction that I (and many other women) have when watching a rape scene. Not nearer, note, to understanding the actual crime, or to acknowledging that humans are capable of heinous cruelty, or that life is intricately unjust. Rather, the movie might just give guys a taste of the chilling sensation that what you’re witnessing is somehow directed at you, almost a warning that you, too, could have your soul and dignity hatefully, mercilessly, and often casually shattered in front of your face. A reminder to watch out: don’t become too secure in your foolish conviction that you are a unique and valuable individual.

Why does this movie get those messages across so successfully? Among a multitude of other reasons, it openly addresses, without shying away from any of the “truths” that proponents of truthful art so admire, the fact that so much of being able to prove that one is a respectable man seems tied up in the presence or absence of a functioning organ. That someone might care so little for you that that person wants to go beyond hurting you physically, taking, too, that thing that, at bottom, you believe is yours alone. I saw those men in my little group begin to understand what it feels like to see someone so successfully go after another’s soul with a self-congratulatory smile. And then to get the impression that those around you would dismiss you as weak and hysterical were you to admit your painful feelings of empathy and fear, were you to do anything other than walk away from the screen and grab a beer and move on to the next activity. Well, I thought, they might finally know what it feels like.

But hold on, now; I’m not trying to “get back” at anyone; I’m not gloating over a victory in the ridiculous battle of the sexes. The scene I’ve described, and most of the movie, in fact, was almost too excruciating to watch. There was nothing enjoyable about seeing someone tortured, despicable person though he was; I experienced no triumphant feeling of “justice” (if we must call it that) having been served. There was no glee in wondering what this act of vengeance was doing to the person perpetrating it, or what sorts of hurt and sense of futility had led her to undertake such an extreme course of action. It was more than unnerving to think that a whole team of creative professionals came together with the intention of turning a disturbing idea into a visible reality. This film is not, in other words, what I would call “entertainment” in any sense of the term.

I feel that I should note, too, that this picture was not the product of angry, vindictive females; writer Brian Nelson and director David Slade are, as their names suggest, men. And watching the DVD commentary, it’s quite obvious that their purposes in making this movie weren’t aligned with the ones the ones that I’m taking out of my experience with it.

All of its motivations aside, though, Hard Candy is an obviously powerful film. And, sadly enough, in spite of all of my disparagement of “truth in art for truth’s sake,” I think it had to be as gruesome as it was in order to wake “us,” male or female, out of the desensitized ways in which it seems that we accept violence in this culture—at least violence against women, or any sorts of brutality committed between members of the same sex. (Think of the especially prurient pleasure taken in “chick fights.”) I don’t know of any more fruitful course of action in terms, for example, of getting men to see just what the idea of rape does to at least this woman. Other than this incident, the closest I’ve come to that outcome has been a sort of paternalistic sheepishness on the part of nice, guilty-feeling men who can’t imagine (and why should they be able to?) how it affects me.

What am I really trying to say, then? My plea is not for a balancing of the scales, so that brutality is acceptable as long we achieve parity in the number of victims of each gender, each side keeping up in a continual raising of graphic stakes. Neither am I demanding a wide-ranging ban on the depiction of violence, in film or elsewhere. But might we consider—just for a second—whether letting us in on the intricacies of a sexual assault is really worth it? Whether the continuing portrayals of such an act—and the justifications made about them—might be (maybe unconscious) attempts to hold onto a place on some remaining hierarchy? Or whether they only present us with “inevitabilities”—for whose elimination, in our newfound artistic maturity, we might as well not struggle?   Why resist truth, after all?

How about we get a little more creative than merely reporting on “reality?” Why not, in other words, ditch the rape scenes and scrap the shoot-em-ups? Idealistic? Sure. Willfully naïve? Maybe so. Likely? Not in this universe, I’ll admit. I’m not asking for a revoltingly aseptic cinematic universe worthy of Patty Duke and the Beave. But I will ask that writers or directors consider, next time they feel like using rape to make a point, that they think not only about what kind of world they’re reporting on—but what sort of reality—emotional, spiritual, even physical—they’re helping to create.

The illustration is based on the photo by Made Underground. Credit: Made Underground

By Katy Scrogin | The post Artistic Truth Bites Back: The Bitter Taste of Hard Candy appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Whichever side they come from – and whichever variation of the arguments they choose – it all boils down to this: they are decrying the fact that relationships have moved from the private to the public sphere.  The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only and should remain between them; love should remain an unmediated experience between the two persons in that relationship.

Which of course completely misses the point. 

If we consider the fact that relationships are the result of a negotiation between two persons, then there must be a space between them for this very negotiation to occur. Otherwise, all that is happening is that one person is subsuming the other within their own sphere of understanding.  This would be understanding at its most banal – and perverse – form; that of bringing the other person under one’s stance.  If that were the case, there would no longer be any relationship; all negotiation is gone and the other person is effectively effaced.  Hence whenever one hears the phrase “I understand my partner,” one should be wary; clearly that person’s version of a relationship is a masturbatory one.

In this sense, any relationship between two (or more) persons always already carries with it the unknown, and always unknowable.  The other person is an enigma, remains enigmatic, to you.  This is the only way in which the proclamation “I love you” remains singular, remains a love that is about the person as a singular person – and not merely about the qualities of the person, what the person is.  For if the other person comes under your own schema, then the love for the other person is also a completely transparent love, one that you can know thoroughly, calculate; the other person becomes nothing more than a check-list.  To compound matters, if it is the qualities that you love, by extension, if those qualities go away, so does the love.  Only when the love for the other person is an enigmatic one, one that cannot be understood, can that love potentially be an event.

If it is an event, then strictly speaking it cannot be known before it happens; in fact, at best it can be glimpsed as it is happening, or perhaps even only realized retrospectively.  Hence at the point in which it happens, it is a love that comes from elsewhere; this strange phenomenon is best captured in the colloquial phrase, ‘I was struck by love’ or even more so by ‘I was blinded by love.’  This is a blinding in the very precise sense of, ‘I have no idea why or when it happened; before I knew it, I was in love.’ Cupid is blind for this reason: not just because love is random (and can happen to anyone at any time) but more importantly because even after it happens, both the reason you are in love, and the person you are in love with, remain blind to you. 

Since there is an unknowable relationship with the other person, the only way you can approach it is via a ritual.  This is the lesson that religions have taught us: since one is never able to phenomenally experience the god(s), one has no choice but to approach them through rituals.  These rituals are strictly speaking meaningless – the actual content is interchangeable – but it is the form that is important. Rituals allow us momentary glimpses at secrets, and secrets are never about content. Rather, secrets entail the recognition that they are secrets; the secret lies in their form as secret.  This can be seen when we consider how group secrets work; since the entire group knows the secret, clearly the content of the secret is not as important as the fact that only members within the group are privy to this secret.  Occasionally the actual secret content can be so trivial that even other people outside the group might know the information; they just do not realize its significance.  For instance, if I used my date of birth as my bank-account password, merely knowing when I was born would not instantly give you the key to my life savings.  In order for that to happen, you would have had to recognize the significance of the knowledge of my birthday.  This of course means that you have to know that you know something.  Since the god(s) are, strictly speaking, unknowable, this suggests that rituals put one in a position to potentially experience the god(s).

The meaningless gestures on Valentine’s Day play precisely this ritual role.  It is not so much what you give the other person, but the fact that you give it to them.  The gift in this sense is very much akin to an offering; the gift opens the possibility of an exchange.  Gift-giving does not guarantee that you will like what is returned; there is always a reciprocation of the gift, but what is returned to you is never known in advance, until the moment it is received.  This of course means that the worst thing that one can do is not to give the gift: that would be akin to a cutting off of all possibilities, a complete closing of all communication with the other person.  This at the same time also means that you cannot wait for the other person to give you something before you get them their gift: if that were the scenario, the return gift would be nothing more than a calculated return, where the relationship is nothing more than an accounting figure, where the other would be once again reduced to a statistic, a mere return of investment.

