The Nicholas Brothers: a slow motion tribute

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The Nicholas Brothers were probably the best dance act of the Golden Age of Hollywood and only Jim Crow could have kept them from being as famous as Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. I hope you enjoy this slow motion tribute to their art. DS

Times Change

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I happened on this clip and I began to wonder about how something that was once so mainstream, so top of the line, so wholesome, so American "family" entertainment, now looks so painfully like a charter flight full of scummy, leering, pedophile, sex tourists setting off on holiday to Phnom Penh. The word "inappropriate" falls far short. What has happened... what has changed? Reality? Fantasy?  It is hard to believe that the sophisticated libertines of 1930s Hollywood were not fully aware of all the implications of what they were selling. Or a significant part of the public too, if only subconsciously. To my mind this bit of film seems even older than the "Dancing Lady" of my previous piece. DS

America's undeniable advantage

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A Spanish friend of ours that runs a very important NGO has just come back from Beijing, where she hadn't visited since 1995. In those days, as she tells it, Beijing was millions of identically dressed people on bicycles and deep fried grasshopper stands on every corner. Today, she says that Beijing makes the isle of Manhattan look like Trenton New Jersey. What has been done in a little over ten years is breathtaking.

I think by now it's obvious that someday China is going to surpass the United States. There are too many of them, they work too hard, they are too smart and there are too many of them... I already said that.

Still, the USA has one advantage that will probably keep it afloat much longer than it deserves. The secret is in the photo above, taken in a KFC in Beijing.

What is that secret?

People like to pretend they are Americans.

China is without any question one of the world's greatest cultures with massive contributions to humanity's treasures in thought, word and deed over thousands of years. However, no matter how much you admire and love their culture, unless you are of 100% Han Chinese descent, it is impossible to imagine yourself being Chinese. Statistically, of course, there is a fairly good chance that you are Chinese already, but if you aren't, there is no way in the world you can become Chinese. You are either Chinese or you aren't.

But, thanks to America's amazing ability to mythify even its most banal idiosyncrasies, millions upon millions of humans all over the world imagine themselves to be Americans several hours a week and have been doing so since the invention of moving pictures. This is usually known as America's "colonization of the world's subconscious".

You don't even have to speak English to participate. Films are dubbed. I remember, when learning the language, that I soon got used to hearing John Wayne speaking Spanish on the screen, but I collapsed in laughter the first time I heard him speak Italian. John Wayne? Italiano? ¡No, hombre, no!

The Chinese man in the picture, happy in his cowboy hat, is our Pyramid of Giza, our Great Wall. DS

America, beautiful, but dumb

"The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse."
Susan Jacoby - Washington Post

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America is literally like no other country in the world. To understand how original it is you only have to compare it to Australia and Canada. In fact one of the best ways of coming to grips with the American psyche is to begin by comparing these three, white settler, ex-British colonies.

America is extraordinarily original, therefore "exceptional", but not exactly like most Americans think. In fact "American Exceptionalism" is a doctrine which maintains that Americans, because of their innate "goodness", are destined to fulfill a special destiny.

Here is a sample of this mentality in a recent statement of Colin Powell's, which many see as an indirect endorsement of Barack Obama:

"I am going to be looking for the candidate that seems to me to be leading a party that is fully in sync with the candidate and a party that will also reflect America's goodness and America's vision."

Now there any number of positive adjectives that I could apply to "my fellow Americans": energetic, creative, hard working, ingenious, enthusiastic, etcetera, but "good"?

General Powell is talking about a people who enslaved his ancestors, ethnically cleansed the Native-Americans, dropped atomic bombs on the helpless civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and uselessly killed about a million Vietnamese in a historically short space of time. Good? Certainly, any lucid historian would have to say about America what the British used to say about certain ladies, "she's no better than she ought to be".

So, I am not "proud" to be an American, simply, I AM an American. I love America because I love myself, not vice versa. I accept and cherish her gifts to me and assume her karma reverently. America is my idiosyncrasy, my mother tongue and a sortilege of skandas to schlep though the samsara. Never, in my whole life, often surrounded by people who detest what the United States represents, have I ever said -- with that smile of a fox eating shit off a wire brush -- that I am a Canadian... In the words of a great American, "I yam what I yam". I just don't want to live there, f'ya knowwhaddahmean.

After I lived away from America some time, I began to have enough distance to "see oursels as ithers see us" and realize how unique, eccentric, idiosyncratic and even a bit sinister America really is. However, like Susan Jacoby, whose text I quote today, lately I have begun to notice that America has passed originality to become simply weird. A country that produced Emerson, William James, Walt Whitman, Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison has become a universal byword for stupidity.

'Twasn't always so. Jacoby writes:

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged "Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin." This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made.

If we go farther back we can find masses of citizens, many frontiersmen, who way back in 1858 were able to follow the complex arguments of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. So obviously this isn't something genetic. Americans are being deliberately turned into idiots, because only idiots would act as America does today. What has happened? Who in America wants Americans to be so stupid? Why?

