simulating friendship*

Priority of sensation over substance. William Deresiewicz writes, in reference to Facebook:

We have turned [our friends] into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.... There they are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they're not in the same place, or, rather, they're not my friends. They're simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.

Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling—from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls. The same path was long ago trodden by community. As the traditional face-to-face community disappeared, we held on to what we had lost—the closeness, the rootedness—by clinging to the word, no matter how much we had to water down its meaning. Now we speak of the Jewish "community" and the medical "community" and the "community" of readers, even though none of them actually is one. What we have, instead of community, is, if we're lucky, a "sense" of community—the feeling without the structure; a private emotion, not a collective experience. And now friendship, which arose to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going the same way. We have "friends," just as we belong to "communities." Scanning my Facebook page gives me, precisely, a "sense" of connection. Not an actual connection, just a sense.


* I could also call this, as you may expect, "when words change their meaning" or "when words lose their meaning", but I thought it might be nice to have a change
** I discovered Deresiewicz via Charles Petersen's article In The World of Facebook

when words lose their meaning*

Diversity.

Example 1: Fashion magazine Love celebrates the diversity of eight of the most “beautiful people” in the world. Is it just me or do they look pretty similar? (via Sociological Images)

Example 2: Visit any business school website and you’ll be sure to find the words “diversity” mentioned somewhere about their student bodies. Yet my friend related to me earlier this year that admissions officers at top business schools told her that they prefer students to have no more than three years of work experience.

Example 3: In our workplaces, in our churches, we comment with smug satisfaction about the diversity present, generally in reference to multilingual capabilities and skin color. But oftentimes, this diversity is superficial at best, a visual characteristic of a group of people who share similar educational background, political views, lifestyles and socioeconomic status.**

A commenter on the Sociological Images blog entry referenced earlier writes:

Media decision-makers know that in 2010, the concept of “diversity” is a useful tool to generate a positive response in audiences, especially when the piece explicitly says, “Hey, this is diverse.” Whether or not there’s discernible “diversity” in whatever they’re labeling as such, the label itself gets the applause.

It’s like putting puppies or daisies in an ad. And it’s a particularly cynical trick they use when they just throw in the word “diversity” to drum up feel-good vibes in something that’s actually quite mundane and not at all groundbreaking, diversity-wise. (Original comment found here)


* I’ve lost count of the number. It might be 7, not counting variations. I should probably make this a tag. Speaking of which, I hate my tags. What I mean when I use them seems to keep changing.
** Not to say that ethnic diversity is unimportant and should not be celebrated, but let’s recognize that there are other forms of diversity that in multicultural America may be more meaningful.

when words lose their meaning* (6)

Christians love the word “community” and we like to use it liberally in our conversations, our blog entries and our prayers. There’s just something about the phrase “building community” that seems to justify any activity or desire.

It’s not just Christians who are fond of the word. Nonprofit mission statements often reference “serving the community”. We talk of the artistic community, the anarchist community, the gay community etc… The Internet has further nurtured the growth of various communities. For instance, sites like ravelry.com, craftster.org and personal blogs have contributed to a vibrant knitting and crafting community.

But what do we really mean when we say we build community or that we are part of a community? What is the nature of this community that we refer to? What exactly is our commitment to it? Is it just a group of people who share conveniently common interests, tastes and perhaps even religious beliefs? Or is it, or should it be, something more interdependent and inclusive?

Whereas a community attempts to be an inclusive whole, celebrating the interdependence of public and private life and of the different callings of all, lifestyle is fundamentally segmental and celebrates the narcissism of similarity. It usually explicitly involves a contrast with others who “ do not share one’s lifestyle.” For this reason, we speak not of lifestyle communities, though they are often called such in a contemporary usage, but of lifestyle enclaves. Such enclaves are segmental in two senses. They involve only a segment of each individual, for they concern only private life, especially leisure and consumption. And they are segmental socially in that they include only those with a common lifestyle. The different, those with other lifestyles, are not necessarily despised. They may be willingly tolerated. But they are irrelevant or even invisible in terms of one’s own lifestyle enclave.

Even those of us who are trying to create true community inevitably find ourselves in a lifestyle enclave:

(Wayne) sees his life as that of a full-time activist contributing to the community by organizing its members in efforts to create a more equal and just society…. It does not denigrate Wayne’s aspirations to point out that Santa Monica (where he lives) is a very special kind of place with a very high concentration of people like Wayne. Even more to the point is that Campaign for Economic Democracy activists share a lifestyle, even down to similar tastes in music, wine and food. Thus even those who would most like to think of our society in organic communitarian forms cannot avoid the lifestyle enclave as the effective social expression of our personal lives.

We say we go to a certain church because we enjoy its diversity. But when we embark on our church-shopping, we’re most likely intent on finding a church where there are like-minded people who we would enjoy spending time with.

To be fair, "most groups in America today embody an element of community as well as an element of lifestyle enclave". But it bears asking whether the activities we conceive of as “community-building” are more about lifestyle and preference than interdependence and commitment.


*Despite caring deeply about what words mean, I seem to use the wrong words ALL THE TIME. For instance, a few entries ago, I initially used the word "mulch" instead of "munch". And at home, I always say one noun when I really mean another: I'll say "cup" instead of "plate" or "downstairs" instead of "upstairs". Sigh. I have some bizarre form of verbal dyslexia.
**All italicized sections of the above blog post are from Habits of the Heart, a book that I am enjoying immensely in case you haven't picked that up yet. It might even get 5 stars.

when words lose their meaning (5)

I stumbled upon Kasmeneo’s fashion photo stream via the Sociological Images blog. Kasmeneo regularly wears women’s clothing and posts photos of his outfits on flickr. While I have no objection to him wearing women’s clothing**, I am disappointed with his choice of vocabulary to express his opinion on the matter:

Fashion is one of my major hobbies… and mainstream men’s fashion is much too boring. So I take most of my clothes and shoes from the women’s department, as there’s just much more items, styles, colors, and materials to choose from.
That’s also my personal statement regarding equal rights - they include the right of clothing choice. What you see here is what I wear everyday, at work, in town, for shopping, whatever. And I hope that publishing my pics here can convince some men that nice clothes and shoes are not a girl’s privilege. It’s all there, you just have to take it - just like the girls do with our stuff.

The term “rights”, whether “equal rights” or “human rights”, is constantly co-opted for the purposes of demanding or justifying our desires. The line between our postmodern consumer wants and the “basic rights and dignities to which all humans are entitled” is gradually blurred.

I don’t know a single politician who doesn’t mention ten times a day “the fight for human rights” or “violation of human rights.” But because people in the West are not threatened by concentration camps and are free to say and write what they want, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity, the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone towards everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights.

~ Milan Kundera, quoted in Richard Stivers’ "The Illusion of Freedom and Equality"

If right implies choice, choice suggests desire. Indeed, right as an expansionistic concept is a metaphor for desire… Rights easily become the desires that advertising presents to us as needs, the fulfillment of which is left open to our choices.