The only manner in which both persons can give true gifts is to offer them independently of the other person, whilst keeping them in mind.  In this way, the two gifts are always already both uncalculated (in the sense of not knowing what the return is) and the reciprocation for the other (without knowing whether the other person actually has a gift in the first place). 

Of course this would seem like an irrational, even stupid, way of buying gifts. The stupidity involved actually saves the relationship from being merely banal.  And more importantly, prevents it from entering the mere profane.

It is the stupidity of Valentine’s Day – complete with it kitsch-ness – that protects the sacredness of relationships, precisely by being completely and utterly meaningless …

By Jeremy Fernando | The post In Defence of Stupidity; on Love and Valentine’s Day appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Consider that classic movie genre, the romantic comedy. It is the adult version of a fairy tale. But how many do we have to watch before we start to believe that some part of them must be based in truth? My guess is, really, not that many. When you consider how many different romantic comedies are out there telling the same basic story with minor variations, well, some of it must be true sometimes, right?

Yeah, right.

The fact is that it’s not as easy to stay grounded as we might think. Psychologists in Great Britain have been studying the effect of romantic comedies (rom-coms) on people’s interpersonal relationships. They’ve found that fans of romantic comedies tend to have unrealistic expectations when it comes to their own romantic lives. Sex should always be perfect, and if you were meant to be together, your partner should know what you want without having to be told. After all, that’s how it works in the movies. And when people have been watching these things since early childhood, they start to accept some elements as real, however unconsciously. That is what makes these movies so perilous.

There is a well-known and accepted formula at work in romantic comedies. The main characters must be relatable and appealing, there must be obstacles to their union, and those obstacles must be overcome so that they can get together at the end. The stories are predictable, light, and funny. It’s a formula that predates Shakespeare, and it’s been executed in dozens of variations since the invention of motion pictures. It works, but with occasional exceptions, the rom-com pretty well peaked as a film genre years before I was born.

Of course, there will never be another Philadelphia Story or Roman Holiday. Hollywood’s recent attempts at remaking classics (1995’s Sabrina and last year’s The Women come to mind), only prove its ability to water down even the strongest source material. And with so many changes in gender dynamics in the past few decades, not to mention shifting taboos and advancing communications technologies, this genre should evolve. The problem is that it hasn’t. If anything, it’s regressed. The basic formula is still there, but the characters have become stereotypes and caricatures. If I know exactly how a movie will end based on a thirty- second commercial, it’s safe to say that the storylines are beyond merely predictable. The fun, then, should come from watching it play out, the witty dialogue, the sparkling chemistry, the will-they-won’t-they, and how far will he or she go to attain the inevitable happy end. But very rarely does anyone evolve beyond the designated type. The dialogue is generally flat and predictable. At most, the audience gets a few standard pratfalls or moments of painful awkwardness.

Take, for example, Renée Zellweger’s most recent offering, New in Town. Chances are good that I will never see this movie. Not just because it got terrible reviews, since bad reviews won’t keep me away from any film that I really want to see. Rather, my opinion was sealed on my first viewing of the trailer. New in Town is a standard fish-out-of-water-falls-for- local-yokel format. Fine. But are we supposed to believe that a high-powered ambitious female executive takes on an assignment in the boonies without doing any sort of research, least of all checking the weather before getting on the airplane? She’s sophisticated and a bumbling idiot. She’s a mix of caricatures that real women are supposed to be able to relate to. Is it any wonder this film bombed?

After all these years and all of these cultural and economic shifts, Hollywood still does not give women credit for being thinking, independent consumers. Judging from the rom-coms that have come out recently, Hollywood actually believes women to be completely mindless conspicuous consumers who will pay to look at anything pretty and shiny. When we don’t, they turn around and say we don’t spend enough to justify their continued investment in female-targeted fare. Fortunately, the success of Sex and the City and Mamma Mia! have finally made the studios think twice about the power of the female wallet. Unfortunately, the results of those second thoughts are movies like Bride Wars and Confessions of a Shopaholic, which feature female characters who are brainless conspicuous consumers. I understand the challenge of fathoming the eternal question of what it is that women want. I don’t understand what’s so hard about doing a little quality control when you’re dealing with a proven working formula.

The romantic comedy’s primary purpose is, of course, to be profitable for whichever Hollywood studio produces it. Which means that, in practice, they are cinematic cotton candy–inoffensive, insubstantial, overly sugary treats that are enjoyable in the moment and then make you feel a little sick. We go to see them because we like the sweet fluffiness. It’s pure escapist fantasy. But I’m tired of feeling sick afterward. All I’m asking is that Hollywood not persist in insulting our intelligence. Plenty of clever writers and talented directors and charismatic actors float around in L.A. Let them be clever and show their talent and charisma. Over half a century ago, Charles Lederer and Howard Hawks, along with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, proved that you can have a completely implausible plot and still tell a great story in a fun, smart way. Fantasy doesn’t have to be stupid, and characters don’t have to be two-dimensional or stale.

In a world of Facebook, Twitter and iPhones, it should be so easy to explore the promises and pitfalls of modern technology that studios have no need to fall back on played-out conventions. I went to see He’s Just Not That Into You, thinking it might offer some comedic insights on the role of social networking and technology in the dating world. Beyond a line Drew Barrymore delivers that was featured in the trailer, though, the movie could have taken place at any point in the past thirty years. The central character is a slightly younger Bridget Jones on speed, desperately flinging herself at every potentially available guy. This is not a person with whom I am able to or wish to identify. The overall depiction of relationships is somewhat more realistic in this movie than most others that have come out in the last couple of years, but that’s not saying much. It’s a film based on a self-help book, for pity’s sake. The women are pathetically naive and completely neurotic, and the men are given license to exploit them. The fact that the movie has been so successful just speaks to the vacuum in the marketplace.

The only evolutionary trend I’ve noticed in the genre is a marked leaning toward men. Judd Apatow clearly deserves the credit for the recent introduction of the bromantic comedy to theaters everywhere. His take on the genre has nearly eliminated the need for female presence onscreen at all, while at the same time expanding the male audience. No coincidence there. For years, men have been complaining about their wives and girlfriends forcing them to sit through romantic comedies. Apparently, if you throw in a couple of fart jokes and make the leading man a stoner, guys will lap it up. Team Apatow has raised the status of the lovable loser in ways that John Hughes’s Farmer Ted and Duckie could never have imagined. The trend would seem to be culminating in the upcoming I Love You, Man, which is about a straight guy, in need of a best man at his wedding, who goes out looking for bromance. All I have to say about this is that there’s a reason the Duckies of the world didn’t get the girl. Relatable they may be, but sexy they are not. And, yes, I do resent men co-opting this traditionally female-targeted movie genre. Sure, Spicoli was hilarious, and while he might be the ideal bromantic partner, he is not the man of any girl’s dreams. Don’t men have enough movies targeted at them? We deserve our bit of market share. We also deserve a higher quality product for our money and time. If this genre is supposed to be about fantasy, loveable losers don’t cut it. Ostensible romantic comedies like Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall set up clueless, spineless slackers as the leading men. Is that supposed to be the romantic ideal for the twenty-first century? Call me old-fashioned, but I would much rather stay home and watch Cary Grant banter than pay to see Jason Segel’s bits.