It is far beyond my modest abilities to forge a truly American, grand, paranoid, conspiracy theory of all of this. But I would humbly direct the attention of those sufficiently endowed in these matters to explore the confluence of interests between America's over bloated military spending, its suicidally self-defeating foreign policy and the enormous media conglomerates: news-sports-Hollywood, that create America's mental wallpaper, the texture of its stupidity. The answer is certainly there. DS

Susan Jacoby: The Dumbing Of America - Washington Post
Abstract: "The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations. This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office.(...) Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.(...) It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news. No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching." As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be.(...) The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation. There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. READ IT ALL

Terror... developing a taste

Un chien andalou - Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí (1929)

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I live in Spain, a country which has been living under the threat of terrorism for the last three decades, with hundreds of victims of every category, generals, admirals, soldiers, policemen, housewives, politicians and children... and that was before the March 11th, 2004 Al Qaeda attack. That attack was the bloodiest terrorist attack in European history.

Now the people of Spain hate terrorism and by extension terrorists, but there is no culture of paranoia and after the Al Qaeda bombings there was no singling out of Muslims for discrimination, there were no incidents of attacks on mosques or on Muslims... This despite the fact that there are many Moroccans living and working in Spain and the sight of women and girls wearing the hijab is a common one on Spanish streets and in Spanish public schools.

Now this is not because of some great love lost between the Spanish and the Muslims; quite the contrary, as they have been fighting each other tooth and nail off and on for over a thousand years. What doesn't exist in Spain yet is a paranoia industry similar to what Zbigniew Brzezinski describes in the article I've selected below and although there are people probably desirous of starting one, there is a great resistance in Spanish society, both high and low, up till now, against setting in motion such sinister forces.

The United States does have such a paranoia industry operating in universities, news media, the entertainment industry and it is working overtime. As Brzezinski points out, it is destroying the country. Certainly anyone who is looking for a winning subject for a monographic blog would do well to devote themselves to investigating this paranoia in depth and providing the rest of us with a reliable road map to that swamp. Who is behind it, who profits from it and where do they take those profits? The whole world needs the answers. DS

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Terrorized by 'War on Terror'- Washington Post Abstract: The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us. The damage these three words have done -- a classic self-inflicted wound -- is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare -- political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.(...) The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own -- and can become demoralizing. America today is not the self-confident and determined nation that responded to Pearl Harbor; nor is it the America that heard from its leader, at another moment of crisis, the powerful words "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"; nor is it the calm America that waged the Cold War with quiet persistence despite the knowledge that a real war could be initiated abruptly within minutes and prompt the death of 100 million Americans within just a few hours. We are now divided, uncertain and potentially very susceptible to panic in the event of another terrorist act in the United States itself. That is the result of five years of almost continuous national brainwashing on the subject of terror, quite unlike the more muted reactions of several other nations (Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, to mention just a few) that also have suffered painful terrorist acts. In his latest justification for his war in Iraq, President Bush even claims absurdly that he has to continue waging it lest al-Qaeda cross the Atlantic to launch a war of terror here in the United States. Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum. The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation. That America has become insecure and more paranoid is hardly debatable. A recent study reported that in 2003, Congress identified 160 sites as potentially important national targets for would-be terrorists. With lobbyists weighing in, by the end of that year the list had grown to 1,849; by the end of 2004, to 28,360; by 2005, to 77,769. The national database of possible targets now has some 300,000 items in it, including the Sears Tower in Chicago and an Illinois Apple and Pork Festival. Just last week, here in Washington, on my way to visit a journalistic office, I had to pass through one of the absurd "security checks" that have proliferated in almost all the privately owned office buildings in this capital -- and in New York City. A uniformed guard required me to fill out a form, show an I.D. and in this case explain in writing the purpose of my visit. Would a visiting terrorist indicate in writing that the purpose is "to blow up the building"? Would the guard be able to arrest such a self-confessing, would-be suicide bomber? To make matters more absurd, large department stores, with their crowds of shoppers, do not have any comparable procedures. Nor do concert halls or movie theaters. Yet such "security" procedures have become routine, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and further contributing to a siege mentality.(...) The entertainment industry has also jumped into the act. Hence the TV serials and films in which the evil characters have recognizable Arab features, sometimes highlighted by religious gestures, that exploit public anxiety and stimulate Islamophobia. Arab facial stereotypes, particularly in newspaper cartoons, have at times been rendered in a manner sadly reminiscent of the Nazi anti-Semitic campaigns. Lately, even some college student organizations have become involved in such propagation, apparently oblivious to the menacing connection between the stimulation of racial and religious hatreds and the unleashing of the unprecedented crimes of the Holocaust.
The atmosphere generated by the "war on terror" has encouraged legal and political harassment of Arab Americans (generally loyal Americans) for conduct that has not been unique to them. A case in point is the reported harassment of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its attempts to emulate, not very successfully, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Some House Republicans recently described CAIR members as "terrorist apologists" who should not be allowed to use a Capitol meeting room for a panel discussion. Social discrimination, for example toward Muslim air travelers, has also been its unintended byproduct. Not surprisingly, animus toward the United States even among Muslims otherwise not particularly concerned with the Middle East has intensified, while America's reputation as a leader in fostering constructive interracial and interreligious relations has suffered egregiously.The record is even more troubling in the general area of civil rights. The culture of fear has bred intolerance, suspicion of foreigners and the adoption of legal procedures that undermine fundamental notions of justice. Innocent until proven guilty has been diluted if not undone, with some -- even U.S. citizens -- incarcerated for lengthy periods of time without effective and prompt access to due process.(...) And the resentment is not limited to Muslims. A recent BBC poll of 28,000 people in 27 countries that sought respondents' assessments of the role of states in international affairs resulted in Israel, Iran and the United States being rated (in that order) as the states with "the most negative influence on the world." Alas, for some that is the new axis of evil! The events of 9/11 could have resulted in a truly global solidarity against extremism and terrorism. A global alliance of moderates, including Muslim ones, engaged in a deliberate campaign both to extirpate the specific terrorist networks and to terminate the political conflicts that spawn terrorism would have been more productive than a demagogically proclaimed and largely solitary U.S. "war on terror" against "Islamo-fascism." Only a confidently determined and reasonable America can promote genuine international security which then leaves no political space for terrorism. Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, "Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia"? Even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which cannot be denied, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions. READ IT ALL

