Spinning racism as conservation

The New York Times has a startling article centering around a shuttering ice cream shop, The Great Divide, that unflinchingly presents the racist views of some residents of a rapidly-changing Queens community as some latter-day version of Jane Jacobs:

The closing of the beloved neighborhood spot strikes many residents as simply the latest sign of the death of old Bellerose. The bowling alley, another local hangout that some considered the beating heart of Bellerose, closed a few years back, to eventually be replaced by a Staples, among other stores. Several years ago, the nearby movie theater closed, and the building now houses a martial arts supply business.

There have been other changes, even more unsettling to some residents in this neighborhood, long a mostly white enclave of families of Irish, Italian and German stock. ...

The transformation has come as a shock to many of the neighborhood’s earlier settlers, some of whom say they wonder whether magazines tucked into seatbacks on flights between Mumbai and Kennedy Airport advertise homes in Bellerose.

And many residents are not surprised that the developers who plan to tear down the Frozen Cup are Indian immigrants. Some of the same developers recently opened a Quality Inn down the road in Floral Park, an establishment, Mr. Augugliaro said, that “stands out like the Taj Mahal.”

Nice start; nevermind that the shuttering of long-time neighborhood institutions is normal in all neighborhoods -- where was the Times when the bowling alley and movie theater closed. Or was that not a story because it wasn't bought by the same people who created the Taj Mahal?

And yeah, let's call it a divide and morally equate the people on either side; nevermind that one side is racist against the other. Let's just call it a he said, she said thing.

While New York is often praised as a gorgeous mosaic, ethnic tensions are hardly unknown in the city, especially in neighborhoods that undergo rapid demographic shifts. Sometimes tensions are expressed overtly; other times, they lurk under the surface, revealing themselves in conversations that can be heard in local bars and living rooms.

That is the case in Bellerose.

Yeah, racism is presented as two-sided ethnic tensions! And note the understated language -- "ethnic tensions are hardly unknown in the city". Ha! The killing of black kids by whites, the killing of Sikhs by whites, the killing of hipsanic kids by whites -- just tensions that are hardly unknown.

Harshad Patel, who lives with his family in Floral Park, immigrated to the United States in 1981. Before entering the hotel business, he worked as a restaurateur, a metal lathe operator, a water plant operator and a sewage treatment worker. He also ran an electroplating business.

He said he was perplexed by the veneration of the Frozen Cup.

“If they have so much feeling,” he said of the establishment’s devotees, “let them buy it. Let them run the Frozen Cup if they want to.”

But the business would not survive, he insisted. “Nowadays,” Mr. Patel said, “there are so many flavors on the market and so many places to go.”

To drive home his point, he made a public offer. If someone wanted to run the Frozen Cup for the next 10 years, he promised to sell the place at a $100,000 loss.

“Let me see,” he said with a grin. “Who is coming forward?”

See, Patel's views aren't the centerpiece of the article, because it's what some white residents think that really matter. So there's no response to what Patel says in the piece, the Times just quotes him and moves on.

As officers of the Queens Colony Civic Association and members of other community groups, Angela and Michael Augugliaro have been among the most vocal opponents of the plan to replace the Frozen Cup with a hotel.

But as they sat in their living room, they expressed unhappiness with what they see as other undesirable changes in the neighborhood: street vendors selling halal gyros; traffic congestion near the Indian and Pakistani grocery stores on Hillside Avenue; newly created mini-mansions, many of them occupied by extended South Asian families.

“They’re turning the neighborhood into a third-world country,” Mr. Augugliaro said. “We don’t want it over here to look like Richmond Hill or Jackson Heights,” he added, speaking of Queens neighborhoods with sizable South Asian populations.

As he spoke, Ms. Augugliaro shook her head in disapproval at some of his remarks, and he seemed to pick up on her unspoken criticism.

“I’m not a racist,” Mr. Augugliaro quickly added. In fact, he said, he was tired of the subject of race coming up so often. “What does race have to do with it?” he asked.

The couple later recalled a morning years ago when they saw an old man in an orange turban walking on the sidewalk with a curved sword slung from his waist like the one they remembered from the Ali Baba cartoons.

The man was a Sikh, and the object was a Kirpan, a sword carrying religious symbolism and worn by some adherents of the faith, though often a smaller version of the Kirpan is worn on a necklace under a shirt. The couple laughed as they recalled the scene.

“It was like a total shock,” Ms. Augugliaro said.

Yup, he's no racist.

Many of the South Asians who live in Bellerose have only good things to say about the neighborhood. On a snowy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Francis Thomas, the Indian-born owner of India Kitchen, a restaurant on Braddock Avenue, stood at the counter and said relations between the races in Bellerose were good. “They’re tolerant,” Mr. Thomas said of the people of Bellerose.

Yes, because tolerance is the highest value we aspire to here in America; it's weird for the Times to insert this paragraph, when so much of the article shows the residents aren't tolerant, and that'd it'd be weird for any South Asians to think that.

Instead the Times takes ordinary politeness, an unwillingness on the part of South Asians to speak ill to a newspaper about their neighbors, as a 'there's nothing here to see, move along' sentiment.

Next door to the India Kitchen, however, at a pub called Fuzzy’s Bar, where a grill called Wolf Dawg serves burgers and “hot dawgs,” patrons griped about their immigrant neighbors as “Jeopardy!” played on two small television sets.

“Everybody wants to bring their country here,” said Bruce Holloway, one patron who lives in Bayside, Queens. “They don’t want to look like Americans, they don’t want to dress like Americans, and they don’t want to speak English.”

“But they do come for the benefits,” volunteered his drinking buddy, who gave his name as Franco and said he grew up in Bellerose and used to go to the Frozen Cup for strawberry ice cream with chocolate sprinkles. And of the South Asian grocery stores, he added, one of which opened a month earlier down the block and had the word “bazaar” in its name, “It’s not the kind of store an American goes into.”

Of the newcomers, a group he describes simply as “the Indians,” he said, “They change everything that’s been here.” And he wondered aloud, “Where the hell do they get the money from?”

This is one of the things that drives me crazy about the Times -- they habitually think it's okay to use white as an euphemism for American. So the article is structured so that quotes about how no 'American' would go into a store, that South Asians don't want to look like 'Americans', aren't juxtaposed by a different view, they just float by.

Imagine if the guy was saying Jews aren't Americans or no American would go into a Jewish deli; it wouldn't be buried in the midst of a paragraph, there'd be an expert talking about how this kind of anti-Semitism is engrained among certain subcultures -- there'd be some sort of overt recognition that this statement isn't normal or correct.

But for the Times, apparently it's normal and no cause for alarm that an established, declining ethnic group is racist toward neighbors who are saving their community.

Heck, maybe racism really is just the new family values!

Idiot New York Times take on diversity

Edward Wyatt of the Times seems to disbelieve the reality of America's racial diversity, painting it as something that exists only within the artificial construct of the United Nations.

Generation Mix: Youth TV Takes the Lead in Diversity Casting: The red-carpet area at the premiere of the Disney Channel’s new Cheetah Girls movie last week looked less like the typical Hollywood cast party than some sort of United Nations session.