My parents took me to see Lady and the Tramp when I was five years old. It was the perfect starting point for a lifetime of movie watching, especially for a little girl. All the elements are there: the beautiful, vulnerable heroine, the charming but flawed hero, an undeniable attraction, uncontrollable obstacles driving them apart, a handful of sidekicks for comic relief, some witty dialogue, a grand gesture, and a happy ending. I have no doubt that it and many similar films had something to do with my ideas about what life should be like. I still sometimes wish I could have a date half as romantic as Lady’s spaghetti dinner in that alley. Silly as the theory may seem, those British psychologists have a strong case. What we see on the big screen, especially when it’s set in familiar surroundings, probably does have an impact on our perceptions and expectations. So, when all that we see is superficial, generic and puerile, it can’t be good for anyone. The thing about Lady and the Tramp is that it’s smart and fun, and the characters all learn lessons and grow. It’s more than fifty years old and it’s a cartoon, but it has more realistic three-dimensional characters than anything Kate Hudson has starred in lately. It’s bad enough for people to hold up romantic comedies in general as models for their own lives, whether they do it consciously or not. But if they’re basing their romantic expectations on current rom-coms, I fear for the future of our society.

By Paloma Ramirez | The post I am Indignant! Why Can’t Romantic Comedies Be Good Movies? appeared first on The Public Sphere.

The vicious debates surrounding California’s Proposition 8 this election season again evoke the right-wing stranglehold on the discourse of (gay) marriage. Aside from recycling the perpetual imagery of torch-wielding savages clamoring at the gates of Purity, Goodness, and Moral Restraint (indeed, the “defense” of marriage remains the primary grounds upon which the right opposes gay marriage), those discussing this issue continue to argue for two sides and two groups: those who support gay marriage as an indicator of strengthened civil rights for the gay and lesbian communities, and those who oppose gay marriage because of its threat to tradition, religion, and the pillars of heterosexuality. The missing piece here, of course, is the somewhat-amorphous third group: those (gay and straight) who oppose gay marriage because it assimilates queer people into a problematic, sexist, patriarchal, classist, and homophobic institution. Perhaps in their efforts to avoid the stereotype of being “anti-family-values,” left-wing folks have failed formally to ask these questions: Why marriage at all? Why not work collectively to end marriage, or at least divorce marriage from the conferral of rights, for both queers and heterosexuals? If marriage tangibly institutionalizes the supremacy of heterosexual kinship structures, as Judith Butler has argued, why should anyone get married?

In March 2004, Oregon’s Benton County did something extraordinary: it banned all marriages as a response to our nation’s heterosexist definition of marriage as “between one man and one woman.” County commissioner Linda Modrell told Reuters, “It may seem odd, but we need to treat everyone in our county equally.” Odd indeed. This action asks us to consider the nearly-universally-accepted principle that gay marriage = gay rights by posing: Do gay people get “rights” if they become more like heterosexuals? What would happen if we instead demanded that heterosexuals–those with mainstream, religious, and cultural power–change their relationship to marriage? What if heterosexuals could no longer (or, in the interim, chose not to) marry?

The call to end marriage as an institution does not fall far from trends found in recent demography studies. In 2005, numbers of non-nuclear families surpassed nuclear families for the first time in U.S. history. ((Williams, B., Sawyer, S. C., & Wahlstrom, C. M. (2005). Marriages, families, and intimate relationships. Boston, MA: Pearson.)) Studies asking, “Why?” (often with much hand-wringing about the rising divorce rates as a sign of the apocalypse) point out that marriage has increasingly less relevance for heterosexual couples. We have seen dramatic increases in opposite-sex couples living together before marriage, or avoiding marriage altogether, along with spiking divorce rates, increases in same-sex families, trends toward more intergenerational families, and more step-families and adoptions nationwide. Studies also show huge increases in young people reporting that they do not have a religious affiliation, do not attend church, and generally see religion as irrelevant to their lives. I mention this data because if those who care about gay rights worked to harness some of the anti-marriage/altered-kinship-structure/anti-religious energies within the heterosexual community, we might find ourselves with an unexpected tidal wave of support for formally revising the cultural meaning of marriage.

After all, marriage consistently has negative consequences both for women and the culture at large. For instance, the astonishingly disturbing property implications can overwhelm: fathers “giving away” their daughters like mules (or, more accurately, paying someone to take their daughters off of their hands), the bride’s parents paying for the wedding as a way to reinvent the dowry system, wives changing their names and adopting their husbands’ names, grooms asking permission of the bride’s father (owner) to marry his daughter (property), being pronounced “man and wife” (subject and his property) at the ceremony, women wearing engagement rings as a marker of their taken status, and the like. These customs, while perhaps somewhat on the decline and certainly steeped in notions of tradition and ceremony, have real consequences for women’s lives. They imply that husbands own and possess their wives, which leads to a host of social problems based on this fundamental inequity, even for the more “enlightened” couples who imagine they can distance themselves from this paradigm. For example, because marriage presumes that husbands should have sexual access to their wives, spousal rape did not become a legally recognized crime until the late 1970s, and the first-ever recorded charge of spousal rape did not occur until 1949(!). Even with this “progress,” successful prosecutions for spousal rape remain extraordinarily low in comparison to other rape trials. Further, other problems also arise from the property implications of marriage: women earn less of their own money and therefore cannot leave unhappy marriages; women receive little institutional support for fleeing their husbands; women still inherit property at lower rates than men; and cultural divisions between legitimate and illegitimate families gain momentum. In short, despite the improvements made to the packaging of marriage in recent years, this repackaging does not undermine marriage’s patriarchal attributes and implications.

Social science data also reveals the ways that marriage privileges the nuclear family over all other kinship relationships while it specifically harms women. For example, married women tend to have more negative physical and mental health outcomes than single women, while men show the opposite trends. Women in caretaking roles—whether taking care of husbands, children, elderly parents, etc.—show far worse health outcomes than their non-caretaking counterparts. ((Gove, W. R. (1984). Gender differences in mental and physical illness: The effects of fixed roles and nurturant roles. Social Science & Medicine, 19, 77-84.)) With regard to divorce, women’s incomes take a far more intense beating following divorce than do men’s incomes, and women more often take on child-rearing responsibilities, thereby dropping their incomes even further. Women even face social consequences as single parents that differ from men’s experiences as single parents: compared to single fathers, portrayed as generous, kind, and attractive, single mothers are constructed more often as overworked, neglectful, and unattractive. Moreover, institutional marriage reveals twisted kinship values. For example, health care coverage values the married couple but not other familial ties; one cannot give one’s elderly mother one’s employer-paid health care plan, just as one cannot give a sibling or a friend one’s coverage.

Marriage also makes it much more difficult for people to disentangle themselves from each other. Aside from the social validation provided by marriage (e.g., others recognize the couple as “legitimate”), the legal contract of marriage does little to predict longer relationships or more egalitarian unions, even while it promises to bind people together “until death do they part.” In practice, the artifice of the marital union often serves as a costly, ineffective, and exclusionary means of unifying people. The marriage contract does not specify the rights and burdens it enables, yet we accept this in the name of sentimentality; come time to divorce, many wish they had read the fine print. In short, marriage is a losing proposition, particularly for women.