~ “The Illusion of Freedom and Democracy” Richard Stivers

* In order to keep up with trendy summer blockbuster movies (Terminator Salvation, Star Trek) I am officially rebooting this series.
** To be fair, he makes the clear point that women do wear men’s clothing and it would be unreasonable to impose a double standard for matters of fashion. Furthermore, he actually pulls off the look fairly well. I really don't think men look that bad in skirts.

how to identify a hipster*

that is if you care…

In the movie Adaptation (starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep), New Yorker magazine writer Susan Orlean ends up in an affair with John LaRoche, an unlikely match given that he lacked the sophistication and cosmopolitanism of her usual circle of friends, who seemed rather concerned about hosting interesting dinner parties and mocking others. Perhaps what drew Susan to John was precisely what her group of worldly and successful friends did not possess—a passion for something. Susan notes in the movie: I suppose I do have one unembarrassed passion. I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately.

If I were to find a distinguishing characteristic that would separate a hipster from someone who is not, that is what it would be. Someone who cares passionately, genuinely and sincerely about something other than themselves is not part of this death movement of Western civilization.

And sometimes I find myself precariously on the edge of that distinction—as noted in my profile, I have many “hip” interests, amongst which are riding bikes, buying thrift shop clothing, listening to independent music, knitting and sewing. In addition, I live in a trendy neighborhood and work for a nonprofit. I don’t think I am cool, but no hipster ever admits to being one.**

But what troubles me most is how hard it can be for me to care passionately about something. There are definitely people/themes/ideas that spark my care—urban poverty, labor injustice, food economics, sex trafficking and immigration. However, it’s been hard to turn those moments of thought and emotion into more concrete and consistent action, especially in a society that writes off those who care passionately about something as obsessive and extreme (perhaps we do this so that we don’t need to confront how meaningless our lives actually are). Our society preaches moderation, balancing passions with security so that we can live in guilt-free comfort.

But I know that Jesus called his disciples to abandon their fishing nets (their livelihood), and rely upon him, without the security around which they had built their former lives. And in knowing this, in my comfortable post-college life, I find myself craving something to care about passionately.

So I hope this time of unrealized good intentions will be an incubating period for a more defined passion. Of the many things that I could be (the existential crisis afforded to me by my privilege and education), I would like to be something other than hip. I want to commit myself passionately to something, so that I can live for more than just myself, or rather, so that I can be part of something that is greater than myself. And I guess therein lies the answer, I can start by caring passionately (once again) about God, and maybe everything else will fall into place.



* You might also try the book Field Guide to the Urban Hipster (a little outdated now though as the book's usage of the category hipster is more broad)
** Consider for instance this conversation, from the Adbusters article:
Standing outside an art-party next to a neat row of locked-up fixed-gear bikes, I come across a couple girls who exemplify hipster homogeneity. I ask one of the girls if her being at an art party and wearing fake eyeglasses, leggings and a flannel shirt makes her a hipster.
“I’m not comfortable with that term,” she replies.
Her friend adds, with just a flicker of menace in her eyes, “Yeah, I don’t know, you shouldn’t use that word, it’s just…”
“Offensive?”
“No… it’s just, well… if you don’t know why then you just shouldn’t even use it.”
“Ok, so what are you girls doing tonight after this party?”
“Ummm… We’re going to the after-party.”

in praise of being like a child (as opposed to acting like one)

Today’s consumerism has made possible an extended childhood, justifying selfish pursuits and immediate gratification in the guise of self expression, customer satisfaction and economic growth. However, many seem to be waking up from their shopping frenzy, realizing that it is perhaps time to grow up.*

But I don’t think our only problem is that we act too much like children—we also need to become more like children. I don’t want to idealize childhood innocence—I don’t believe it exists as any parent would note how quickly a child learns how to say “No!” and “Mine!”. However, there is a quality of being a child, that seems to get lost in the endless deluge of evaluation and judgment to follow from peers, parents, and authority figures over the course of one’s coming to age.

When I flipped through short stories I wrote in elementary school, I remember how free I felt printing out those characters on paper, and how I never wondered whether or not it was actually good writing. I wrote because I loved to write and not because I desired any acclaim or approval from others.

I remember spending hours playing make-believe in my own backyard and journaling fantasy worlds in my diaries, unashamed of what a silly “waste of time” that must have all been. It was fun and it didn’t matter what the rest of the world thought.

I remember crawling into my parent’s bed on a Saturday morning, to cuddle and feel safe. I was free from worry about whether or not they would put food on the table or a roof over my head. It would be done. I could depend on them.

Where has all this freedom disappeared to? When did it get lost in all the worries of the world? Now instead, I am stuck in the adult world of second guessing, pride and shame, doubting, mistrust and approval-seeking. Childish in my wants and complaints, but unchildlike in my faith and hope.

I don’t really want to grow up and become an adult. That is not a desirable solution for my childishness. I don’t want to feel like I am in control and capable of managing my own life, hiding my insecurities with a paper fort of resume achievements. In fact, there are moments when I am quite glad that my entry into the “real world” has been beset by confusion and surprise, instead of success and clear direction. I am glad because it has given me the opportunity to become smaller and more child-like, so that God can become larger.



* Some interesting articles on this topic:

From Adbuster’s Too Comfortable to Take Risks:

Social critic Mariko Fujiwara blames the breakdown on the collapse of the family system, among other factors. The baby-boomer parents achieved a level of middle-class comfort. They had fewer children so they could sustain that comfort – and they gave their children everything, except the strength and guidance to navigate the myriad choices and uncertainties of the twenty-first century.

“Japanese kids today feel that if anything goes wrong for them, it will be disastrous for the entire family,” says Fujiwara. “So they don’t even want to try. There is a mismatch between their aspirations and their willingness to work to achieve them ‘no matter what.’ They thought material and digital connections would be enough, but they’re discovering that they and their parents were wrong. Today’s Japanese kids are incredibly unhappy.”

What if Japan, the face of the future, is showing us who we are becoming – as a kind of proverbial ‘canary in a coal mine,’ a Cassandra of our trans-cultural futures. Consumerist, protectionist Japan is now celebrated worldwide as the Asian arbiter of cool, even chic. But at home, endless consumer choice and cleverness is starting to look hollow.

Evangelion auteur Hideaki Anno, now 47, believes that the problem may not lie exclusively with Japan’s younger generation. Instead, he says, there is no adulthood for them to grow into. “We are a country of children,” Anno recently told a reporter from The Atlantic Monthly. “We don’t have any adult role models in Japan.”

I predict that the dilemma facing Japan – how to create a sophisticated adult culture in a capitalist society that has less need or room for one will – become commonplace in the coming years.

From Against August from David Warren Online (article courtesy of Nick):

It might even be said that the “rights of childhood” -- I am trying to form this idea in contemporary terms -- have been transferred, by successive Acts of Parliament, from children to the childless.