Adrienne Bailon, who plays Chanel in the trio of Cheetah Girls, drew on her Ecuadorean and Puerto Rican roots and chatted in Spanish with a television interviewer. Meanwhile Kiely Williams, an African-American actress who plays Aqua, and Sabrina Bryan, who plays Dorinda and whose real name is Reba Sabrina Hinojos, answered questions and waved to fans.

Deepti Daryanani, an actress from Calcutta, and Rupak Ginn, an American actor whose parents emigrated from India, wore outfits inspired by their roles in the television movie, “The Cheetah Girls One World,” in which the group travels to India to star in a film after one of its members misunderstands an invitation to Bollywood as one to Hollywood.

Other Disney stars in attendance included Brenda Song, the daughter of a Laotian Hmong immigrant father and a Thai-American mother, who starred in the Disney Channel movie “Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior”; Anna Maria Perez de Tagle, a daughter of Filipino and Spanish parents, and her “Camp Rock” co-star Roshon Fegan, who is part Filipino; and Shanica Knowles, an African-American actress who plays a high school rival of Miley Cyrus’s character on “Hannah Montana.”

It's almost like Wyatt didn't read his own quotes:

“This group of people is reflective of the life we all live right now,” said Debra Martin Chase, an executive producer of “The Cheetah Girls One World,” which will be shown Friday on the Disney Channel.

“One-third of the U.S. population is now nonwhite,” said Ms. Chase, one of a handful of prominent African-American producers in Hollywood. “That is reflected in the Disney Channel projects because they are committed to diversity. It has been a priority for them all along.”

Wyatt goes even further down his alice in wonderland path, citing as diversity the fact that the new 90210 has a couple of minor characters who are non-white, including one who's playing a fake ethnic role:

And “90210,” the updated version of the seminal 1990s teen drama set in Beverly Hills that will begin this fall on CW, features two minority cast members: Tristan Wilds, an African-American actor previously seen in HBO’s “Wire,” and Michael Steger, a multiethnic actor who plays an Indian film director in “The Cheetah Girls One World.” Mr. Steger, of Ecuadorean, Norwegian and Austrian descent, will portray an Iranian-American high school student in “90210.”

The article for all its wrong-headedness does, I think, mean well; but maybe the Times needs to take some lessons from Disney on this:

Gary Marsh, president for entertainment for Disney Channels Worldwide, said that executives at the company talked every day about how to promote greater diversity in front of and behind the camera.

“It’s something we work really hard at to make it look effortless,” he said. “We constantly push directors and casting directors and producers to make different decisions than they might otherwise make.”

Going to the dogs (and snakes)

What the heck is Chris Duncan of the AP thinking?

Rockets agree to send pick, Greene, Jackson to Kings for Artest: NBA front-office sources confirmed to ESPN.com that Ron Artest will be dealt to the Rockets in exchange for Houston's first-round draft pick in 2009, ex-King Bobby Jackson (who arrives with a $6.1 million expiring contract) and the draft rights to Donte Greene.

After wavering for more than two months, Artest elected not to opt out of the final year of his contract for $7.4 million by July 1. But the forward immediately announced he regretted his decision, saying the Kings had misled him on their interest in a long-term contract extension. Artest also said he couldn't see himself playing in Sacramento beyond next season.

Artest apologized to the Kings a few days later but one week after that, Artest demanded a trade, claiming he had been blinded to his career well-being by his friendship with the Maloof family, which owns the Kings.

Joe Maloof responded sharply to Artest, warning the forward to muzzle himself.

Yeah, by all means, let's equate black athletes with dogs whenever possible.

Then again, this is the organization that on at least two occasions has made the same ridiculous spell-check-related mistake:

Gore told the AP he hoped the speech would contribute to "a new
political environment in this country that will allow the next
president to do what I think the next president is going to think is
the right thing to do." He said both fellow Democrat Barrack Abeam and
Republican rival John moccasin are "way ahead" of most politicians in
the fight against global climate change.

New Yorker's Obama moment

Lee Siegel gets it right in the Times with his take on why the New Yorker Obamas cartoon was a dumb idea (and why those idiot liberals who are joining the conservative backlash against the criticism don't get it):

The problem is that the cartoon accurately portrays a ridiculous real-life caricature that exists as literal fact in the minds of some people, and it portrays it in terms that are absolutely true to that caricature. An analogous instance would have been a cartoon without commentary appearing in a liberal Northern newspaper in the 1920s — a time when Southern violence against blacks was unabated — that showed a black man raping a white woman while eating a watermelon. The effect of accurately reproducing such a ridiculous image that dwelled unridiculously in the minds of some people would have been merely to broaden its vicious reach. The adherents of that image would have gone unsatirized and untouched.

In satire, absurdity achieves its rationality through moral perspective — or it remains simply incoherent or malign absurdity. The New Yorker represented the right-wing caricature of the Obamas while making the fatal error of not also caricaturing the right wing. It is as though Daumier had drawn figures besotted by stupidity and disfigured by genetic deficiencies — what might have been a corrupt 19th-century politician’s image of his victims — rather than the corrupt politicians themselves, whom he of course portrayed as swollen to ridiculous physical proportions by mendacity and greed.

But if that very same New Yorker cover had been drawn in a balloon over the head of a deranged citizen — or a ruthless political operative — it would have appeared as plausible only in the mind of that person. The image would have come across as absurd and unjust — a version of reality exaggerated to the point of madness.

By presenting a mad or contemptible partisan sentiment as a mainstream one, by accurately reproducing it and by neglecting to position the target of a slur — the Obamas — in relation to the producers of the slur, The New Yorker seems to have unwittingly reiterated the misconception it meant to lampoon. No wonder so much political humor nowadays contents itself with the smug deriding of the worst aspects of the “other side.” At a time when it is almost impossible to attach a universal meaning to anything, the crossroads linking satire to its target can be very hard to find.

Idiot abroad

Why is it in a city that's 60% immigrant or the children of immigrants, the Times' standard for what's non-standard continues to be that of some stodgy white person?

As always, the Sunday Travel section provides the fodder, with the always-reliable Matt Gross reprising his role of wide-eyed whitey abroad, this week in South Korea with an article headline The Weird, Wild and, Ultimately, Sublime (note to the Times: Labeling a nation's cuisine 'ultimately sublime' doesn't balance out calling it weird and wild:

To understand where these trends were coming from — and, I hoped, to discover the next ones — I spent a week eating the weird and the wild, the tasty and the comforting, and, more than once, the sublime. Oh, I also ate lots and lots of kimchi. ...

Let’s begin with the familiar: barbecue.

Oh, thanks for letting us know right away what you consider normal.

Then, there's this:

“To be honest with you, Koreans just think that if it’s an expensive bottle, then it’s good — ’cause they take a bottle and they drink it like a shot!” said Daniel Gray, who operates the SeoulEats.com food blog and who accompanied me through many meals. “But it’s starting to get more refined. Now they’re starting to learn the difference. They’re starting to say, ‘O.K., I’m going to enjoy this bottle, I’m going to pair this with the right food.’ ”

That's another consistent Timesian, to go to a foreign country and use an American as a guide. Cause it's too hard to actually talk to the natives, and it's so much better to get information third-hand!

Imagine a French paper coming to the U.S. and seeking out a French expat to guide them through Southern BBQ--how much credibility would we give to that?