And still, we have spent a great deal of time over the past several years framing marriage as The Answer to full civil rights for gay people, while simultaneously requiring that they legitimize their desire to marry. This has resulted in some disastrous discursive problems. First, these assumptions raise questions about whether gay identity is about who one has sex with (and how), or why one has sex with them (and with what consequences). We are severely ahistorical on this point because we too often forget that we once divided people’s sexual identities based on why they had sex–either for procreation (the normative) or for pleasure (the sinners, degenerates, bohemians)–without any concern for whom they had sex with. In other words, modern-day heterosexuals who liked oral sex, anal sex, sex for pleasure (etc.) would have historically been lumped together with homosexuals as sexual deviants. While these terms have shifted–in that we’re almost okay with heterosexual sex for pleasure as long as it’s not too blatant, raunchy, overly-accessorized, or public–this historical anti-pleasure campaign still seeps into our cultural consciousness today. For example, right-wing fear of gay people often stems from the fact that gay people blatantly have sex for pleasure and not for reproduction. Gay people directly contradict the bourgeois value system that leads to kinship systems based on reproduction; they openly and purposefully have sex solely for pleasure. In this sense, gay identity has stood outside of the Puritanical, capitalistic (“be productive and produce productive products!”) model of productive kinship for quite some time. Assimilation efforts like the pro-gay-marriage campaigns, therefore, have to spend a great deal of time reassuring everyone that being gay is about “love” and “family” rather than, say, unadulterated sexual pleasure. While pitching gay people as less “scary” and more “normal” to jittery Middle America is an unfortunately necessary part of the pro-gay-marriage game plan, this effort distances us from the reverence gay culture has for sexual pleasure and non-reproductive sex.

Second, by asking gay people to legitimize their desire to marry, the debate about gay identity as either biological or a choice has raged on, splitting the “experts” and the public into two camps. First, the pro-gay-marriage people who argue that gay = biological claim that gay people cannot help being gay because they were “born that way,” so they should therefore receive the same rights as heterosexuals. They forget that these arguments pave the way for eugenicists to simply “fix” the gay gene and “repair” the dysfunction of gayness. Gay identity in this model becomes something that happens to us, something that we do not consciously choose. (Also, remember that mainstream media then tends to apply the biology argument more intensely to gay men rather than lesbians, thereby recycling the same old “men have uncontrollable urges for sex” argument feminists have rejected for years now). Conversely, other proponents of gay marriage instead argue that being gay is a choice, and therefore gay people and straight people are biologically equal and thus deserve equal rights. One can easily deconstruct the absurdity of this argument by imagining the implications of having, say, a civil rights movement arguing for equality between white people and people of color solely on the basis of biology. The problem here is simple: we are asking the wrong question.

When I say that the right-wing has a stranglehold on the discourse of (gay) marriage, what I specifically mean is that they have managed to convince reasonably intelligent folks on the left that this debate between biology and choice stands in for the question of whether gay people deserve rights. We forget that no possible answer to this question serves the interests of gay rights. The biology/choice debate not only goes against nearly all reputable scientific research that shows an integration between the nature/nurture positions, but it also demands that gay people account for themselves in the eyes of heterosexuals. It positions heterosexuals as the ones evaluating gay people, rather than situating gay people as themselves aligned with heterosexuals in the struggle for full civil rights and equality for all. When we ask, “Is being gay biological or a choice?,” we essentially force gay people to submit to the evaluative will of heterosexuals. In my own research on women’s sexuality, the absurdity of accounting for oneself in this way appeared when I (slightly sadistically) asked heterosexual-identified women how they became heterosexual or discovered their heterosexuality. After bumbling around for a few seconds, these women typically looked me straight in the eye and said, “That’s a ridiculous question.” We should take a cue from them and do the same.

Returning to the original dilemma of what to do with marriage itself, I propose a different set of solutions: first, let’s remember and celebrate the fact that gay identity is in part based on its blatant, sometimes flamboyant and in-your-face, opposition to heteronormativity. While gay people may choose to reproduce, raise children, and imitate heterosexist norms of kinship, gay people have also consciously valued sexual pleasure and reimagined notions of family. That’s a good thing. Second, marriage is a deeply flawed institution, and as such, not only promotes sexist and heterosexist values, but stands in as the primary way that the State confers rights upon us. We should look carefully at how other countries reconcile these problems by, for example, divorcing marriage from the conferral of rights and, as such, rendering marriage strictly a religious ceremony. It is entirely unacceptable that we attach rights as basic as health care (which, contrary to what John McCain has argued, is not a “privilege”), hospital visitation, and the ability to adopt children to an institution that shamelessly and flagrantly promotes the conflation of Church and State. These rights should not be conferred via marital status. If we separate rights from marriage, this would benefit both gay couples and unmarried heterosexual couples. Heterosexuals must serve at the forefront of this battle by demanding an end to marriage as we currently define it. Third, we must reprioritize our goals for gay rights, first by demanding that heterosexual allies take a more personal role in the struggle, ideally by either not marrying or working to strip marriage of its legal power, and then by recognizing that gay marriage is not synonymous with gay rights. Let’s seriously consider: Is gay marriage really the kind of change we want for our country? Marriage is not a building-block for challenging oppression; it is oppression. If we spend our time and energy fighting for gay marriage, and we end up winning, we might find ourselves irreversibly wedded to marriage as a religiously-based institution. The joining of heterosexuals and queers in the battle to separate marriage from rights will reinvigorate the overly dichotomous gay marriage debates while challenging one of the most backward, sexist, and regressive institutions of our time.

* Image: Allusion aux Agences matrimoniales, Croquis californien par Cham. Wood engraving from the New York Public Library collection. Created by Cham (1819-1879), originally published in Le Charivari magazine.

By Breanne Fahs | The post Would You Prefer Gay Marriage or No Marriage? appeared first on The Public Sphere.

“Are you from Hawaii?” “Are you Chinese?” “Where are you from?” “Do you come from the islands?” These are among the questions I have been (and continue to be) frequently asked by new acquaintances and strangers. I don’t think I got such queries before college, because I grew up in Southern California, a place where the Filipino population has always been quite sizable. I remember feeling a little put-off by the curiosity in the beginning, only because I didn’t see why I had to explain my racial identity to strangers. However, I began to take it less personally as I realized that people would ask me these questions because they were genuinely interested in my background. Now, these encounters don’t faze me at all, and I find them amusing. I actually got asked once if I was Italian because of my last name!

It’s always fun to compare notes with my sister and brother, as we now live in three different, very distinct areas of the nation. Living in Boston, I am often asked if I am Hawaiian. My sister in Los Angeles is frequently mistaken for being Chinese. My brother, currently residing in Phoenix, repeatedly gets identified as being Mexican. Recently, I have wondered how often people in the United States face inquiries about their ancestral background. While my acquaintances and friends who are of other Asian and mixed ethnicities do get similar questions, they aren’t quite as diverse as the ones directed toward my siblings and me.

Having lived on both sides of the country, I can honestly say that I am more likely to get peppered with queries on the West Coast than I am on the East Coast. This may have a lot to do with the higher degree of diversity in California than in New England. In addition, New Englanders (and most East Coasters) tend to be more reserved. Yet, more and more, I see left and right coast stereotypes going out the window; I’ve met more and more Los Angeles transplants here in the Boston area, and encountered many East Coast transplants when I went back to LA for graduate school. The last time I was back in LA, I heard the actual usage of car horns, previously only noted in Boston or New York City!  And just the other day here in Boston, a car stopped to let me cross the street (and not at a crosswalk, either!) instead of trying to run me over. It gives me hope that many other stereotypes will soon become things of the past. This is part of my motivation for writing this column: to disprove the stereotypes out there and to answer the infinite questions about my so-called Asian identity. It is “so-called” because Filipinos defy typical Asian identifications, as evidenced in my own family, and because of the fact that my sister, brother, and I have often experienced ethnic misidentifications .