What are these rights? Chiefly, the right to play, often away from mature supervision; the right to breathe, away from traffic and similar threats; the right to live in a fantastical world of one’s own invention; the right to refuse responsibilities; the right to demand entitlements, and to receive the fruits of others’ sacrifices; the right to be taken care of, and empathized with, whenever something goes wrong.

These were all, in previous generations, among the solemn rights of children, but today belong almost exclusively to a much older class with large disposable income, which is to say, “Dinks” (double income, no kids). To which we might add, “Shinkeroaks” (single high income, no kids, eschewing relationships of any kind). And I have noticed that the sound of a noisy child is extremely unwelcome in the environments they have created for themselves.

While this last remark might be taken as carrying a political edge -- and it is true that the (mostly urban) childless provide the demographic backbone for all “liberal” and “progressive” parties today -- it should be said explicitly that the Left has no monopoly on dinkish and shinkeroaksome behaviour. It is available to anyone who wants to buy into what the late Pope called “the culture of death,” in which we live only for ourselves, and for the moment.

Adbusters also has a feature article on hipsters, the Dead End of Western Civilization, the epitome of today's culture that combines childish consumerism with adult cynicism:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

...

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Speaking of hipsters, have you checked out the hipster Olympics yet? Or the appropriately named Stuff Hipsters Don't Like.

garbage dump

I’ve just returned from vacation in cool California and am returning to the humid weather of Philadelphia and my overflowing “Word Document” where I amass all the articles and quotes for this blog. So I thought I would clean my plate as I did previously before posting again (currently in the pipeline are some scribblings on the birth, adolescence and middle age of Philadelphia, crafting and consumerism, and rather reluctantly, on the topic of being Asian American, since I am technically now an American. I suppose I could consider taking topic suggestions as well).

First of all, this cartoon is incredible, though I can’t seem to remember where it is from:


A similar graph from this White Courtesy Telephone blog post also suggests the inanity of much research.


Also, on an academic note, it’s been all over the news that Peter Enns has resigned from Westminster Theological Seminary (WTS) in what appears to be a theological difference. In my completely amateur opinion, it marks WTS’ move away from academic scholarship and more as a denominational training ground. Institutions, like cities, have personality and character. They are born, they change, they age, and eventually they also will die.

There’s been more talk about the students who are receiving elite educations. An adjunct faculty writes about the spirit of entitlement that dominates Harvard University. The article has been hotly contested and debated, so if you’re interested, run some searches on it or check the additional links on aldaily.com.

So given the state of today’s academic environment, the recent passing of Russian writer Alexander Solzhentisyn should merit attention. Solzhentisyn was a bold writer who openly criticized and denounced the Russian communist regime, in particular writing about the horrors of the gulags. Articles from the Inquirer and the Economist.

It was also refreshing to see an SFMOMA exhibit on China “Half Life of a Dream”. The artwork seemed meaningful because it actually seemed to have something relevant to say – perhaps because China has more of a contradictory national narrative, than the postmodern fragmentation of the American narrative in recent years. The Philadelphia Inquirer has featured three stories spanning two decades about a Chinese woman who has now become a corporate executive. 2008, 1999, 1987.

Speaking of China, the Olympic Games are coming up. I’ve never been super into watching these competitions—and part of me is always devastated by the amount of havoc it can wreak upon a city—economically and ecologically. For the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, the city plans to bulldoze through a rare forest. There’s more coverage of China’s Olympic Games and the corresponding environmental and societal issues at the same site.

On the environmental note, as gas prices hike, bicycling has also finally been gaining the spotlight. There’s a useful Philadelphia Inquirer article with practical tips about bike commuting, as well as an Economist article on bicycling and its implications on street planning and safety.

My few words of advice from my on year of experiencing the indignities of commuting by bike: it is okay to wear skirts that are longer than skirt length, changing after you get to work is highly advisable, and it’s better to be slow and safe. Be respectful of motorists (e.g. don’t run red lights when they are trying to get through the intersection) but remember that you have a right to be on the road. However, if your safety is threatened (e.g. angry, aggressive driver), you may need to slow down and get off the road.

Meanwhile, I am reminded of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities with a recent Mercedes hit and run accident in the Philadelphia area. Hit and run accidents make me very angry. However, the murder of a four year old this week strikes an entirely different level of emotion, something akin to numbness.

Despite the violence in this area, Philadelphia still remains a great city to live in. Surprisingly, it is a lot safer than what one might imagine. Props to this recent college graduate who wrote for the Inquirer why he has decided to stay in Philadelphia and contribute to my continued ambivalence about the gentrification of this city.

Speaking of Philadelphia, I have been fairly satisfied with Nutter as our mayor, but that did not prevent me from feeling saddened about reading about the death of Jesus White, a homeless man who ran in the mayor primaries last year.

It’s especially striking that Jesus White worked a regular job, but still had no home. It saddens me that when the economy does well, it takes years for the minute benefits to “trickle down” to the poor. Yet when the economy suffers, the impact is felt immediately and most severely by the poor.

Speaking of policies, Barack Obama’s recent support of faith-based programs has also been on the minds of many. This Opinion article Why Obama seized the faith-based mantle by Amy Sullivan from USA Today traces the history of faith-based initiatives, something that surprisingly despite being one of Bush’s signature policies, stemmed from the Democratic party.

This other opinion article from the Baltimore Sun makes a argument against more funding for faith-based programs, but instead advocates more collaboration between religious congregations and secular nonprofit organizations. The writer’s argument is solution-oriented and forward-looking, which I appreciate, but he also assumes the necessity to professionalize care, something that I am not entirely comfortable with. While professional help may be valuable and important, we run the risk of evading responsibility ourselves, and pushing it off to a third party, outsourcing compassion if you will. While Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ has not been successful, I am pretty sure that putting the burden of caring for the poor entirely on the shoulder of the government will also fail. Institutionalized compassion will not bring about transformation. (Does institutionalized care even qualify as true compassion?)

All this talk about politics makes me remember once again that I am now a U.S. citizen and will be voting in the upcoming election! Perhaps more significantly, I have almost been married to this man for 6 months.

On a lighter note, Wordle.net is quite amusing. I ended up with this for this blog:

I'm also tired.

on the uses of diversity (2)

or: the entry in which I reveal my political cards (not that it should be a surprise to anyone)

The Economist recently published an article on political segregation. More and more Americans are choosing to live in areas where their political beliefs are in line with everyone else’s:

For example, someone who works in Washington, DC, but wants to live in a suburb can commute either from Maryland or northern Virginia. Both states have equally leafy streets and good schools. But Virginia has plenty of conservative neighbourhoods with megachurches and Bushites you've heard of living on your block. In the posh suburbs of Maryland, by contrast, Republicans are as rare as unkempt lawns and yard signs proclaim that war is not the answer but Barack Obama might be.