Indeed, as in a lot of other Times travel articles, Gross seems to manage to interact entirely with Americans during his visit to Seoul--not one person quoted or mentioned in the piece is Korean.

Talk about weird.

Out of step

What is it with the Times--along with Chris Matthews, they consistently don't seem to believe something is 'mainstream' unless it's white.

The latest example is the insistence in a photo caption that a white guy singing Mexican music is going to be its basketball Jesus.

Born in the U.S.A. but at home south of the border, Shawn Kiehne, a k a El Gringo, is out to bring Mexican music into the American mainstream.

The musician himself seems interesting, but really, the article is just tone deaf--for one thing, there's no evidence this guy's music is drawing in whites:

“There are Mexicans everywhere now,” he said. “I’m playing in Iowa, Arkansas, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Kentucky. In these places, deep in Middle America, the shows are packed, and it’s all Mexicans. Davenport, Iowa? There are Mexicans in Davenport, Iowa?”

For someone who proclaims how in touch he is with his Mexican brothers, it's embarassing that he doesn't seem to know there are Mexicans in Iowa--anyone who knows anything about the immigration debate knows Iowa's been a hotspot, with its rapid demographic change feeding both xenophobia and a more interesting cultural climate.

And Kiehne ends the article by overtly conflating white and mainstream:

“Ricky Martin helped make it O.K. for white Americans of my generation to like Latin music,” he said. “I want to do the same thing for norteño. I want it to appeal to mainstream white America while staying true to the Mexican sound.”

As long as he stays overseas

Roger Cohen's got an Op-Ed in the Times about how much the French love Barack Obama.

Cohen doesn't mention the profound problem, of course, of a country supposedly in love with a black American that's only got one black Frenchman in parliament.

But right now, in French eyes, there’s a single good American: the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, Barack Obama. His book, “The Audacity of Hope,” is a best seller. His face is everywhere, sometimes in socialist realist images evoking Che Guevara.

An online support committee has drawn all-star support, including the fashion designer Sonia Rykiel, the Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë, the writer-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pierre Bergé, the partner of the late Yves Saint Laurent.

Out in the troubled suburbs, with their large African and Arab populations and broad mistrust of a political system that has produced one black parliamentarian among the 555 representing mainland France, Obama is an urban legend. In France at least, he has high-low appeal.

Dr. Who?

Shaila Dewan sets out in the New York Times to examine the controversy over a new MLK sculpture proposed for the national mall in Washington D.C. in Larger Than Life, More to Fight Over . But a startling line detracts from an otherwise interesting, well-reported piece:

In a flourish that the commission secretary now says he regrets, the letter also said that the statue made Dr. King look “confrontational.”

From the Washington Monument on, no memorial has been erected on the Mall without a bruising debate. But there is something about Dr. King that makes the simple act of commemoration a thicket of controversy.

Yeah, I wonder why it is that commemorating Dr. King comes with some much controversy.

Maybe we should ask John McCain.

Glossing over the obvious

The omnipresent Sewell Chan writes Immigrants’ Children Find Better Lives, Study Shows off a panel presentation by the study's authors he moderated, that raises a question:

A decade-long study of adult children of immigrants to the New York region has concluded that they are rapidly entering the mainstream and doing better than their parents in terms of education and earnings — even outperforming native-born Americans in many cases. ...

It focused on five groups: Dominicans, Chinese, Russian Jews, South Americans (consisting of Colombians, Ecuadoreans and Peruvians) and West Indians, defined as immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean, including Belize and Guyana. The researchers also interviewed native-born whites, blacks and Puerto Ricans (those born on the mainland) in the New York area for comparison purposes. ...

The authors acknowledged that it was hard in some cases to explain why some of the five groups studied appeared to do better than others. The relative success of Russian Jews seemed clear: They immigrated with high levels of education, benefited from government programs because they came as refugees and received aid from established Jewish organizations.

The authors said it was more difficult to explain why “Chinese youngsters have achieved the greatest educational and economic success relative to their parents’ often humble origins.” The Chinese have a fairly cohesive community with “a high degree of social connection between its better- and worse-off members,” the book argued, while ethnic newspapers, churches and media served as a link between middle- and working-class immigrants and helped share “cultural capital,” like information on how to get into the city’s best schools.

Finally, Chinese parents were less likely to divorce, and they encouraged their children to put off marriage and children until their education was completed.

Sure, those are all reasons--wonder why the famously productive Chan doesn't also note that maybe the Chinese Americans kids just worked harder, too.

They've got the time, after all, as Dylan Loeb McClain's article, Brooklyn Public School Is a Big Winner at National Championships alludes to:

At the elementary school national championships in Pittsburgh last weekend, public schools won many of the top prizes. ...

Among the public schools that did well was Intermediate School 318 in Brooklyn. For the second year, the school won the section for players in kindergarten through the sixth grade. ...

Elizabeth Vicary is the school’s chess coach. She worked for Chess-in-the-Schools but is now on staff at I.S. 318, where she teaches English and chess.

“I am not sure that this will come across the way I mean it,” Vicary said, “but there are some advantages to teaching kids who don’t have a lot of opportunities in their lives. They are not also going to soccer games.”

Well

Europe, no longer frozen in time

There's so much dreary jingoistic writing in the Times travel section that the exceptions leap out at you. Here's Dan Barry, whose thoughtful article is only slightly undermined by its American-centric headline, Does the ‘Real’ Ireland Still Exist? .

It's one of the few articles in the Times as a whole that acknowledges our antiquated notions of what a Frenchman looks like, what makes a German dish, who lives in an Irish city, only works if you ignore the impact of economic and demographic changes over the last few decades.

(Now if only the Times could start publishing articles like this about non-Western countries!)

Yes, you can find a thatched cottage here and there, if you try. Yes, you may even encounter a white clot of sheep blocking your rented car’s path, raising from musty memory some postcard caption about Irish Rush Hour. But to wander about, looking to bag with a digital camera some approximation of a time-faded Irish postcard, is to miss the complexities of a country that is thoroughly enjoying its wealth and adapting to its European Union membership while at the same time trying to preserve its dreamlike landscape and proud cultural heritage.

You may indeed hear a young Irish woman suddenly break into song in Kinvara. But you may also walk around the corner and be served dinner by a young man with an Eastern European accent instead of a brogue. Travel 10 miles up the road to Gort and you might wade into a celebration of Brazilian culture, staged by a transplanted community that is now an integral part of that old market town.

There you have it: delightful, post-millennial Ireland. ...

A change in infrastructure is one thing; a change in culture is quite another. And nowhere is this change more strongly felt than in Gort, about 40 miles northeast of the cliffs and just a dozen miles from Kinvara. My mother grew up on a farm near there, and I’ve been visiting Gort since the 1970s. I have watched it gradually grow from an aged and insular town to a bedroom community for Galway City, some 20 miles away. Farms I remember are now Levittown-like subdivisions.

The real change, though, is in Gort’s new and sizable Brazilian community, attracted in part by job opportunities at a local meat-processing plant. The impact has been extraordinary: Brazilian music nights in one of the pubs, Brazilian necessities — from maracuja to mandioca — in the shops, and a Sunday Mass said in Portuguese. There has been the usual awkwardness in this marriage of two distinct cultures, but for the most part the newcomers have been warmly accepted; for example, when carbon monoxide from a faulty oil burner killed two Brazilian men nearly three years ago, townspeople banded together to raise money to help the families.

