A NATO OF THE EAST? Dick Weisfelder called my attention to this article which describes the Shanghai Co-operation Organization. The organization consists of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzystan and Tajikistan and observers and among other things has called for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Central Asia. The article refers to commentators who refer to the new grouping as the “NATO of the East” and suggest that it may mark “the end of Western global dominance.” Kids, there are a lot of countries and people out there with interests different from ours, and we should expect them to assert those interests during your lifetimes. I have always thought that the phrase “superpower” is misleading. It was a useful shorthand way at one time of indicating that the USSR and the United States had much the strongest militaries and weaponry in the world, but the power that they had in the world was greatly overstated. Think of how little influence either the USSR or the United States had at the height of the Cold War over day-to-day affairs in India, China, Africa, Australia or Canada. The end of the Cold War did not give the United States appreciably more power in any of those places.
Archive for February, 2008
A NATO OF THE EAST?
Friday, February 29th, 2008AN AMERICAN AND A CLOCHARD. (COMMENT).
Thursday, February 28th, 2008AN AMERICAN AND A CLOCHARD. (COMMENT). Annalisa commented here on my post about French tourists who were thrilled to encounter an American who was down on his luck. Annalisa pointed out that as a tourist in France, I had a comparable experience and was pleased with it. Years ago, I was showing Annalisa and Nick Paris for the first time. I brought them to see St. Severin, one of my favorite churches (a short distance from Notre Dame). “That’s St. Severin,” I announced. At that point, a clochard, who had been sitting on the curb, roused himself, and said very loudly and with a beautiful strong French “r”: “Saint Severin.” Why was I pleased? The quiet moment, a favorite church, the implicit comment on my accent, a Frenchman interacting with us, and correcting us?
MEASURING THE AMERICAN DREAM.
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008MEASURING THE AMERICAN DREAM. Kids, in reading articles about income distribution you have to pay attention to measurement problems. The word “poverty” is ambiguous. Sometimes it refers to relative poverty and sometimes to absolute poverty. I think that in the article I linked to today, Professor Krugman is talking about relative poverty rather than absolute poverty. The estimate he uses, which apparently is based apparently on following a sample of parents and children, avoids one of the frustrations of comparisons of income distribution. Over a period of a generation, immigration, presumably from poorer countries, causes measurement problems. Simple comparisons of the lowest 25% thirty years apart run into the problem that after thirty years, many of the lowest quartile will include immigrants who lived in poverty in other countries, for whom we don’t have any information. Presumably a majority of these immigrants are better off than they had been, even if they are now in the bottom quartile in the United States. Following individuals doesn’t avoid measurement problems entirely, however, because new immigrants from poorer countries would make it easier for the second generation in the study to escape the bottom quartile.
AN ECONOMIST LOOKS AT THE AMERICAN DREAM.
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008AN ECONOMIST LOOKS AT THE AMERICAN DREAM. This article by Paul Krugman points to a study which followed individual families in the United States for two generations. “According to one recent estimate, American children born to parents in the bottom fourth of the income distribution have almost a 50 percent chance of staying there — and almost a two-thirds chance of remaining stuck if they’re black.” The article points out the effect that poverty has on children, quoting a study that found: “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” Kids, notice what would happen if the incomes of children were randomly distributed, so that the income of parents had no effect on the income of children. There would be a 25% chance that children of parents in the bottom quartile would wind up in the bottom quartile. And there would be a 25% chance that children of parents in each of the other quartiles would wind up in the bottom quartile.
THE GREAT GATSBY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM.
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008THE GREAT GATSBY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM. THE GREAT GATSBY is a favorite book for high schools not just because it is a great novel but because essays on Gatsby and the American Dream are such obvious assignments. This article is based on interviews with some high school students with immigrant backgrounds who find the book speaks to them about American dreams. My daughter Annalisa found GATSBY to be unappealing because she disliked all the characters. These students admired– and identified with –Jay Gatsby.
EUROPEANS AND AMERICAN POVERTY.