What are some Filipino stereotypes? Well, one that jumps to mind is “Filipino time.” Every Sunday that we went to Catholic mass, it was inevitable that the groups of families shuffling in late during the scripture readings were mostly Filipino. Many of our relatives show up to family events one to two hours after the time of invitation, which is why our mother tends to give these relatives an early time in order for them to actually arrive on time. However, I have observed that other cultures have this same habit, and I’ve heard references to everything from “African time” to “Hawaiian time,” so this particular stereotype is definitely not unique to Filipinos.

I don’t have many more generalizations about Filipinos to share with you because as a race, we haven’t had much of a presence in U.S. pop culture…at least until recently. A character on Desperate Housewives insulted a doctor by implying that he had attended a Filipino medical school.  I remember reading about how the Filipino community was up in arms, but all I could think was, “Hey, we got our own racial insult now!”  Making the Filipinos’ presence known over such a random reference in a TV show is kind of sad.

The history of Filipinos in the United States is deeper and more varied than are medical school references and media coverage of Imelda Marcos’ multitude of shoes. It is high time that more people were aware of who Filipinos are, so that fewer people have to pause or to jump to a stereotype when trying to determine the origin of my phenotype. After all the questions I’ve received about my ancestry, it’s time to go beyond answering, “I am Filipino.” Who and what is “Filipino”? My sister Lauren and I will take turns writing this column in order to answer that very question. As an appetizer, here are just a few facts about Filipinos that I’ve gleaned from online sources such as Wikipedia…pieces of the real history of Filipinos that have been forgotten or remained largely unknown:

• The Philippines is the 12th most populous country in the world–just behind Mexico–with over 90 million people.

• The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,107 islands.

• More than 180 dialects and languages (Tagalog being the dominant native language) are spoken in the Philippines.

• The Philippines has the largest diaspora in the world, with 11% of its population all over the globe in jobs far away from friends and family.  Some of our own relatives have been a part of this diaspora in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia.

• Islam came to the Philippines via Malaysia and Indonesia before Catholicism came via Spain (thanks to its most famous near-circumnavigator, Ferdinand Magellan, who in turn was imported from Portugal).

This is just the tip of the iceberg–there is so much more to know about Filipinos. In future articles, Lauren and I are both impatient to share more information about the Philippines, supply our insights on what it is like to be a Filipino-American, and to reflect on Filipino identity in both U.S. history and popular culture. Stay tuned!

By Sheila Espineli | The post My So-Called Asian Identity: Infinite Q&As appeared first on The Public Sphere.

In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing.
(from the Hippocratic Oath)

As you go, proclaim the good news: “The kingdom of heaven is at hand!”   Cure the sick… as you received without payment; give without payment.
(Matthew 10:7-8)

1.

A couple of days ago I was on the phone with my Mother. She had recently undergone cataract surgery for both her eyes – a series of operations that has brightened her outlook, both figuratively and literally.   My mother has been on a pretty fixed income for the past several years, but because of a program in the city in which she resides (a program designed to benefit those on a scale from “pretty fixed” to “no” income), the procedures were very nearly free. During our conversation I made the comment, “Hooray for socialized medicine!”

Mother, a lifelong Libertarian and congenital contrarian, was quick to chide me.   “This is not socialized medicine,” she insisted. “Socialized medicine would be terrible!”

This is what I would call a typical conversation between my Mother and me on such subjects.   It is a disagreement we have had for decades. For her, the Market (always with a capital-‘M‘) is the Answer (again, you can almost hear the capital-‘A’) to all problems – be they social or personal (and all those potentially-unhygienic crevices in-between).   Anything, therefore, that would supplant or interfere with the unfettered workings of the Market is bad.

I am inclined to disagree.  

2.

I was in mind of this conversation, over the past several days, as I came across the following two anecdotes, related to me by friends of mine:

First, one friend, just recently returned from a pre-Olympic visit of five weeks in China, told of getting a cut on her ankle, which then got badly infected. After a couple days of just trying to let it heal on its own, the wound began turning blackish, and so she went to see a Chinese physician.   She mentioned that she was slightly frightened to take that step, as she had – like many of us – been raised on the horror stories surrounding anything non-American that relates to medical practice.

She was in for a pleasant surprise.   At the Chinese clinic she was immediately seen by a (female) doctor, who examined the wound, made a treatment decision, and relayed instructions to the (male) nurse.   The nurse, in turn, cleaned the wound and bandaged it properly. The infection was treated with antibiotics and is now fully healed.

The surprise did not end there.   Total time in the clinic? Less than an hour (with a translator, no less). Total cost of the antibiotics? $1.50. Total cost for the visit itself? Fifty cents, American.

The second story, slightly less rosy, involves a graduate school colleague of mine, who has just been given formal permission to take part of the next year off for medical leave. The leave is officially sanctioned, remember; it is recognized by the University and is, in effect, simply a “pause” in her studies. In other words, she is still a student.

Despite this very clear fact, however, she was recently informed, by the administrator of the school’s insurance plan, that she would not be considered eligible for school medical insurance while she was on school medical leave. Never mind that (to quote the Book of Esther) it was for such a time as this that medical insurance was invented in the first place; my friend has been caught up in a bureaucracy with its own illogical logic.

While I am not privy to all the details of the discussion that followed, I am reasonably certain that my colleague noted the frank absurdity of this situation to the administrator.

3.

Given the above, I wish to make the following points:

1) As much as I may dislike the practices of the People’s Republic of China on issues of liberty, I cannot fault them for having an inexpensive health care system that seems, at least on my limited knowledge of it, relayed to me by my friends who have been there, to work.   That is to say, the usual argument against China’s “human rights record” shifts somewhat if we expand our imagining of “human rights” to include effective, affordable health care.

2) The argument often made against a program of socialized health care for our nation – by my Mother and those of her mindset – is that such a system would be mired in bureaucracy and inefficiency, such that those who need care might not get it at the time they most need it. What I have observed, however, in my own health care and that of others, is precisely this sort of bloated inefficiency already at work here in America – with the added insult of an obscene price tag.

My evidence, I admit, is scant, and consists at this point of hearsay and anecdote.   And yet the sheer preponderance is certainly indicative.   Consider, for example, doctors who insist on putting human beings ahead of profits.   I am friends with physicians who are idealistic and truly concerned for the full health and wellbeing of their patients, and each one of them in the past ten years has been encouraged by the partners in their practices to leave because such care is not serving the ultimate goal of profit (One friend now works, interestingly enough, as a major administrator for the public health establishment).

Contrariwise, I have been acquainted with other doctors, who are, in more typical fashion, concerned chiefly with dollar signs. One such soul, while diversifying his portfolio into real estate, was recently involved in callously dispossessing my wife and I of our apartment with less than a month’s notice when it became profitable to turn them into condominiums (So, let the reader be aware, I do have some personal bias, if not animus, in these discussions. Caveat emptor).

4.

“Health care for profit” is not simply an oxymoron or an ethical dilemma – it is a blasphemy. Mention of the phrase makes me mindful of another image – this time of a college classmate, some years ago, weeping openly on her graduation day.  

She wept, not for joy, but because she suffered from both youth-onset diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, and had not yet secured a job, and had therefore no access to affordable job-related insurance to replace the school’s plan (a plan by which she would no longer be covered upon graduating). She wept because, despite all the high talk of the “Market” and its “forces,” and of that mythic abundance that supposedly abounds when supply meets demand, she was, quite simply, uninsurable.     Even if she could have afforded to pay the premiums, private insurance would have refused to cover the very conditions for which she most needed insurance.

Those who disagree with my outrage at this will speak here of “complexities.”   I am aware that this is a complex issue, and I am aware that the answer is not simple (or at least not simple-minded) charity.   After all, even the Nazis gave bread to the poor, at least at first.   The Nazi example chastens us that we should always look deeply into the motives and methods of any model of charity we might endorse.  