And every June, Gort serves as host to a traditional Brazilian festival called the Quadrilha. The town center comes alive with folk dances and passionate sambas that could never be confused with an Irish step dance, while the air fills with the aroma of Brazilian cuisine that could never be confused with brown bread and tea.

I do wish Barry had made some acknowledgement that the 'Brazilians' are in many cases by birth now Irish; and I'm sure the 'usual awkwardness' glosses over some pretty ugly patterns; but at least he's trying.

James Cuno, master of your universe

Jori Finkel's portrait of the Art Institute of Chicago's director, A Man Who Loves Big Museums, starts out with one of those telling anecdotes journalists are so fond of:

WHEN James Cuno stepped into his job as director and president of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004, employees were a touch nervous. The departing director, James Wood, had begun the most ambitious expansion in the museum’s history. But ground had not yet been broken. And although he had raised $120 million, at least twice that would be needed.

It was a pivotal time, and after 24 years at the museum Mr. Wood was handing the reins to a man who had led the Courtauld Institute in London for less than 24 months.

Then late one afternoon, one employee after another caught sight of Mr. Cuno moving into his office — by himself. Although the museum has a staff of nearly 600, he was carting and carrying stacks of books on his own. It was an early sign that Mr. Cuno, who goes by Jim and not James, would be a down-to-earth, hands-on leader, one with a deep commitment to recent art-historical scholarship.

“I’m a bit compulsive about my library — the way it’s organized, which is rather intuitive,” said Mr. Cuno, 57. “And physically putting the books away helps me to remember where they are.”

So far, so good. But then there's this startling sequence:

This month he can add a new title of his own to those shelves: “Who Owns Antiquity?,” published by Princeton University Press. While it is far from his first book (he has written about Jasper Johns and Joseph Beuys, among other artists), it is his first dedicated to the political minefield of cultural patrimony. A condemnation of cultural property laws that restrict the international trade in antiquities, the book doubles as a celebration of the world’s great border-crossing encyclopedic museums, among them the Art Institute and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. ...

Mr. Cuno contends that “the accident of geography” should not give nations exclusive claims on archaeological material that happens to be found within their borders. He asserts that a country’s cultural patrimony policies reflect its political or diplomatic agenda more than a commitment to preserving culture. And he argues for the revival of partage, a practice in which museums or universities aid the excavation of an archaeological site in another country in exchange for some of the artifacts.

“People will assume my argument in favor of partage is a thinly disguised argument for imperialism,” he said. “But partage helped to create not just the university museums and encyclopedic museums in this country, but also museums locally on site — like the national museums of Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Yeah, an accident of geography! As if artists and craftsmen are somehow free agents, who pop up fully-formed in cultures, their creations unsullied by all that surrounds and nurtures them, nothing taken therefore nothing owed.

It's really an insane argument; Cuno's essentially arguing hey, if there's a group that's strong today--Western collectors and curators--there's no problem if they strip what they want from people who at this point in time can't outbid or defend their heritage.

That this universal class of masters of the universe should of course take precedence over the 'accidental' possesors of art.

And hey, after all, it's not like the rich are taking everything--they're leaving behind what they don't want in museums for the natives!

Sheesh.... It makes you reinterpret the opening anecdote.

Maybe the reason Cuno carried his own books in was to keep someone from coming along and taking them.

Times photo by Peter Wynn Thompson

Groping for the dragon

So the NYTimes has launched a new blog, Rings, which "covers the 2008 Beijing Games from every angle -- the politics, the arts, the culture, the competition."

Hmm, let's see--so far none of the 14 points are from an Asian or Asian American, and contributor George Vescey's recommended 4 books to read to understand China are all written by Western journalists.

Wonder if they know the Chinese proverb, about the blind men and the elephant.

Unexamined life

Racism's dead? Diversity doesn't matter? Ha! Not as long as we live in a world where people make important decisions on the basis of unexamined conscious or subconscious feelings of comfort.

Names That Match Forge a Bond on the Internet, NYTimes: But while many people are familiar with Googlegängers, a fundamental question has gone unanswered: Why do so many feel a connection — be it kinship or competition — with utter strangers just because they share a name?

Social science, it turns out, has an answer. It is because human beings are unconsciously drawn to people and things that remind us of ourselves.

A psychological theory called the name-letter effect maintains that people like the letters in their own names (particularly their initials) better than other letters of the alphabet.

In studies involving Internet telephone directories, Social Security death index records and clinical experiments, Brett Pelham, a social psychologist, and colleagues have found in the past six years that Johnsons are more likely to wed Johnsons, women named Virginia are more likely to live in (and move to) Virginia, and people whose surname is Lane tend to have addresses that include the word “lane,” not “street.”

During the 2000 presidential campaign, people whose surnames began with B were more likely to contribute to George Bush, while those whose surnames began with G were more likely to contribute to Al Gore.

“It’s what we call implicit egotism,” Dr. Pelham, who is now a writer and researcher for the Gallup Organization, said. “We’ve shown time and time again that people are attracted to people, places and things that resemble their names, without a doubt.” ...

In studies that make believers in free will squirm, Dr. Pelham’s team asserts that names and the letters in them are surprisingly influential in people’s lives. In one experiment, participants of both sexes evaluated a young woman more favorably when the number on the jersey she was wearing had been subliminally paired with their own names on a computer screen.

A feeling of connection between people with the same name is, in a way, little more than sharing an affinity for a brand — like two car owners who give each other friendly toots because they both drive Mini Coopers.

“Self-similarity is really one of the largest driving forces of behavior of social beings,” said Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. “When someone is similar to you, you give them special privileges,” like buying something from them or voting for them.

All this means is we have to be conscious of our own prejudices; you can't fight things like racism and sexism, after all, if you don't even see your own behavior as being necessary for examination.

And, once you start looking at it, it's suprising how many issues are tied to people making universal judgments on the basis of their biases. There's this from the Washington Post, for example:

Behavioral Study on Students Stirs Debate,
Fairfax Report Finds Possible Racial Bias: For public schools in the No Child Left Behind era, it has become routine to analyze test scores and other academic indicators by race and ethnicity. But the Fairfax County School Board, to promote character education, has discovered the pitfalls of applying the same analytical techniques to measures of student behavior, especially when the findings imply disparities in behavior among racial, ethnic and other groups.

The county School Board, which oversees one of the country's largest and most diverse suburban school systems, is scheduled to vote tonight on whether to accept a staff report that concludes, in part, that black and Hispanic students and special education students received lower marks than white and Asian American students for demonstration of "sound moral character and ethical judgment."

Such findings have prompted a debate on the potential bias in how teachers evaluate student behavior and how the school system analyzes and presents information about race. Board member Martina A. "Tina" Hone (At Large), who is African American, called the school system's decision to break down data by race "potentially damaging and hurtful."

The report on student achievement under "Essential Life Skills," first presented to the board March 27, quantifies the moral-ethical gap this way: "Grade 3 students who received 'Good' or better ranged from a low near 80 percent . . . for Black and Special Education students, to about 95 percent . . . for Asian and White students." The report also indicated that Hispanic third-graders scored 86 percent on the measure.