At a bookshop in Bethesda (one of those posh Maryland suburbs), Steven Balis, a retired lawyer with wild grey hair and a scruffy T-shirt, looks up from his New York Times. He says he is a Democrat because of “the absence of alternatives”. He comes from a family of secular Jews who supported the New Deal. He holds “positive notions of what government actions can accomplish”. Asked why he moved to Maryland rather than Virginia, he jokes that the far side of the river is “Confederate territory”. Asked if he has hard-core social-conservative acquaintances, he answers simply: “No.”

In the back of my mind, I’ve been wondering for quite some time: do I currently support Barack Obama because I really do believe he’s the best choice for president? Or is it because almost everyone else around me also does (I’m surrounded by liberals :P)? There’s still many months until election time, so there’s time to assess thoroughly and decide. If I end up doing what everyone else is doing, I hope it’s not from following the herd. And if I do decide differently, I hope I’ll have the courage not to hide it from others, because I am worried about what they think of me.*

It’s a pity that there isn’t more contact and dialogue between people of different political preferences. It’s easy to become silo-ed in our own bubbles, comfortably feeling smug with our political opinions, and writing off those who different opinions as stupid/elitist/ignorant/absurd etc… If we are to find some viable solutions to the problems that we are facing, ones that will actually be implemented in Congress and not just dreamed about, we do need to be actively trying to dialogue with and understand others’ opinions. Instead of just writing off another's opinion as wrong, it’s good to ask: What are their assumptions? (As Nick has written about in his blog). And if those assumptions are different, we can ask: why are they different? how can we work through our differences? and how can we continue to respect them in light of their different beliefs?

All this is much harder when we socially separate ourselves from those who have different political preferences from us. Living as neighbors, colleagues or friends, humanizes those “liberals” or “conservatives” or “anarchists” or “socialists”. It becomes much harder to label them and see them under the stereotype of their political preferences.** It puts us in a position where we must at the very least interact with them, instead of having all our knowledge of them be mediated through the internet and the evening news.

The Economist article continues on the dangers of lack of diversity:

There is a danger in this. Studies suggest that when a group is ideologically homogeneous, its members tend to grow more extreme. Even clever, fair-minded people are not immune. Cass Sunstein and David Schkade, two academics, found that Republican-appointed judges vote more conservatively when sitting on a panel with other Republicans than when sitting with Democrats. Democratic judges become more liberal when on the bench with fellow Democrats.

“We now live in a giant feedback loop,” says Mr Bishop, “hearing our own thoughts about what's right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear and the neighbourhoods we live in.”

Voters in landslide districts tend to elect more extreme members of Congress. Moderates who might otherwise run for office decide not to. Debates turn into shouting matches. Bitterly partisan lawmakers cannot reach the necessary consensus to fix long-term problems such as the tottering pensions and health-care systems.

America, says Mr Bishop, is splitting into “balkanised communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible.” He has a point. Republicans who never meet Democrats tend to assume that Democrats believe more extreme things than they really do, and vice versa. This contributes to the nasty tone of many political campaigns.

Interestingly enough:
The more educated Americans become, the more insular they are. Better-educated people tend to be richer, so they have more choice about where they live. And they are more mobile.



* It’s also still up in the air whether or not I will be able to vote in this historical election. I’m still in the process of applying for US citizenship. My civics exam is next week, and if I pass, I’m not sure when I will be sworn in. I haven’t voted before in my life, and so there’s a certain excitement in me about this upcoming election. I think in the past, I’ve taken voting too lightly, or ignored elections altogether, because it was something that I couldn’t be part of. But now, I might actually be part of this so-called democratic system, and I feel this growing sense of investment and care that I haven’t felt before.
** It’s ironic how “liberals” who are so sensitive about intolerance and racism, are rather quick to make generalizing comments about “conservatives”.

sex and women's rights

two terms not to be confused with one another

I’m a little late on writing about the Sex and the City Movie. Part of me enjoyed the TV show because it was funny and part of me secretly envied the wardrobes of those four women, but whatever other part of me that remained resented the show for the way that it represented the supposedly ideal life of a female:

At least, you could argue, Miranda has a job, as a lawyer. But the film pays it zero attention, and the other women expect her to drop it and fly to Mexico without demur. (And she does.) Worse still is the sneering cut as the scene shifts from Carrie, carefree and childless in the New York Public Library, to the face of Miranda’s young son, smeared with spaghetti sauce. In short, to anyone facing the quandaries of being a working mother, the movie sends a vicious memo: Don’t be a mother. And don’t work. Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life? On TV, “Sex and the City” was never as insulting as “Desperate Housewives,” which strikes me as catastrophically retrograde, but, almost sixty years after “All About Eve,” which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did—by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits—but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies, we’re not worth it. It’s true that Samantha finally disposes of one paramour, but only with a view to landing another, and her parting shot is a beauty: “I love you, but I love me more.” I have a terrible feeling that “Sex and the City” expects us not to disapprove of that line, or even to laugh at it, but to exclaim in unison, “You go, girl.” I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist, my head a whirl of closets, delusions, and blunt-clawed cattiness. All the film lacks is a subtitle: “The Lying, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe.”

~ From the New Yorker

If this is the epitome of role models for my generation of females, then I am quite saddened. Sex and the City is occasionally lauded for promoting sexual liberation and freedom for women. These days, it seems that female liberation is only about sexual liberation and reproductive rights.*

And if Sex and the City represents this, then this female liberation seems rather intent on turning all us women into selfish, men-obsessed, materialist girls, comfortably living out an extended childhood.

Has female liberation also lost sight of the actual critical issues of our society? To cite from the article from my previous post:

… elsewhere, thousands of honor killings and millions of female circumcisions transpire yearly. In Saudi Arabia, feminism is not second-guessing the remarks of a college president, but simply wanting to drive a car; on the West Bank, it is not being murdered when dating someone your father and brothers don’t like; in the Sudan, it is avoiding genital mutilation; in Iran, it is escaping stoning when accused of adultery…





* If you use the words “rights” and “freedom” to defend any issue, you will certainly sound justified in your reasoning.

Notions of Oppression of the Dead White Male in Today’s “Institutions of Higher Learning”

Subverting Structures of Minority Privilege and Deconstructing Diversity

In this article, The New Learning that Failed (published in the New Criterion), Victor Davis Hanson explores (and criticizes) the reasons for the failure for academic institutions to promote the study of classics (in other words, the so-called Western canon of white male dead authors). He makes several valid assessments on the state of the humanities departments in today’s university. He touches upon the inability to recognize beauty:*

There is no vocabulary left to convey ugliness or near perfection in art or literature—at least none that is not instantly deconstructed to prejudices of race, gender, and class. In a university class, we read mostly poems without meter, rhyme, musicality, or an elevated vocabulary, and novels without heroes or protagonists or even much action; we view art that is far removed from what the eye sees or would wish to see. The result is that our students cannot recognize beautiful things around them or within themselves.

Having studied plenty of minority and post-colonial literature, there’s some really beautiful work written (of course, we never described it using that word) that is well worth studying. But that doesn’t mean that a dead white male cannot write something relevant to us today. And there are plenty of poems without meter, rhyme or musicality, and protagonist-less novels that are excellent, but that doesn’t mean the ones that have them are so antiquated that they are not worth reading.