But the situation I have just described, regarding my college friend and many more like her, is simply, patently, perversely unreasonable.   There must be a point at which reason – and reasonable kindness – prevails, mustn’t there?

5.

Frankly, at this point, I do not care what it is called – whether it goes by the name “socialized medicine” or by some other, less offending moniker – but the fact remains that there are countries all over the globe, of every stripe of politics and resource, that are delivering efficient and affordable, if not free, health care options to their citizens. The quality of this care, moreover, often beats the best that the American medical market seems to provide; in fact, we’re pretty low on the totem pole when it comes to the effectiveness (total or partial) of our care system.

So, to be blunt, call it what you will, but I am tired of waiting. Health care, by my lights, should be readily available, highly effective, and free. I have little interest in discussing anything short of that anymore. Nor am I interested in discussing or rehearsing the reasons given as to why we can’t do it.   Such reasons are simple lies, and should be named as such.   Like the other countries that are doing it, we can do it.   The fact that we Americans aren’t amounts to little more than simple foolishness and petty jingoism.

Too often, human beings are made to suffer so that the comforting word choice of a few powerful individuals can remain untarnished, or for some idiocy of ideological gluttony. Systems are put in place to preserve the systems themselves, and not the lives put in their care.   Why do we (who with all our talk of affluence and education relative to those “less fortunate,” should certainly know better) allow such gluttony to continue?

We will be judged, I am told, by how we have cared for the “least of these” among us. Let us, for once, be honest: The least among us deserve better – better, certainly, than we have offered them thus far.

By David Dault | The post “When Did We See You Lord?” How the U.S. Healthcare System Ignores the Basic Ethic of Do No Harm appeared first on The Public Sphere.

I am grateful for so many things about this country, things like free speech, freedom of religion, and our general prosperity (and relative to the rest of the world, we are prosperous even in our current economic crisis). I’m grateful for electricity 24 hours a day, indoor plumbing, and the more-or-less consistent availability of hot water. I’m grateful for supermarkets whose shelves are always stocked with more food than any of us will ever eat. And then there are the things we used to have that I wish I could still be grateful for, like anti-trust laws and an objective judiciary. But I digress. I do appreciate many aspects of life in this country. What I don’t appreciate is the tendency of the government of this free nation to get involved in our private lives in the name of public interest.

The social contract, of course, requires the government to act in the public interest, but its methods are occasionally overly intrusive. Sometimes we compromise because, after all, it makes sense that motorcyclists should wear helmets (although apparently the availability of donor organs decreased dramatically when those laws began to be enforced). But should government have a say in what we feel like eating? Recent public health measures in New York City aim to do just that, and I have to say, I resent it.

First, New York banned the use of artificial trans fats in all foods sold in restaurants.Yes, we all agree that trans fats are bad and an unnecessary element in any diet. And of course, the food industry would not have changed its recipes without government intervention. Fine. But earlier this summer, a new regulation began to be enforced that requires any restaurant that makes nutritional information public and uses standardized recipes to prominently post the calorie counts of all menu items. For those of you who live in cities with less meddlesome administrations, that means that when you walk into a Starbucks for a mocha frappucino fix, you see exactly how many calories are in that mocha frappucino (280 in the tall size). Not to mention how many calories are in the chocolate chunk cookie that you might have thought about getting to go with it (420).

The justification for making all this information, not just public, but unavoidably prominent, is that it will help guide informed and healthier food choices in a public that is suffering under an obesity epidemic. For now, the regulation applies only to restaurants with 15 or more outlets nationwide, with menus that are standardized for content and portion size. It specifically targets fast food and casual dining chains, which make up about 10% of the restaurants in the city. Apparently, even Mayor Michael Bloomberg doesn’t want to know how many calories are in that plate of foie gras at Per Se.

So, the goal, ultimately is to reduce obesity by making people aware of the number of calories they’re consuming when they go to these kinds of restaurants. According to a Health Department survey conducted in support of this regulation, people in Subway restaurants who saw the information consumed about 50 fewer calories than those who didn’t. And I can honestly say that the first time I walked into a Starbucks and was confronted by the fact that a blueberry scone has about twice as many calories as a plain croissant, I went for the croissant. I guess it works to a certain extent. I admit this grudgingly, of course, not because I’m opposed to an informed public, but because I object to the method of dissemination. I am not a “latte lady” who needs a daily Starbucks fix. Generally, when I go into one of these places, I do it specifically to indulge. So, when my monthly chocolate chunk cookie craving rolls around, I don’t particularly care to know the extent to which I am indulging. Plus, I’d be willing to bet that the people who are most likely to notice this stuff are the ones least likely to be in danger of becoming obese anyway.

One of the main arguments against this kind of regulation is that it is paternalistic. While everyone agrees that government should act in the public interest, there is very little agreement as to the extent to which it should act. By promoting this kind of policy, the City of New York is taking another step down a potentially slippery slope toward the dreaded “nanny state” in which no one can smoke outside their own home and children sit in car seats until they’re old enough to drive. I am all for acting in the public interest, but is this kind of action the best use of government time and taxpayer money? If the Health Department wants to fight the obesity crisis, why not invest in educating the public? Sure, by forcing the prominent posting of calorie counts, they’re informing the public, but that’s not quite the same thing, is it?

Just because I now know that the average full-size salad at California Pizza Kitchen has well over 1000 calories doesn’t mean I have any idea how much of that is fat or sugar in relation to the BBQ chicken pizza (1060 calories). Nor does it tell me anything about how it really relates to my personal health. The nutrition information on packaged foods is based on a 2000-calorie diet, which is the recommended daily intake for the average person. The “average person” weighs about 150 pounds. I am not average, and, frankly, I have no clue what my ideal caloric intake actually is. I eat salad when I feel like eating salad and French fries when I feel like eating French fries. I live with the hope that it will ultimately all balance out. But aside from knowing that the average adult should eat about 2000 calories a day, to me, all these numbers are just numbers. Combine them with all the other information on a chain restaurant’s menu, and they just blend in with the visual noise.

Instead of posting calorie counts in chain restaurants, teach us what calorie counts really mean. Introduce real education programs, starting in schools, that not only emphasize the importance of a healthy diet, but show children that it means different things for different people and why. Make a few PSAs asking people to think about what they eat or giving them tips on how to improve their diets. Better yet, address the root of the problem by confronting the food industry itself about portion sizes or the ingredients that go into packaged foods or the way they advertise. Sure, that yogurt is low-fat, but have you noticed how much sugar is in it? Nothing needs as much high fructose corn syrup as it has, especially considering that it’s been proven to be a factor in increasing obesity, and it’s in almost everything we eat. And that 1000-calorie salad at California Pizza Kitchen is a full-size order, but I’ve never been able to finish even a half order at that place. Of course, all that introduces a much deeper issue when you consider how much easier it is for the government to create “nanny laws” than to regulate industry. It’s a simple thing to say, “Yeah, show “˜em a bunch of numbers and maybe they’ll realize they’re eating too much.” It’s a much more complex matter when you mention that there are an awful lot of junk food commercials on during popular cartoon shows, and that they make eating look so fun.

Who knows, maybe this is one of those bass-ackward ways of forcing corporations to take some responsibility. Maybe it will have some long-term positive effect on people’s eating habits. More likely, after the initial sticker shock wears off, people will stop noticing and go back to eating whatever they would have initially. As for me, after I saw how many calories are in a Starbucks chocolate chip cookie, I walked out of the store and across the street to a gourmet chocolate shop where I purchased a cookie that was about the size of my open hand. It was warm, full of huge gooey chunks of rich homemade chocolate, not to mention sugar, butter, and fat, but, as far as I could tell, it was completely calorie free.