The findings on third-grade morality reflected the number of elementary students who received "good" or "outstanding" marks on report cards in such areas as "accepts responsibility," "listens to and follows directions," "respects personal and school property," "complies with established rules" and "follows through on assignments." Such categories, which draw mainly on teacher observations, are common.

Well, sure--a bunch of white teachers might very well see blacks and hispanics as disruptive, even when they are exhibiting the exact same behavior as "normal" whites--and Asians.

I do wish the Post had broken out the data between whites and Asians; maybe the headline should've been: Blacks, Hispanics, Whites Fall Short Compared to Asians.

You'll never see something like that, of course, because journalists are conditioned to see white performance as the norm, with everything else being deviant, either "positive" or "negative".

Otherwise, if pure performance really were the measure, the headlines would be all about how whites, blacks and hispanics lag behind academic standards as set by Asians.

At any rate, conservatives, who think of humans as inherently sinful, might disagree, but most people, once they've become aware that they "just don't feel comfortable" or "just don't like" the same types of people, over and over, realize that's wrong, and can and do change.

It's the basis behind Barack Obama's presidential run, after all.

Not mincing words

There's an interesting Times article that, unwittingly, does a good job of capturing some of the issues that are roiling, and will ultimately change, Europe.

Immigrants Capture Italian Flavor: Last month, Gambero Rosso, the prestigious reviewer of restaurants and wine, sought out Rome’s best carbonara, a dish of pasta, eggs, pecorino cheese and guanciale (which is smoked pig cheek; pancetta, for aficionados, is not done) that defines tradition here.

In second place was L’Arcangelo, a restaurant with an Indian head chef. The winner: Antico Forno Roscioli, a bakery and innovative restaurant whose chef, Nabil Hadj Hassen, arrived from Tunisia at 17 and washed dishes for a year and a half before he cooked his first pot of pasta.

“To cook is a passion,” said Mr. Hassen, now 43, who went on to train with some of Italy’s top chefs. “Food is a beautiful thing.”

Spoken like an Italian. But while the world learned about pasta and pizza from poor Italian immigrants, now it is foreigners, many of them also poor, who make some of the best Italian food in Italy (as well as some of the worst and everything between).

With Italians increasingly shunning sweaty and underpaid kitchen work, it can be hard now to find a restaurant where at least one foreigner does not wash dishes, help in the kitchen or, as is often the case, actually cook. Egyptians have done well as pizza makers, but restaurant kitchens are now a snapshot of Italy’s relatively recent immigrant experience, with Moroccans, Tunisians, Romanians and Bangladeshis all doing the work.

The fact itself may not be surprising: On one level, restaurants in Italy, a country that even into the 1970s exported more workers than it brought in, now more closely mirror immigrant-staffed kitchens in much of Europe.

But Italians take their food very seriously, not just as nourishment and pleasure but as a chief component of national and regional identity. And so any change is not taken lightly here, especially when the questions it raises are uncomfortable: Will Italy’s food change — and if so, for the worse or, even more disconcertingly, for the better? Most Italian food is defined by its good ingredients and simple preparation, but does it become less distinct — or less Italian — if anyone can prepare it to restaurant standards? Does that come at some cost to national pride?

Wow--these foreigners sometimes actually cook! And yes--top immigrant chefs are just 'anyone'.

There is, of course, more.

But in a debate likely to grow in the coming years, others argue that foreign chefs can mimic Italian food but not really understand it.

“Tradition is needed to go forward with Italian youngsters, not foreigners,” said Loriana Bianchi, co-owner of La Canonica, a restaurant also in Trastevere, which hires several Bangladeshis, though she does the cooking. “It’s not racism, but culture.”

Yeah, and the Confederacy was all about culture, too.

And then, of course, there's this:

Despite this success — and thousands of loyal Italian customers — he said he never felt fully accepted. “Italians say they aren’t racist but then they say to me that in Milan I have found America,” he said, referring to a slightly insulting expression for finding success without really working for it. “It makes me feel lousy.”

Qunfeng Zhu, 30, a Chinese immigrant who opened a coffee bar in Rome’s center, has had a similar experience even though he makes an authentic espresso in a classic Italian atmosphere (overlooking a few bottles of Chinese liquor).

“Some people come in, see we are Chinese and go away,” he said.

But in the last few years, he said, that happens less frequently, one sign that Italy is opening up — if slowly — to other kinds of food. Twenty years ago it was hard to find anything beyond the odd Chinese restaurant. Now the choices are broader, especially for Asian food like Japanese or Indian.

“We live in a globalized society — there are so many people represented in our city,” said Maria Coscia, the commissioner of Rome’s public schools. So much so that last year the city began a program of serving a meal from different countries once a month. But many parents complained loudly.

“The first time we did it, the menu was Bangladeshi,” she said. “That was a problem.”

As a result of the complaints, the program was tweaked slightly and now at least one dish in four on those days — even grade-school students eat well here — will remain Italian. Now it is largely accepted, though the program’s Web site includes this reminder for the still wary, “In the total of the 210 school days, when lunches are served, only eight days are dedicated to the menus from other countries.”

It's pretty astonishing how openly racist Europe can be--the best part about the article is it continues the trend of writing about non-white Italians as foreigners, as if the definition of an Italian is limited to those whose grandparents marched under Mussolini.

After 17 years--he's an American

What is it about journalists tagging non-white people as foreign?

James Agnelos' Hot Off the Presses: The Newsstand Stays: FOR 17 years, a forest green newsstand has stood near the corner of Third Avenue and East 77th Street. For most of those years, a friendly Pakistani who identifies himself only as Malik has earned his livelihood selling newspapers, sodas and snacks from inside the stand’s four small walls.

Pope's backwards Easter message

One of the many things whites often don't understand about discrimination is the concept of us and them.

Blacks, Hispanics and Asian Americans in America feel discriminated against when they're portrayed as other, as an aberration from the norm, as the object rather than the subject, as acted upon rather than the actor, as supporting actors important only for what they bring out in the main character.

It's often language-based; whites see themselves as the arbiter, with a natural right to pass judgment and define the terms for everyone else. Their worldview is always at the center, with all the paternalism that comes with that often-subconscious assumption.

You see this skewed perspective at its most naked in media articles that consistently use variations of 'us' to refer to whites/'mainstream', 'them' to non-whites/'non-maintstream'.

It's especially obvious when it comes to religion--Christianity is us, Judaism sometimes when it's deemed convenient; Islam/Hinduism/Buddhism are other.

I was struck by this recently when reading media accounts of two incidents that illustrate how profoundly divisive Pope Benedict is, and how he's a relic of another age that while past, certainly isn't dead.

German Jewish leader criticizes Pope over prayer

Reuters: The leader of Germany's Jewish community said on Friday she was surprised Pope Benedict could have allowed a new version of a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews.

Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told Reuters Television she could not fathom Pope Benedict putting forward the new decree because he experienced discrimination against Jews in Germany as a young man.

"I would have assumed that this German pope, of all people, had got to know first hand the ostracizing of Jewry," she said. "I could not have imagined that this same German pope could now impose such phrases upon his church."

Jewish groups complained last year when the Pope issued a decree allowing wider use of the old-style Latin Mass and a missal, or prayer book, that was phased out after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962 to 1965.

They protested against the re-introduction of the old prayer for conversion of the Jews and asked the Pope to change it.