Pogo meets Iraq

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There is a lot to chew over in this article from Foreign Policy Magazine. It makes some important points that provide a practical program for thinking about the disaster of Iraq.

Americans have a big problem accepting that other people(s) are really as different as they are, that their cultures and social structures are as intractable as they really are. That as William Faulkner, "the past isn't history, it isn't even past."

I suspect that behind a lot of this, there is a deep fear of how precarious the American identity has become as it has ceased to simply be WASP, with becoming WASP-like the measure of American-ness, while at the same time the "others" who were always invisible or comic relief have become visible: Visible and vocal. You might say that the WASP identity was the "Marshall Tito" to America's inner "balkanization".

Among the neocons, who midwifed the war in Iraq, that identity crisis seems to be greater than for others. Neoconservatives seem to have a pressing need to believe that they, instead of being, in reality, a tiny minority with very special interests, are in fact "universal" in their beliefs and especially in their needs. In the druggy sixties this was known as forcing others to "take your trip". DS

What Iraq Tells Us About Ourselves - Foreign Policy (hat tip to Teresa O'Neill)
Abstract: How did the highly educated, wealthy, and powerful American people make such a horrendous, catastrophic series of blunders? As Pogo, the cartoon opossum, once famously said, “We have met the enemy and he is us!” Yes, that’s right: We, the American people—not the Bush administration, nor the hapless Iraqis, nor the meddlesome Iranians (the new scapegoat)—are the root of the problem. It’s woven into our cultural DNA. Most Americans mistakenly believe that when we say that “all men are created equal,” it means that all people are the same. Behind the “cute” and “charming” native clothing, the “weird” marriage customs, and the “odd” food of other cultures, all humans are yearning for lifestyles and futures that will be increasingly unified as time and globalization progress. That is what Tom Friedman seems to have meant when he wrote that “the world is flat”—that technological and economic change are driving humankind toward a future of cultural sameness. In other words, whatever differences of custom and habit that still exist between peoples will pass away soon and be replaced by a world culture rather like that of the United States in the 21st century. To be blunt, our foreign policy tends to be predicated on the notion that everyone wants to be an American. In the months leading up to the start of the Iraq War, it was common to hear seemingly educated people say that the Arabs, particularly Iraqis, had no way of life worth saving and would be better off if all “that old stuff”—their traditions, social institutions, and values—were done away with, and soon. The U.S. Armed Forces and U.S. Agency for International Development would be the sharp swords of modernization in the Middle East. How did Americans come to believe that the entire world is embarked on the same voyage, and that we are the navigators showing the way to a bright future? Our own culture is a rich blend, brewed from such elements as enlightenment, optimism, Puritan utopianism, a Calvinist tendency to not forgive sinners, and the settler’s lack of respect for the weak and “native” peoples of the world. In the United States, such threads have pushed us to believe that we are all in a melting pot of common ideology. This belief system has been fed to us in the public schools, through Hollywood, and now in the endless prattle of 24-hour news networks. It has become secular religion, a religion so strong that any violation of its tenets brings instant and savage condemnation. So called “neoconservatism” isn’t some kind of alien ideology; it’s merely a self-aware manifestation of the widespread American belief that people are all the same. The repeated assertion by U.S. President George W. Bush that history is dominated by the existence of “universal values” is proof in the pudding.
By Col. W. Patrick Lang, Jr. READ IT ALL