—

“LineUp” Courtesy of Loretta Lopez

By Paloma Ramirez | The post I Am Indignant: Don’t Nanny Law Me! I Want That Brownie appeared first on The Public Sphere.

This summer, I indulged in a rapid drive from Pasadena, CA to Albany, NY. As I passed through the economically slowing but still alive Sun Belt on into the more economically depressed towns and cities of the Midwest, I also found myself barraged with a variety of unique advertisements set up to greet me specifically as an Interstate rider. Most focused on drawing my tourist dollars to the local town, but some just focused on getting my attention. While I focus on U.S. religiosity, I learned that every state did have a slightly different ethos of road signage. Here is some of what I saw.

By Jacqueline Hidalgo | The post Signage Across the U.S.A.: What I Learned While Watching the Road appeared first on The Public Sphere.

There are many kinds of indignation. There is the violent indignation of a Mets’ fan whose player just struck out and the petulant indignation of a child who isn’t allowed to play with a toy that doesn’t belong to him. There is the passing indignation of being cut off in traffic and the enduring indignation of being passed over for promotion. For this first column, in this first issue, I’m addressing something that is new to me: indignation over the blatant yet socially acceptable abuse of a simple technology.

I am not technophobic. A loyal Apple user since the days of the II e, I love my old Powerbook (though it’s already nearly as obsolete as that II e) and my new video iPod (nearly 15 of its 80 gigs are in use). I keep a drawer in my apartment dedicated to the detritus of today’s essentials ““ digital camera chargers, connector cables, adapters, assorted batteries, and tiny storage devices for gadgets I no longer own. But when it comes to cell phones, I was a willfully late adopter. I am not a phone person, and something about carrying around a device that allows anyone to call you anytime, anywhere, just doesn’t sit right with me. The number of times I have waited in the supermarket checkout line while the girl in front of me chatters on her cell phone might have something to do with it.

Anyway, three years ago, after constant badgering from friends who could never get in touch with me, I finally got a cell phone. It opened up a whole new world; a world in which I had no idea how to function. I would forget to charge it, provoking a persistent plaintive beeping, so I would turn it off and forget to turn it on again. People wondered why I didn’t get voice messages, and they got irritated because the phone was always off. Friends would send text messages. Some of them had pictures attached. I didn’t know how to look at them. All I knew is that they cost extra. I asked my friends not to text me.

Now, with the prevalence of Blackberrys and iPhones, texts, pictures, videos, and emails are all whizzing through the air at thousands of kilobytes per second every second of every day. The current generation of 18-24 year olds has never known communication to be any different. This is not necessarily a bad thing. While I appreciate the inherent usefulness of this all, these new, more text-based, and less personal, methods of communication, have certainly changed the way we relate to one another. Yes, when traveling, for business or when plans change last minute, it’s a wonderful thing to be able to convey information to anyone in the world at the touch of a button. But is a text really appropriate in every situation?

For example, I was out with a friend one night, and while trying to get the bartender’s attention, we started chatting with two guys. Drinks were had, and numbers were exchanged. Now, it is not unusual for a guy, on being told my number, to dial it on the spot. This serves multiple purposes ““ it gets the number into his phone’s memory, it confirms the legitimacy of the number, and it automatically gets his number into my phone. Fine. In this case, the guy, immediately upon getting my number, sent me a text. It read: “Hi paloma its ur bf adam” (sic). Half an hour later he sent another: “I had fun w u. Def hang again soon.” I received that message the following morning because I do not habitually check my phone. In fact, I rarely look at it unless it is actively ringing (and sometimes, not even then). I eventually wrote back: “Hope youre not too hungover. I had fun w you too.” He responded immediately: “Actually feel great.

At this point, I was enjoying the novelty of an active text exchange with a cute guy, though I had no clue how to go about it. It takes me a good five to ten minutes to compose any kind of text message, and each time is just as frustrating and fraught with peril as the last. In the time I have owned a cell phone, my texting skills have improved only in that I now know how to do it, more or less. At any rate, I was at work, so the exchange was quickly put away, and I went on about my life.

That Saturday evening, I received this message from Adam: “Going out tonite?” OK, so, how does one typically respond to this sort of thing? The question is straightforward, but it was not an invitation or any kind of request for my company. That combination of words in this particular situation could best be interpreted as: “If you are going out tonight, maybe we can meet up.” Or a more straightforward translation: “Will you get drunk and have sex with me tonight?” My response: “Busy tonight ““ maybe later this week?

I admit that this is still a new medium for me, and I need to pick up on the rules. When did it become acceptable for guys to communicate this way? I use the word “communicate” here because I can’t honestly say he asked me out. He didn’t. What happened is that he sent me a text that implied an interest in a social interaction of some sort. What the hell is that? By the way, his response to my suggestion that we meet up later in the week was this: “Mos def

Which brings us to a few days later, when I looked at my phone and realized I had another text: “My friend wants to hang w ur friend again so we shld do group cocktails a nite this wk?” This at least is a specific suggestion. But he still hadn’t actually called me. Is this how things work now? Has all our modern technology and instant communication brought us to this? It’s like passing notes in junior high. No wonder kids love it so much. And no wonder it’s caught on with all those twenty- and thirty-somethings out there enjoying their extended adolescence. For the record, this particular guy is in his thirties and, apparently, owns his own business.

Call me old fashioned, but when a guy wants to go out with me, I’d like him to actually ask me out. What’s wrong with dialing a number and making a phone call? If you’re texting me, you already have a phone in your hand with the number plugged in for you. It takes more time to type out a message than it does to hit the little green button to put a call through.

I am not the only one to suffer the abuses of texting in the dating realm. An informal survey of my single friends reveals near universal annoyance with the medium. The typed word, especially when abbreviated, is ambiguous in the best of times. How many emails have been misinterpreted because nuance doesn’t read? And yet, it has become the default form of communication. In a way, it’s easy to see why. Text is ambiguous. There is very little danger in sending a few words into the ether. It’s like a crumb dropped into a pond to see if anything bites. If nothing does, it just dissolves. No risk involved. If something does bite, you can still hover and decide whether or not you’re interested. It’s the very definition of passive aggressive. It’s happening more and more often in every age group among both men and women, and it’s really not okay.

If I receive a text that says, “Hey its Blank ““ now u have my number.” Yes, that’s true, but does that mean I’m supposed to respond? I don’t know how to carry on a conversation with acronyms because I’m no longer eight years old. Don’t make me try to flirt by typing out letters on a numbered keypad. It will never sound good. If you want to talk to me, press the little green button and wait for the ringing sound to stop. It’s really not that hard. If you don’t want to talk, why are you wasting your time with all the typing?

By Paloma Ramirez | The post I Am Indignant: Text Messaging Is No Way to Ask a Girl Out appeared first on The Public Sphere.

An acquaintance of mine claims to have 258 friends. That number could be larger, actually; the figure only represents the number of boon companions who show up on her MySpace page and not those additional pals who might appear in real time but avoid online social networking. Among this tight-knit group are celebrities, a personified representation of the university she attended, people with whom she’s shared neither the same physical space nor an actual conversation, and an assortment of random human beings who actually do spend time with her in the non-virtual world. Admittedly, this gal is more outgoing than I am, and is far more in tune with the latest social trends. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something oddI even want to say “disturbingabout this densely populated area of her life.