The Vatican last month revised the contested Latin prayer used by a traditionalist minority on Good Friday, the day marking Jesus Christ's crucifixion, removing a reference to Jewish "blindness" over Christ and deleting a phrase asking God to "remove the veil from their hearts".

Jews criticized the new version because it still says they should recognize Jesus Christ as the savior of all men. It asks that "all Israel may be saved" and Jews say it keeps an underlying call to conversion that they had wanted removed.

Knobloch said that she could not envision a continuation of the inter-religious dialogue as long as the old prayer stands.

"The inter-religious dialogue has suffered an enormous setback because of this version and I assume that one will find a way very soon to continue the dialogue, but at the moment I don't see it happening," she said.

"As long as the Catholic Church, that is to say Pope Benedict, does not return to the previous wording, I assume that there will not be any further dialogue in the form that we were able to have in the past," Knobloch said.

That came out Friday; today, we have this in the NYTimes: Pope Prays for Peace on Easter Sunday

Pope Benedict XVI led prayers for peace on the holiest day of the Christian year at a rainy outdoor mass here Easter Sunday, exulting conversions to the faith hours after the Vatican highlighted the baptism of Italy’s most prominent Muslim.

In a prayer before thousands of soaking pilgrims and tourists on St. Peter’s Square, the pope noted that the disciples had spread the message of Christ’s resurrection — celebrated on Sunday — and as a result “thousands and thousands of persons converted to Christianity.”

“This is a miracle which renews itself even today,” he said.

Days after Osama bin Laden issued a threat against Europe that mentioned the pope specifically, Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born writer protected by Italian bodyguards for his criticism of radical Islam, was baptized by the pope Saturday night and received his first communion. The news about Mr. Allam, a secular Muslim married to a Catholic, was accented by a Vatican press release an hour before the baptism ceremony.

“It was the most beautiful day of my life,” Mr. Allam, 55, a deputy editor at Italy’s largest daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera, wrote in a column on Sunday. “The miracle of the resurrection of Christ reverberated in my soul, freeing it from the shadows of a preaching where hate and intolerance toward he who is different, toward he who is condemned as an ‘enemy,’ prevailed over love and respect for your neighbor.”

Mr. Allam said that he would take the new middle name of “Cristiano.” ...

Imagine if the Pope had made the centerpiece of his Easter address the conversion of a Jew to Christianity.

What are the odds the Times story wouldn't mention that in the headline, wouldn't quote any Jewish leaders, wouldn't present this as in any way problematic, and wouldn't even question who has annoited this man Italy's most prominent Muslim (the fact that a man who's said repeatedly he doesn't follow any Muslim practices can be said to hold that position is itself a commentary on how divided Italian society is).

It sounds ridiculous, but often these biases become obvious if you just substitute the world jewish for muslim, or christian for muslim. Imagine the Pope on Easter trumpeting the conversion of someone like George Soros to Christianity--he'd be laughed at, derided, condemned.

It's especially problematic given, as the Reuters article points out, the anti-Semitic and hateful basis of Christianity's emphasis on conversion.

It's impossible to talk about Christian conversion in a vacuum--Christians may present it positively as evidence of God's love/etc., but the subtext historically and currently is always negative.

Unless you become one of us you are worse, to be pitied, to be acted upon--to be killed, to be jeered, to be shunned, to be rulued, to be evangelized to, to be seen as not fully human.

I have no problem of course with people converting to any religion. But it's ridiculous as Pope Benedict does to use someone's choice to push an agenda and try to beat home a larger political goal.

He's really eroded Pope John Paul's progress in inter-religious dialogue--probably because he doesn't believe he's speaking with peers.

Obama vs. the Clintons

It's looking like Barack Obama has won the South Carolina primary by a huge margin over Hillary Clinton, fueld by an estimated 80% of the votes from black voters and a big margin among young/first-time voters.

It's a big enough margin that all the networks and the AP were calling the race as soon as the polls closed at 7 pm EST, based solely on the exit polls with 0% of the official results in.

Clinton, like in Iowa, is in a dogfight with John Edwards to stay out of third. What does it say that four contests into the 2008 campaign, Hillary is battling just to stay out of third?

Simple--a lot of Democrats don't like her either.

Realclearpolitics.com linked to an interesting Jonathan Chait opinion piece in the L.A. Times, Is the right right on the Clintons? Hillary's campaign tactics are causing some liberals to turn against the couple.

We've gone down this road before; after Iowa, I was pretty certain Obama would take New Hampshire and pretty much sweep the table. I wasn't expecting Hillary to shed tears while simultaneously unleashing hubby Bill's attack tactics, which seemed to work in the contrarian Granite State.

Curious to see what the Clintons pull out starting tomorrow... nobody likes losing, but their ugly side really seems to come out after these things, even if it seemed to have led to a backlash in South Carolina.

My guess is the Clintons are going to try and paint Obama as winning because of blacks, sending the message to white voters that they need to choose sides. Which is ridiculous, given that Obama won Iowa and, as Carl Bernstein just said on CNN, "damn near won all-white New Hampshire."

Hillary's desperate and scared enough that she's doing anything and everything; when this campaign started--3 years ago?!--there was no way she envisioned Bill would be rampaging around the South like Sherman, scorching Obama and essentially playing junk yard dog so she could wash her hands of it all.

It's a huge problem for Hillary; she's essentially eating her seed corn, making herself seem less like her own person and leaving herself open to Republicans running against Billary if she does manage to make it to the general election.

On to Super Tuesday, with 22 states in play; Hillary's still ahead in all of the key ones, except for Illinois and Georgia--but her margin over Obama has been shrinking.

It's ironic given the shameful racial politics in South Carolina that the Clinton camp is touting the key role of the Hispanic vote on Super Tuesday, based mostly on her success with Hispanics in Nevada. I've written before about the dynamics of the African American/Latino electorates in the 2008 race; it'll be interesting to see if Hispanics decide to stick with the status quo Clintons, or sign on to Obama-mania.

Given the relative youth of the Latino voter, I think they're going to give Obama a hard look; there's just over a week before Super Tuesday, the tidal wave out of South Carolina, coupled with the increasingly toxic Clintons, will definitely help make up some minds.

Uncredited photo found in numerous places online.

Cinema musings

Brains too, actually
Charles McGrath's Commanding Attention in or Out of Costume

A word Ms. Knightley uses often about herself is “obsessed.” “I’m quite obsessed with film,” she said. “I absolutely love watching it. I love knowing how movies are made, and I love being a part of them.” Over the course of lunch she rattled off half a dozen performances she had been studying lately, especially George Clooney and Tilda Swinton in “Michael Clayton,” Marion Cotillard in “La Vie en Rose” and Chazz Palminteri in “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.” But her most detailed commentary, oddly, was about some oldies, “On the Waterfront” for example.

“That scene with Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando in the back of the cab,” she said. “Amazing! Today you’d never hold that scene in a two-shot. You’d be in quite close, and you’d be constantly back and forth. But there the shot is always quite wide, and the atmosphere between the actors, because it’s so held back, is completely amazing. I got quite obsessed by it.”

She also talked about “Brief Encounter,” Noël Coward’s classic weeper, set in 1945, and “In Which We Serve,” Coward’s patriotic saga about the crew of a British destroyer, which she and the rest of the cast of “Atonement” watched, along with Mr. Wright, as part of their World War II homework.