It’s important to study the writings of dead white males (and yes, there are exceptions), because they have in large part shaped the structure and basis of our society today. If we are to understand who we are now, we need to go back and understand where we have come from. We also need to understand what relevance they might have for our current situation.

Of course, I do believe it’s important to understand other cultures and acknowledge the ways that the Western canon may have omitted them, but if that becomes our sole war cry, then we may soon lose sight of reality:

Theories of exploitation were divorced from the real world. While relatively well-off students anguished in class over perceived gender and radical oppressions, the United States remained the number-one destination of the world’s immigrants fleeing political bias, poverty, and religious intolerance. The first-generation Mexican national who ran as fast as he could from the oppression of Oaxaca, and clipped the bushes outside the tasteful faculty office, instinctively knew and appreciated the advantages of Western culture far more than did the leisured professor inside.

Feminists insisted that Harvard’s president Larry Summers must be fired for insensitive remarks regarding the under-representation of women on math faculties; elsewhere, thousands of honor killings and millions of female circumcisions transpire yearly. In Saudi Arabia, feminism is not second-guessing the remarks of a college president, but simply wanting to drive a car; on the West Bank, it is not being murdered when dating someone your father and brothers don’t like; in the Sudan, it is avoiding genital mutilation; in Iran, it is escaping stoning when accused of adultery. In contrast, Greek learning had emphasized that deeds must match words; otherwise, to paraphrase Aristotle, it is easy to be ethical in our sleep.


Language in the university has lost its connection with reality—a danger that Socrates warned about in his battles with the Sophists and we have seen in our own time with the communist attempt to remake vocabulary to further social and economic agendas. “Diversity” does not mean diverse anything, surely not differences in political thought or ethnic backgrounds, but rather a requisite number of different skin colors. A classroom with three offspring of affluent African-American professionals can be “diverse” while having children of Appalachia or impoverished immigrants from Eastern Europe is not. The “free speech” area may mean that radical pro-Palestinian groups can hand out anti-Semitic literature or Chicano activists may vandalize conservative newspapers, but it is not a place where one can talk safely and candidly about the problems of illegal immigration, or social contributors to the AIDS epidemic, or the need to calibrate affirmative action more on class than race.

…

We, in contrast, have lost all sense of proportion and simply use the self-absorbed yardstick of our own times versus all others. Thus Iraq—not the summer of 1864 or December 1950—is the worst (fill in the blanks) war, blunder, or quagmire in our history or of all time. A flippant campus slur is the most sexist thing ever heard, as if the frontier woman on the Colorado plains without electricity and with eleven sick children never had it as rough. Wounded Knee is tantamount to Okinawa, the loyalty oaths of the 1950s commensurate to the Inquisition. And why not, when the purpose of education now is not to train young minds in a method of disinterested inquiry supported by historical exempla, but to condition them to think in preordained, deductive fashion—in other words, as Sophists rather than Socratics?

We’ve prioritized these assumed values of diversity over the quality and influence of the work itself, and abstained from making value judgments about any pieces of work lest we offend someone. The academy, supposedly a place for honest intellectual inquiry and pursuit of truth, has been overrun by political correctness. As the study of literature becomes more concerned with the nitpicking about notions of gender construction in Dicken’s novels, it loses more and more of its relevance.

Then again, it’s not like this is anything new:

Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question’. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge – to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour – this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.

~ from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters

*Of course, that’s also because we’ve assumed, that literature is a rather subjective matter, like all other things… and therefore, we can’t really say that it reveals any truth of any kind, only that it perhaps produces certain effects and reflects certain notions of prejudices and etc…

blablabla

I have been bogged down by unfinished blog entries. So to unload and start off on a fresh slate, I offer you some thought-provoking links and excerpts, and unfinished thoughts that have inspired me enough to write a few words, but perhaps not enough to write a full entry. This is long (four full screen lengths), so please browse….

Are YOU an African country ravaged by Aids and parched by drought? Fear not! Simply call Madonna! This fabulously wealthy white women from the West will solve all of your problems with a few fleeting visits, some looks of pained concern for the paparazzi, and a couple of million quid in donations…

There is something creepily colonialist in Madonna’s attitude to Africa. First we had the White Man’s Burden -– now we have the White Madonna’s Burden. More and more celebrities are treating Africa as a wide-eyed child that needs a Hollywood hug -– or as a wicked devil that needs a Hollywood hammering.

~ from the White Madonna's Burden

Sometimes, I wish people would stop whining about so-called “sexual oppression” in the United States. We have it pretty good in this country. Why do we keep complaining? Because apparently part of the answer to women’s sexual oppression, is to watch more porn:

Women bear the brunt of sexual oppression. While women have gained upward mobility in economic, political, and social realms, sexual liberation is the necessary key to open the door to full emancipation. Many women are not even aware of this insidious form of oppression. It is essential that women embrace their sexual identities. Women are entitled to enjoy sex and engage in any sexually activity that brings them pleasure without fear of punishment. This includes anything from thinking about sex to consuming pornography to engaging in sex acts that society still deems aberrant. If we find pornography, at large, to be degrading to women, then women must take charge of producing pornographic images that no longer cater to male desires through degrading depictions of women. Women, as consumers, have the power to transform the porn industry by creating a demand for porn that speaks to women’s interests.

~ from Canon Magazine

I hate the language of rights. It seems to imply that we have no responsibilities, only entitlements. It leads us to be complainers and whiners of our own situation, rather than people who are working to improve those of others. (A notable reflection on this can be found in White Courtesy Telephone.)

Who said “women are entitled to enjoy sex and engage in any sexual activity that brings them pleasure without fear of punishment?” Unless we get our tubes tied, we’re always going to have to worry about pregnancy. Our bodies are not entirely our own.

Yale student, Aliza Shvarts, created a scandal this year by creating artwork by collecting the blood from supposedly nine herbally-induced abortions—which in effect, is insulting to pro-choice and pro-life supporters alike for the manner in which she took so lightly human life. And this is the rhetoric she spews:

Among her "conceptual goals," she wrote in the Yale Daily News, was "to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are 'meant' to do from their physical capability." Shvarts wanted to show that "it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are 'meant' to birth a child."

Luckily, atleast some do not buy into the jargon:

Yale, of all colleges, never should have been blind-sided by such a stunt. One of the most astute critics of the humanities is on its faculty. Last year, Anthony T. Kronman, the former dean of Yale's law school, published "Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life." This superb book traces the historical rise and fall of the humanities, which, Kronman writes, "are not merely in a crisis. They are in danger of becoming a laughingstock, both within the academy and outside it."