It’s not the numbers in themselves that bother me; rather, it’s the fact that all of the inhabitants of this e-community share the same label: “friend. OK, fine, what else should you call them, on a site not devoted to business, school, or any other “work-related organization? After all, this sort of acquaintance wasn’t even conceivable only twenty years ago. Pen pal? Not exactly. Associate? That sounds so Wal-Mart. Webfriend? More accurate, perhaps, but we don’t want to get too techno-geek on everyone. The point is that, whatever we think we’re describing with this new sort of relationship, “friend” seems to be the easiest, least confining identifier to use, end of story; don’t take your semantics so seriously.

But I do take semanticsas well as friendshipvery seriously. After all, without friendsthose anchors who stand by you, stave off loneliness, keep you accountable, save you from your own egoexistence would be exceptionally dull. And so, when you can gain or lose a friend in the microsecond it takes to click a mouse, should we worry about the fact that the rich phenomenon that is friendship might be losing some of its complexity?

Let’s take a look at this new realm of cheery community formation. Whatever your preferred site, the routine is more or less the same. You present as much or little, as far-fetched or honest, a public face as you want. You ask the people you know from “real life” to declare publicly that they’re willing to be associated with you, and then you either wait around for something to happen, or you get assertive, depending on your personality. If you choose the latter option, chances are, you browse other members’ profiles, check out their favorite TV shows and music, their pictures, the comments their friends have posted to their siteand if you like what you see, you have another couple of options open to you.

If you’d like to know more about this person than is contained within a few blurbs on the screen, you send a message to say hi and to try and get a conversation going. If, on the other hand, you don’t feel that such a time-intensive step is necessary, you just up and invite that person to be your friend. In this case, you ask a complete stranger to agree publicly to link himself, and all that goes along with him, to you, and all the accompanying baggage that you carry. Somehow, this action is not thought to be as creepy as mailing a personal letter of devotion to a celebrity.

Even if you find something overly hasty about this process of instant and ill-informed amity, though, and refrain from immediate e-bonding with avatars, there will always be some stranger who pops up out of the blue and requests your friendship. The lack of an introductory message in this instance is perhaps less disturbing than the fact that this type of individual often doesn’t even appear to have looked at your profile. So, for example, when a self-proclaimed redneck (and Proud! Kiss my red white & blue ass, terrorists!) solicits the friendship of a Code Pink organizer who enjoys dancing with her coven in Berkeley, you have to wonder what’s going on. It gets even more puzzling, though, because often, you don’t even have that minimal information to guide you; sometimes, potential pals ask you to join up on their team without even allowing you to view their profiles or pictures. In other words, you are asked to claim these unknowns as friends before you’re granted the privilege of knowing anything about them.

And then, for some old-fashioned curmudgeons, a strange thing often ensues out of what should be a ridiculously easy dilemma: instead of officially declining the friend request KrazEE8s has made, you become so anxious about not hurting this person’s feelings that, in spite of being ignorant even of hisor her?true identity that you just ignore the request, hoping that KrazeEE8s will soon forget about having contacted you.

Odds are, however, that were a stranger to come up to you in a public place and ask you to be her friend, you’d pack up and move away in a slightly creeped-out fashion. When the situation happens online, though, why does such a presumptuous approach suddenly become, if not welcome, at least socially acceptable? I’ll wager that it’s got something to do with the safety of the entire process. In spite of the much-discussed dangers of placing ourselves under public scrutiny, when it comes to the work and investment required of an online networking relationship, the risks just can’t compete with those required in the physical realm.

Consider the very un-anonymous peril that someone in the flesh takes when introducing herself to a stranger. If things go well, she’s passed the first of many hurdles; more work lies ahead in order to convince the object of her interest that she’s worthy of sustained attention, of becoming and remaining a “friend.” If rejected, however, she’s markedvisiblyand there’s really no satisfactory remedy to getting out of the situation; leaving will point up her shame and weakness; hanging around will prove that she’s even more socially inept than she demonstrated in her initial approach. The whole prospect is scary. If you don’t have to see the expression on another person’s face, though, whether you’ve been accepted or rejected, well then, one level of anxiety, at least, has been removed.

And then break-ups, never easy to manage, are so easy in the virtual universe that, technically, they don’t really have to occur. If you’re no longer satisfied with your friend, well, just remove him from your friends’ list; there’s no need to inform him that the relationship is over. Unless he happens to scroll carefully through his 300 friends, in fact, he may not even notice you’re gone. And if you’re overwhelmed with the developments that could ensue even from that action, don’t worry; you can just block your ex-pal from contacting you. Easy, clean, no explanation required.

The problem here is that friendship, at least as we’ve experienced it over the last few millienniain the fleshrequires communication and commitmentnot only to respect a friend enough to tell her if you need to go your separate ways, but to be actively involved in her life, throughout the duration of that relationship. Isn’t there some sort of understanding that the two of you will see each other through good and bad, put up with each others’ complaints and relationship troubles and bouts of depression, will attend a concert one of you really doesn’t want to attend? Doesn’t friendship involve, in addition to good times together and common interests, risk and disappointment and accountability, misunderstandings and post-argument reconciliation and a resulting understanding and valuing of each other that are stronger than they were before?

I’m not claiming that good discussion, personal growth, and, dare I say it, lasting friendships, do not or cannot happen on Facebook. I do, however, wonder how this commitment-free realm of existence affects the manner in which we behave in the “real” world, especially the ways in which it shapes our ability, not only to understand and interact with those closest to us, but with people in generalmaybe even our capacity to understand ourselves. It takes something much more complex than a glowing screen of words to help us appreciate the intricacy and nuance that are part of the human experienceand so, to assist us in becoming mature, thoughtful individuals.

Lists of hobbies and favorite music are simply not enough to know a person, and don’t even begin to allow you to describe yourself to others. Heck, Charles Manson might have loved, loved, loved the Beatles just as much as any of their self-proclaimed biggest fans. I’m guessing, thoughhopingthat his physical presenceincluding the quirks that were only perceivable when you stood next to himwould dissuade most people from pursuing an acquaintance, much less friendship, with him. It seems, though, that on these sites of free information exchange, friends are constituted by the facts you know about them; realizing that they like the same movies you do, and prefer green to red, must mean that, were you to meet in the real world, you’d get on swimmingly.

I’m not advocating turning the clock back to rotary phones and card catalogues. And the phenomenon I describe is hardly the most serious social ill we face. Maybe, though, it could warrant a small mention in the lists of things to keep in mind as we move on in our quest for the best of all possible worlds. Because if this trend starts to influence how we treat our “traditional” palsif we don’t have toor worse, don’t want toconnect with other human beings on any sort of profound level, the implications could be terrifying. It’s bad enough to be lonely, or to feel misunderstood, or to misinterpret what another is saying. Becoming accustomed, though, to treating friends as if they were both disposable and easily replaceable makes me wonder with how much less concern we would begin to treat strangers or enemies. Because if our friends don’t matter that much, then those who don’t share our interests or our opinions begin to matter even less. And in a world where we already take so little account of the poor and the marginalized, stopping in our tracks and asking ourselves what friendship means to us might just keep us from expanding that realm of undesirables who are already so unjustly treated. One would hope, too, that it would even lead us to talk to those we’ve eliminated from our consciousnessbecause even those who look and think differently than we do mightamazing suggestion!have much more to offer us than we ever thought possible. That recognition, though, will require a little more than an exchange of favorite TV shows and flattering pictures.

I’m not asking us all, then, to ditch Facebook and the entertainment we might be able to find there. At the very least, though, demand of the people you meet in this new-fangled community something more than a soundbite or a catch phraseat least before you decide to become friends.

By Katy Scrogin | The post Your 258 Closest Friends appeared first on The Public Sphere.