“I was very aware of the American films of that period, but not the British ones,” she said. “I don’t know why that is, but I think it may have to do with the accent. It’s a bit jarring. You don’t hear that accent in Britain anymore. After the ’50s it suddenly became uncool to sound that posh.

“But it’s such an incredible style — virtually without pauses. Today’s style is sort of pseudonaturalism, but actually not at all. There are a lot of indulgent pauses and a very definite rhythm to the way we work, and then to watch these people — it’s like machine-gun fire, where we would have been so labored. They just steam through. I actually sort of prefer it. Very matter-of-fact and yet you totally feel it. It’s very liberating.”

She paused and then apologized for going on. “Sorry,” she said. “But if you’re going to be part of this business, I think you have to be a little bit like this. You have to be a bit obsessed.”

They're Germans too!
Nicholas Kulish's A Hand That Links Germans and Turks

Fatih Akin has earned the right to be a little exasperated about the constant focus on his Turkish-German identity.

“Imagine I’m a painter, and we speak more about the background of the paintings than the foreground of the paintings, or we speak about the framing but not about the painting,” said Mr. Akin, a German film director and the son of Turkish immigrants. “For sure this is frustrating, and for sure that’s why I will leave it behind sooner or later.” ...

Then came the surprise triumph of “Head-On,” which won the top prize, the Golden Bear, at the Berlin International Film Festival. Mr. Akin was unprepared for the celebrity it brought him in Germany as well as in Turkey. He was instantly seen as a cultural spokesman, far beyond his role as a filmmaker, to a large extent because of his Turkish roots, at a time when Germans were re-examining their complex relationship with their country’s large Muslim minority. About 2.7 million people of Turkish descent live in Germany today. ...

Brought over as so-called guest workers decades ago, most of the Turkish migrants never went home. But as a group they have not been embraced by mainstream German society

Imagine Hopper on a Lynch film
Dennis Lim's If You Need a Past, He’s the Guy to Build It

Mr. Fisk cited Edward Hopper’s famous painting of light-streaked storefronts, “Early Sunday Morning,” as an inspiration for the main street. The mansion he built in Mr. Malick’s “Days of Heaven” was modeled on “House by the Railroad,” another Hopper painting.

“Hopper would have been a great production designer,” Mr. Fisk said. “In art school I used to say, ‘Oh, Hopper, he’s just an illustrator,’ but he grows on you. He simplifies images, and that’s what production design is. If you understand the image immediately, it doesn’t take you away from the action.” ...

Mr. Fisk said his do-it-all approach might be a holdover from youthful diffidence. He landed his first art-directing gig (on the 1971 bikersploitation film “Angels Hard as They Come”) without a clear sense of the job description. “I was so scared of not doing what I was supposed to do that I did everything,” he said.

It was Mr. [David] Lynch who got Mr. Fisk his first job on a movie. Mr. Lynch, by then enrolled at the American Film Institute, had a job casting gold bricks from plaster on a western that was shooting in Utah. The work was so tedious that after a while he asked if his friend Jack could take over.

Recalling his first impression of Mr. Fisk at 14, Mr. Lynch said, “I thought he was a loser.” But they soon struck up a friendship. “In the whole high school we were basically the only artists,” Mr. Lynch recalled. “In this conservative world all we wanted to do was paint and live the art life.”

Photo of Keira Knightley from People

Next up: Blackface!

The Times' Sunday paper, always an adventure.

What the Times calls 'exotic' is always the same

Yemen’s Exotic Secrets, headline writer's name not known. The article is forgettable (Tom Downey manages to write about Yemen while talking to and citing only fellow Westerners), what's interesting is this list of Travel articles where the Times uses the word exotic--they're always non-white countries, and in a city that's 60% immigrant or children of immigrants, it's ridiculous that places like 'the Middle East', China, Thailand, Brazil, etc. get labeled "Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange."

You forget the Nazis were great patrons of classical music

Anthony Tommasini, A Patience to Listen, Alive and Well: In recent years a spate of articles and books have lamented classical music’s tenuous hold on the popular imagination and defended its richness, complexity and communicative power. I’m thinking especially of the book “Why Classical Music Still Matters” (University of California Press, 2007) by Lawrence Kramer, a professor of English and music at Fordham University.

Just this month classical music emerged as pivotal to international relations. With the blessing of the State Department, the New York Philharmonic announced that it would present a concert in North Korea during its Asian tour in February. Some consider this plan an outrage that will allow a totalitarian regime to use the Philharmonic musicians as puppets for propaganda. Others see it as at least a chance to pry open a door and share Western culture with a closed society, which is pretty much my view.

Either way, implicit in this plan is the idea that classical music matters. It’s not a sports team or pop group that has been enlisted to begin a thaw with the government in Pyongyang. It’s the musicians of a premier American orchestra.

What effect might this concert have on an audience in a repressive society? To Professor Kramer, as he recently told The New York Times, classical music by definition “is addressed to someone who has a certain independence of mind.” It “almost posits for its audience a certain degree of Western identity, which includes that sense of individual capacity to think, to sense, to imagine.”

At some point, they'll just call it looking out the window

Matthew Gurewitsch, Learning to Move Under the Sea, on Wheels: Two years ago Mr. Mear was pondering the challenge on a Christmas visit to Disneyland, when a little boy walked by and then all of a sudden whizzed away. “I literally chased after him and asked his parents what he was wearing on his feet,” Mr. Mear said. That was his first exposure to Heelys, the shoes built with a wheel in the heel, now ubiquitous at every mall and playground. As Ms. Zambello said: “Serendipity guides you. More ideas come walking down the street than from sitting in think tanks.”

By his own account Mr. Mear was mesmerized. “You can walk,” he said. “You can glide. You can turn. You can spin. You can jump. Once I saw them, I knew.” ...

Recreating that “Eureka!” moment in Disneyland, 12-year-old Cody Hanford, as Flounder, whizzed in from the sidelines to join the multiracial, multicultural sextet of Ariel’s mersisters in the sassy number “She’s in Love.”

“We didn’t just want to have tall, skinny girls,” Mr. Mear said from the sidelines as the women ran their engines, one of them with the curves and charisma of a junior Jessye Norman. “We wanted bodies of all shapes and sizes. That way, people relate: ‘If they can do that, so can I.’ We chose people for their personalities. You can’t beat character.”

Let them? How about howled for blood

Manohla Dargis, War Stories, What’s really been shocking about this year, though, aren’t the idiocies of “Hostel: Part II,” but rather the rage radiating off the movie screens. Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” about American soldiers who rape and murder an Iraqi girl (and her family), falls short in many ways, but the director’s anger is itself a tonic. I think that Mr. De Palma’s focus is misplaced — you can certainly blame these soldiers, though the tougher film would blame people like us, who let them be sent to Iraq — yet I am grateful for his fury. Just as I am heartened by the anger of Sidney Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” each a savage moral reckoning of the contemporary American soul.

He's Scottish. Not that you can tell from the article

Rebecca Milzoff, A Sampler of Roles: It's not every young actor who, free of a rigorous schedule of interviews, takes his father and sister along for an evening on the town. Then again, Khalid Abdalla, the 27-year-old star of the new film adaptation of “The Kite Runner,” has not followed the path most traveled in his career.