~ both quotes from the Washington Post

And so while rich college-educated women rail on about abortion rights and pornography rights, there are lots of more significant ways that oppression is going on in the world:

We All Own Stolen Goods — and How Defending Property Rights Can Help the World’s Most Oppresed People by Leif Wenar
Confessions of a Sweatshop Inspector by T. A. Frank

But of course, we don’t really have to worry about this because we’re adults in America. We only need to care about ourselves. Today, the signifiers of adulthood, the emergence from the so-called university “campus bubbles”, are framed wall art, dry-clean only clothing, studio apartments, even more casual sex, Coach bags and happy hour martinis. Welcome Sex and the City, our beloved four role models of young professional life. Even in later years, the true keynote of adulthood is not so much marriage, as the purchase of dream suburban home, or if you’re really high up on the achievement ladder, the urban luxury flat.

Barber argues that the new ethic of capitalism is one of ‘infantilisation’: money today is to be made in maintaining adults as needy children, who stuff down dumbed-down films, saccharine food and video games. While in the early stages of capitalism it benefited the capitalist system for everybody to save their pennies, now it benefits the system for us to splurge every penny and borrow more. While in the time of Franklin people were encouraged to restrain themselves and reinvest, now, says Barber, we are encouraged to act on every immediate whim, to be the grasping child in a sweet shop unable to say no...

If consumerism is emphasized more in our culture than production, play more than work, this is not only because consumption is what Western capitalism needs now – it is also because the production side of life is so lacking in ideological justification.

It is not so much that we have an ethic of consumption, but that – by default – it remains as one of the few meaningful experiences in our lives. There is a tangibility and satisfaction to buying – to picking out a new shirt or a new album and taking it home – that means that shopping remains for individuals a confirmation of their power to make things happen in the world.

The power of consumption has been usefully theorised by the Marxist sociologist Georg Simmel. In The Philosophy of Money, he looks at how buying an object is an act of individual subjectivity, the person stamping himself on a thing and claiming his right to its exclusive enjoyment. Shopping remains a way in which our choices have a tangible effect, in which we can make something in our lives new and different.

~ from a review in Spiked Online on the book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults and Swallow Citizens Whole, by Benjamin Barber

I am quite saddened if shopping ends up being one of the few meaningful experiences that I can have in my life, and that it's one of the few ways that I can make an impact in the world and express myself. Is it not bad enough that I am what I do, that now I also have to be what I buy?

Today's American children, by contrast, get an average of 70 new toys a year, yet child development experts agree that the best toys are simple playthings such as blocks, balls and figurines that a child can play with over and over, in new ways. When I was growing up, a sticker was something precious that a stationery store owner would carefully cut off a roll and sell for 25 cents. Today, a made-in-China jumbo book of 600 stickers can be bought at CVS for $6.99. Something has been lost in this ostensibly positive development...

Far from inducing feelings of inadequacy, saying no to the parenting consumer culture should make parents feel all the wiser...

As for my husband and me, we hardly have unlimited resources, but we're still planning to go forth and multiply in the big city. The way we figure it, one day our children will be grateful for what we didn't give them -- and what we did for them instead.

~ by Pamela Paul, author of "Parenting Inc.: How We Are Sold on $800 Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches, Toddler Couture, and Diaper Wipe Warmers -- and What It Means for Our Children."

the disappearance of place (2)

We celebrate the internet because it seems to connect us to a degree that we never could have imagined before: MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, YahooGroups, Ravelry, Second Life, not to mention the numerous message boards and special interest, dating websites and chatrooms--- all the various networks tying us to people we’ve never met and locations we’ve been never been to. But the internet only links us via the “space of flows”, and not through an integration of place. It connects us conveniently and without real risk or vulnerability—we can choose to hide behind screennames and profiles, and there is always the easy option to sign off, and sign back on again with a new username.

While I do believe there has been value from the internet, especially in the trading of information and ideas, and the outlet for communication and dialogue—I sincerely hope our “Second Lives” here do not become our First Lives—that we do not choose to play our games in our online networks at the expense of loving our neighbours, as Jesus has called us to do. (While we think we are in charge of technology, sometimes technology is taking charge of us…)

In physical communities we are forced to live with people who differ from us in many ways. But virtual communities offer us the opportunity to construct utopian collectivities- communities of interest, education, tastes, beliefs, and skills. In cyberspace we can remake the world out of an unsettled landscape.

~ Stephen Doheny Farina*

~

Likewise with the television, we run similar risks of trading in the reality of our neighbourhoods, for the abstractions of our easy, low-cost (and unfulfilling) entertainment:

The American house has been TV centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever occurs beyond its four walls. (TV rooms are called “family rooms” in builder’s lingo. A friend who is an architect explained to me: “People don’t want to admit that what the family does together is watch TV.”) At the same time, the television is the family’s chief connection with the outside world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather, it seals them off from it. The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.

~ James Howard Kuntsler,

~

Speaking of which, some random tidbits about television gleamed from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone:

- People who say they “Strongly agree” with the statement “Television is my primary form of entertainment” also have much higher incidences of giving the middle finger to another driver than those who say they “Strongly disagree” with that statement.
- Studies conducted on people’s moods throughout the day through different activities, discovered that people’s happiness/satisfaction in watching television was similar to that of doing laundry, cooking or other household chores.
- Nevertheless, researchers found it difficult to get people to give up television for their studies. One couple was paid $500 to give up TV for a month. The wife remarked “There was nothing to do. I talked with my husband” (paraphrase).

Sometimes I wonder: would I have turned out differently (a better, more knowledgeable person perhaps?) had I not watched my 1-4 hours of television a day growing up?

~

The Amish when asked about how they know which technological inventions to admit and which to refuse from Tay Keong Tan “Silence, Sacrifice and Shoo-fly Pies: An Inquiry in to the Social Capital and Organizational Strategies of the Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania”:

We can almost always tell if a change will bring good or bad tidings. Certainly things we definitely do not want, like the television and the radio. They would destroy our visiting practices. We would stay at home with the television or radio rather than meet with other people. The visiting practices are important because of the closeness of people. How can we care for the neighbor if we do not visit them or know what is going on in their lives?

~

In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbour as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.

~ Benjamin Disraeli (1845)

*All quotes in this entry are from Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning*

What is lost in an instant-fix society where there exists a pill to remedy every little discomfort there is to be had...

But does the American addiction to happiness make any sense, especially in light of the poverty, ecological disaster and war that now haunt the globe, daily annihilating hundreds if not thousands? Isn't it, in fact, a recipe for delusion?

And aren't we merely trying to slice away what is most probably an essential part of our hearts, that part that can reconcile us to facts, no matter how harsh, and that also can inspire us to imagine new and more creative ways to engage with the world? Bereft of this integral element of our selves, we settle for a status quo. We yearn for comfort at any cost. We covet a good night's sleep. We trade fortitude for blandness.

~ From The Miracle of Melancholia by Eric G. Wilson

*Ecclesiastes 7:2-4 ~ It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

for the love of flesh

As Second Life continues to spread its meta domination of the seemingly infinite expanse of cyberspace and the limited confines our everyday lives, I remember how much I love the physical.