Monday, February 25th, 2008EUROPEANS AND AMERICAN POVERTY. Europeans have always been fascinated by the extremes of American life. I once showed New York City to some French friends on their first evening in the United States. It was an extraordinarily hot August day. At one point, they said they wanted to see the subways. Of course, it was even hotter in the subway. We had to walk a block underground to get to the subway to Greenwich Village, where we were going next. One of my friends had a limp and could only walk slowly. What I at that time would have called a wino or derelict was able to keep up with us as we walked, shouting angry curses at us. I looked over at my friends. They were beaming. This was what they had crossed the Atlantic to experience.
WELCOME TO SOBRO.
Sunday, February 24th, 2008WELCOME TO SOBRO. A New York cab driver told me a number of years ago that a lot of international fares that he picked up at Kennedy asked to see Harlem even before they went to their hotel. He said that they were usually disappointed, and so he had some parts of the South Bronx he would show them that would meet their expectations. This weekend’s Financial Times has a regular section devoted to real estate for the very very rich or the very very trendy. There is a regular feature in the section on “Up and Coming” neighborhoods in world class cities. This weekend’s article celebrates the South Bronx, which now has a name like SoHo and TriBeCa: “It is called SoBro—short for South Bronx—by those in the know.”
MEANINGLESS DRAMA.
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008MEANINGLESS DRAMA. I am surprised to see that Albee and Stoppard are considered by Ben Brantley to be descendants of Beckett. I think that Becket pretty much fully explored and exhausted his vision and left little for followers to say—if only because there is nothing to say. If words are meaningless, if communication is impossible and if modern drama consists only of footnotes to Beckett, one of the messages of modern drama must be the futility of modern drama. Imagine how disheartening it is for the theater goers who settle into their seats to know that they will be confronted with yet another demonstration that words—and the words they will be hearing for the next couple hours–are inadequate to communicate.
IS ALBEE AN ABSURDIST? SHOULD HE BE?
Friday, February 22nd, 2008IS ALBEE AN ABSURDIST? SHOULD HE BE? Ben Brantley argued in the article I linked to yesterday that “Mr. Albee and Mr. Stoppard are directly descended from Beckett” and that “Stoppard and Albee remind us of how much the Absurdists have in common with music-hall comedians.” Fintan O’Toole argued several years ago in this article that Albee is not at heart an Absurdist, and, to the extent he has been influenced by the Absurdists, he has taken the wrong path. O’Toole said that: “I find it hard to understand how Albee could have been mistaken for a fellow traveler of Ionesco, Beckett, or Pinter”; and that “The obvious truth that Albee’s is an individual and idiosyncratic American voice was obscured by his image as a European absurdist on the wrong side of the Atlantic.” O’Toole quoted a warning concerning Albee from Harold Clurman in 1961 of the danger of an abstraction that “loses touch with its roots in concrete individual experience” and concluded that “Albee’s recruitment into the theater of the absurd encouraged precisely the kind of abstract decoration that Clurman had warned against….” I think O’Toole’s article is brilliant and agree with O’Toole and Clurman that Albee is at his best when he is least abstract. I would point to THREE TALL WOMEN. The three women are called A, B, and C. Despite the abstraction in their names, it is the idiosyncratic voice of the oldest of the three, with its evident “roots in concrete individual experience” that gives the play its power.
CHOOSING WORDS–STOPPARD AND THE CRICKET BAT.
Thursday, February 21st, 2008CHOOSING WORDS–STOPPARD AND THE CRICKET BAT. It is surprising to see Ben Brantley saying that Stoppard despairs of communicating with words considering that one of Stoppard’s characters has an eloquent statement of what can be done with words and craftsmanship. In THE REAL THING, Henry, a professional writer, compares good writing to a cricket bat, “several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together” so that” if you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds.” He compares bad writing to a lump of wood shaped roughly like a cricket bat: “if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting Ouch! with your hands stuck into your armpits.” The whole speech is brilliantly written and funny, and brings sustained applause.