Last year, Mr. Abdalla (who is of Egyptian descent and grew up in Scotland and England) played a terrorist in “United 93,” the Paul Greengrass film about the 9/11 attacks. In “The Kite Runner,” Mr. Abdalla stars as Amir, an Afghan writer who has moved to the United States but is haunted by memories of his native country.

Composite photos from Marc Jacobs' 'Arabian Nights' event from the Times, as compiled by Bill Cunningham

Teach yourself

Some interesting reading in Jonathan Dee's unlikely profiles, A Toy Maker’s Conscience:

With just a few weeks to go until Christmas, the sensory onslaught inside the Times Square Toys “R” Us was well into its merciless ratchet upward. The infrastructure of aggression — the indoor Ferris wheel, the roaring animatronic T-rex, the woman who blocks your path as you enter the store to snap a picture of you that another employee will try to sell to you on your way out — was augmented by the holiday tension on the ground: mothers on cellphones, seasonal employees in the store’s dark blue shirts pushing carts full of inventory, children banging away at the sample electronics. It seemed as loud as a factory floor; but that is only because most of us cannot imagine how loud a factory floor actually is.

Toy Factory Floor Mattel did more than most companies to improve the conditions for workers in Chinese factories. But when it recalled toys with lead paint it still faced a public-relations disaster.
Prakash Sethi, though, didn’t really see any of it. Instead, standing before a vertiginous wall of toys while shoppers eddied around him, the 73-year-old business-school professor and grandfather saw only what the tens of thousands who march through here every Christmas season fail to see, which is how all these toys came to be here in the first place. ...

The work is hot and loud and exhausting and hazardous and underpaid. But it is also, at least for the 60,000 to 80,000 (or many more, according to Sethi) Chinese factory workers employed directly or indirectly by Mattel, measurably less so than it used to be, and that is in large part the achievement of Sethi himself. A career academic, he is the founder and president of the idealistically named International Center for Corporate Accountability, an operation run out of a two-room faculty office at Baruch College in New York. It may be a reach to style a University Distinguished Professor of Management at Baruch’s Zicklin School of Business as a radical, but in that academic context, at least, he’s something of a flamethrower. He has suggested that multinational companies with manufacturing bases in China and elsewhere not merely raise the pathetically low wages of their factory employees but also pay them restitution for years past. When asked why more companies don’t take steps to monitor wages and working conditions, he once answered “bigotry.” This sort of bluntness makes it less than completely surprising that the I.C.C.A. doesn’t have a long list of clients for its monitoring services. “I don’t work with very many companies,” Sethi says equably. “They don’t want me.” ...

Fitzgerald presented what he called “the concept of Prakash” to the Mattel executives at their corporate headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., and they brought him out for a meeting that led to the establishment of the Mattel Independent Monitoring Council, the precursor to his International Center for Corporate Accountability. (When, several years later, the possibility arose of Sethi and his staff’s monitoring other companies as well, everyone involved agreed it would be best to get Mattel’s name off the door.) What the council was being asked to monitor was Mattel’s adherence to its own “global manufacturing principles” — a two-page pledge consisting mostly of vague ethical declarations to which no one could object, like “facilities must have environmental programs in place to minimize their impact on the environment.” For Sethi — who had spent his career publishing books and delivering lectures on corporate morality more or less into a void — this was an almost unbelievable opportunity to carry his ideas inside the walls of a commercial behemoth, one with sales of more than $5 billion a year. “It was totally unprecedented,” he says. “Really intoxicating. I was inventing everything as I went along. There just weren’t any systems of its kind. Nobody could say, ‘It can’t be done.’ ” ...

Resistance can take different forms. On one audit, a Chinese colleague called Sethi’s attention to a group of men standing beside a black S.U.V. parked outside the factory. At first Sethi didn’t see anything unusual about it. “Where,” his colleague asked him rhetorically, “would you see a group of such healthy Chinese men standing around smoking cigarettes and doing nothing?” The intimation was that the men might be the local police sent by someone to intimidate them. (Sethi had been followed in other countries before.) Rather than risk some sort of incident, the rest of the audit was called off, but six months later Sethi returned to the same factory and wasn’t bothered. ...

Fitzgerald, who left Mattel in 2000, says: “The changes we made in the living conditions in China were extraordinary. I think you can tell from the passion in my voice that I am very proud of what we accomplished. It was a big damn deal. And without Prakash, it could never have worked.”

Sethi remembers one epic argument with a factory manager who didn’t want to upgrade his filthy dormitory on the grounds that it was built before the company created its global manufacturing principles. In the end, Mattel worked out a deal that resulted in a new dorm, and the manager and Sethi became friends. According to Sethi, the manager said, “Prakash, these workers and the ones after them, they’ll never know what a crummy Indian did for them.” ...

But the global manufacturing principles are all about protecting workers; as it developed, there is another constituency whose welfare has been put at risk by Mattel’s operations in China: namely, the consumers who bought and the children who played with what was made there. In early July, a European retailer discovered lead paint on some of Mattel’s toys; on Aug. 2, Mattel announced the recall of 83 different toys, a total of 1.5 million items. Twelve days later, more than 400,000 additional toys were recalled for containing lead-based paint — together with millions more recalled for the choking hazard posed by tiny magnets, which had nothing to do with production shortcuts but were instead caused by flaws in Mattel’s own designs. ...

Alan Hassenfeld, the chairman of Hasbro and the co-chairman of the ICTI CARE foundation, called for a one-code approach in remarks at a Columbia Business School forum last spring that seemed directed at Mattel, offering a somewhat tin-eared anecdote about a Chinese factory that moved the fire extinguishers six inches up and down the walls depending on who was monitoring its conditions that week — as if the real hardship inside these factories was an excess of bureaucracy. ...

There will always be those who consider big business’s vows to make the world a better place fundamentally cynical. But capitalism has often longed for, if not technically required, a moral justification, and for most of the 20th century it was provided by socialism and the various forms of government representing it. Now that opposition is gone, and in search of a nonmaterial rationale, the lords of acquisition have to look elsewhere. The sense of moral aspiration behind corporate social responsibility seems mostly genuine — which is somehow both the most and least appealing thing about it, for it encourages a lot of back-patting among the world’s economic elite, whose members seem able to discern, in their own hunt for the cheapest possible work force, a humanitarian aim.

“I know we have brought a lot of modernity to that part of the world,” Hassenfeld told the audience at that Columbia forum. He said Japan, Korea and Taiwan “exploded” when Hasbro was manufacturing there, adding, “We had to be doing something right.” As for the ICTI CARE code, which now governs the welfare of almost a million Chinese workers inside 1,461 factories, he said: “We’re an industry-driven code. It’s the old ‘fox guarding the henhouse.’ . . . But I made an agreement and shook hands that no matter what we found, we would try and remediate that factory. Be a teacher.”

When I relayed the gist of these remarks to Sethi, he smiled angrily and shook his head. “That’s why I don’t get invited to those things,” he said.

Ah, be a teacher--I wonder if the textbooks will include The Jungle, How The Other Half Lives, and manuals on how to design lead-free toys.

Not to mention each of those countries Hassenfeld thinks Hasbro taught actually invested in education themselves--which is why they outperform us on study after study.