Matt and I recently found a beautiful third floor 2-bedroom apartment at a corner house in Garden Court near Malcolm X/Black Oak Park. Original hardwood floors. Huge windows. Large rooms. Lots of light. A home for us, atleast until rent gets too expensive. I feel like it will be a place where I will love living and being (with Matt of course).


It is good to feel the chill of morning air as I slip out of my warm cozy bed. It is good to walk my slippery way across the icy sidewalks. It is good to feel warmth returning to my ears after biking around in the cold. It is good to be able to sense the varieties of feeling that our bodies are designed to experience.

It is good to touch and feel. It is good to remember that our bodies are good, that our enlightenment and salvation does not exist in some ethereal airy region of the netherworld, but in a tangible, concrete, redeemed existence of what is physical. (We know that we have become gnostics, when we think that prayer is a more spiritual act than sex.)


The simulation of Second Life does hold its appeal to me—the idea that you can be things you would never be, go to places that you’d never go to, fly around and survey the landscape from the comfort of your own home—the illusion that you are not limited by your physical body or your physical situation.

But I am not just whoever I want to fashion myself to be. I do not believe I can create my own identity according to my preferences. There is something more essential inside. There is something more true that I am becoming. I am real. I am made out of flesh. I can touch and be touched. I have a body. And there is something so intangibly beautiful about the pleasures and the vicissitudes of what is tangible. Maybe I’m missing out by not starting a second life, but I am counting on there being enough in this life to keep me busy and satisfied.

killing religion, tolerating culture

Apparently, China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs has instituted Order No. 5, a law announcing: “the management measures for the reincarnation of living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism.” This “important move to institutionalize management on reincarnation” basically prohibits Buddhist monks from returning from the dead without government permission”

Slavoj Zizek in a New York Times op-ed piece, responds:

It is all too easy to laugh at the idea of an atheist power regulating something that, in its eyes, doesn’t exist. However, do we believe in it? When in 2001 the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, many Westerners were outraged — but how many of them actually believed in the divinity of the Buddha? Rather, we were angered because the Taliban did not show appropriate respect for the “cultural heritage” of their country. Unlike us sophisticates, they really believed in their own religion, and thus had no great respect for the cultural value of the monuments of other religions.

The significant issue for the West here is not Buddhas and lamas, but what we mean when we refer to “culture.” All human sciences are turning into a branch of cultural studies. While there are of course many religious believers in the West, especially in the United States, vast numbers of our societal elite follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores of our tradition only out of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong: Christmas trees in shopping centers every December; neighborhood Easter egg hunts; Passover dinners celebrated by nonbelieving Jews.**

“Culture” has commonly become the name for all those things we practice without really taking seriously. And this is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians” with a “medieval mindset”: they dare to take their beliefs seriously. Today, we seem to see the ultimate threat to culture as coming from those who live immediately in their culture, who lack the proper distance.**

Perhaps we find China’s reincarnation laws so outrageous not because they are alien to our sensibility, but because they spill the secret of what we have done for so long: respectfully tolerating what we don’t take quite seriously, and trying to contain its political consequences through the law.

~

On a side note, Zizek also points out that these government measures may pale in comparison to other economic transformation—Lhasa now is also home to karaoke bars and Disney-like Buddhist theme parks:

“In short, the media image of brutal Chinese soldiers terrorizing Buddhist monks conceals a much more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States. Beijing finally learned the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police forces, camps and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations?”

Better than all the crusades and genocides and laws, what better killer of religion than the promise of material comfort?


* Except that for all I know, there’s nothing ACTUALLY Christian about Christmas trees and Easter egg hunts. I guess I owe my thanks to Hallmark, but I can’t be too critical, I use their e-cards.
** As a counterpoint, Meic Pearse argues in his book Why the Rest hates the West: "By their constant, mindlessly inaccurate resort to the “f-word” – fundamentalism – to describe the upsurge of religious fervor in much of the non-West, Western secularists are employing a boo-word that long ago lost its original meaning and has come to signify “more-religious-than-I-happen-to-like”—and thus to say more about the speaker than about the persons, things or phenomena described. It is one more signifier that Western self-styles “multiculturalists” are, in fact, refusing to take seriously any culture but their own

super market choices

We sometimes do quite a bit of research on what we buy. We read reviews about car mileage and maintenance and comparison shop our electronics. Yet when it comes to food, the very items we use to nourish our bodies, we often don’t ask where it comes from and we end up having our choices made for us. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma explores the food industry and the findings are initially rather dismal.*

Low-income Iowa farmers purchase vast amounts of fertilizer, pesticides and corn seed, in order to produce more generic corn (which only pulls down prices, which will only erode the land and pollute the water). The corn will then be purchased and transformed into high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oil, the backbone of processed foods (and also found in a surprising number of other foods—cereal and bread).

Cows and chickens are crammed in confined quarters, and forced fed meat and corn mixtures (contrary to their natural diets) until they are ready for slaughter. Egg hens are crammed even more tightly than meat hens, with as many as 10% dying from the confined conditions.

While organic once offered an alternative to our mass-produced supermarket choices, it has also turned into economies of scale affair. As Gene Kahn, former (?) CEO and founder of Cascadian Farms (a big corporate organic produce company) comments, “Everything morphs into the way the world is.”

Organic produce mostly comes from large industrial size farms since it’s cheaper than buying from many individual farmers, and then tons and tons of oil are expended in shipping the produce fresh across the nation or even across the globe. Free range chickens are only given a small door open to the outside in the last two weeks of their nine week lifespan (after they have grown accustomed to staying indoors in their cooped up pen, only slightly better than those of the non-free-range variety). As Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, “Now which chicken shall we call ‘organic’? I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the government, because now they own the word.” I guess organic ceases to mean anything anymore when organic TV dinners are now sold at Whole Foods. (All that being said, organic food has greatly diminished the amount of pesticides and chemicals poured into our soils and waters).

So it saddens me to see even the most integral choices of our lives embedded with injustice to the poor and damage to the environment. I find it harder and harder to imagine being able to live without participating in these injustices, as I am certainly one who has benefited greatly from the comforts that these systems have afforded us.

As Geez magazine puts it, I wake up finding myself “somewhere between dreams for a better world and a padded, private life (I) didn’t exactly choose”. In today’s supermarket abundance, the vast array of flavours and textures, I don’t feel like I have very many real choices.



* This entry was compiled from quick notes I made in response to the earlier half of Pollan’s book, which was rather depressing. If I ever get around to it, I will write my response to the second half of his book, which was far more hopeful, and does offer some alternatives to our usual supermarket choices. By the way, Omnivore’s Dilemma is an excellent book—I highly recommend it. Not only does Pollan succeed in making 100 pages written about corn engrossingly interesting, he’s also made me rethink what and how I eat. I actually have an extra copy… so please contact me if you would like to borrow it/have it (you have to promise to read it!).

luxury is artificial poverty

I was browsing in the bookstore today and stumbled upon a book called Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster by Dana Thomas. The book describes the transformation of old luxury brands such as Chanel and Louis Vuitton into mass-produced corporate commodities.

The writer is nostalgic for an old aristocratic age when luxury still signified quality, and not a mere brand name. Today, even the supposed luxury brands are mass produced. Corporate brands even deceive the consumer: a common practice is to manufacture most of a handbag or a shoe where it is cheap ( e.g. China). "Made in China" stickers are put on the products, but then are later removed. Then, a smaller portion of the product is manufactured in Italy (a bag handle, an insole) and inscribed with "Made in Italy" so the consumer assumes that the entire object is made by some skilled craftsman in Italy. So a $2,000 bag by Chanel could very easily be made by the same 15-year-old laborer in a sweatshop as a Wal-Mart $10 purse.

Though I have no desire to return to the former hierarchical class structure and the material symbols of distinction, I too admire elegant design and craftsman quality, and am disappointed that good, valuable products are hard to find in these assembly line days. We have a million copies, but nothing real. The loss of authenticity continues.

I am also saddened by the power luxury brands exert over us—Japanese girls who prostitute themselves so they can buy Louis Vuitton. A recent college graduate chooses to work as an investment banker, regularly working 100 hour weeks, in order to buy Gucci diamonds with her lucrative bonuses. Suburban mothers run up high-interest credit card debt to buy the latest Hermès scarf. And I catch myself desiring the products in the glamorous fashion magazine photo spread, or envying the aura of sophisticated looking women who shop in the Burberry and Coach stores near my workplace.*

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

~ Socrates

* Money aside, looking that way would take so much maintenance that I would probably have to spend 2 hours a day grooming and ironing in order to achieve it. You become that which you seek after.

** An alternative to luxury brands is esty.com, a website where tons of individuals or small organizations sell handmade arts and crafts, from jewelry to handbags to screen-printed t-shirts and clothing. 10 Thousand Villages, a non-profit, that sells fair trade products is also pretty cool, though you run the risk of your apartment looking a bit too "exotic".

lost in television

Yesterday, Matt and I finally finished watching three seasons of Lost. We started watching early March, and have been watching through some sixty or so episodes in the last three months.

Though part of me longs to watch more and find out more about the show, the rest of me is relieved that this too is over. I have felt chained to the television for the last three months. It was fun and entertaining at first, an enjoyable activity that Matt and I could share with each other. But soon it became an all too easy and comfortable answer to the question "What should we do together?" And though we would spend hours together, we would feel like we had not spent any quality time together at all, since we had spent those hours staring passively at a television screen.

It was easy to get used to being entertained and letting the hours pass, instead of finding creative ways to spend meaningful time together. It was easy to slip into a mode where television controlled us and not the other way around.

Recently, Ray Bradbury clarified that his novel, Fahrenheit 451, which describes an authoritarian society where books are burned, is not about government censorship, but about the dulling effects of television. The government does not use televisions as a medium of control, but rather the people choose it as an easy opiate. The fireman in the novel says "We give them what they want".

Books require too much work, too much active engagement. Television is an easy answer to all the difficult questions we may have, because it allows us to forget about them and escape into the world of special effects and good-looking actors. And so the books burn.*

I am looking forward to life without a television and without Lost. No longer can I cope with my boredom or loneliness with a flip of a remote control, letting the colours and sounds wash over me. No longer can I forget about my fears and problems by distracting myself with some mediocore tv program. Instead, I might actually be able to find some real solutions.




* More on his website and in an article in the LA Times:.
** And by the way, I actually like Lost alot. I think it's a great show. I just didn't like how it semi-dominated all my free time for three whole months. :P

when words lose their meaning (3.5)

work/life balance

a snazzy catch phrase used by corporations to indicate that their employees are expected to work a lot. if the standard hours were 9 to 5, there would be no need to mention "work/life balance"

work - a word often confused with 'career'. work means exerting effort to accomplish something. but what? people talk about wanting to "accomplish something in their lives", to look back at their careers and note their milestones and achievements. but what do we accomplish in work? aside from using it as a means to an ends (a comfortable lifestyle, lining our nests and earning us prestige). aside from a game where money and goods get shifted around from one white glove to another. aside from perpetuating a system that sustains our status in the current hierarchy of privilege. (we're organization kids. we don't question authority).

life - in new york, life means some mindless form of consumption. an endless proliferation of restaurants, clubs, shows and events (accompanied by the frequent complaint of things not being good enough). it also means taking cabs to where you need to go. nice apartment. life means the frequent gathering of a diverse group of people, meaning an ethnically diverse group of upper middle class young professionals. life means taking a dance class, or picking up a hobby, such as a cooking (oddly enough, wasn't it once a neccessity?). maybe life means getting married and having kids and moving to the suburbs. what does it mean to live well?

a slash divides work from life - as though life begins when work ends. as though work can never be considered integrally as part of our lives. as though work is something we discard and leave behind us as soon as we leave the office. as though we're free not to question what we do at work, and the rest of our values, because work is something separate, divided, forever locked in a compartment away from life. (and yet we still seek fulfillment in work? instead of life? is achievement confined only to the sphere of career?)

balance - this firm has good work/life balance - you wake up at 5am to catch a 6:30am flight. you groggily walk into client site at 8:30am and continue working, eating lunch at your desk, until 8:30pm where you then catch a cab to some ritzy hotel where you then may order overpriced room service and eat like a queen while you watch images flash on a flatscreen tv. thus your week continues with a similar pattern, perhaps interspersed with dinner at a fancy restaurant then thursday rolls around and you fly out on a 5:30pm or 6:30pm flight on Thursday to arrive home at 8pm or 9pm. if you're lucky, it's earlier than when you'd arrive at the hotel normally. then on fridays you work in the office so you get to see all your colleagues who have been packed off to the four corners of the world, and by the end of the day if your work is done, you head over to happy hour. and yes, because you went to happy hour, you are happy. though you work like a donkey during the week, the alcohol makes you forget all about it. good work/life balance. is it not all relative? what does work/life balance mean?

*Note: This entry is not meant to be a bitter, personal lash-out against my experience at my firm. Compared to what is expected at the firm and what hours are like at other investment banks or consulting firms, my hours have been very good, and my job managers and colleagues have treated me well. The last part of this entry comes as an expression of disillusionment with the general industry expectation that a 55 hour work week + travel is normal and acceptable and allows for plenty of time to engage in other "life" activities (and that in some cases, it's okay to make your employees work 100 hour weeks). It is the general "spirit" of the industry, not the individuals (though individuals inevitably subscribe to and participate in this spirit) that I have found difficult. That and my persistent idealist confused questioning of "what does this all amount to?"

**Some say that by creating new products to meet customer needs, or by freeing up money in capital marketes, we're allowing for increased standard of living. But are we assuming that people are simple-minded consumers, that will be happier and more fulfilled the more they buy? Others say that increased business and competition will mean better prices and products for consumers. Do we just say these things to make ourselves feel better? I don't know. If you have real answers, please find me.