Rudi, I Killed Your Father

Band of Thebes, who introduced me to The Eagle, reminded me this week of Third Man on the Mountain, the 1959 Disney live-action feature about an orphaned Swiss youth (James MacArthur) who, under the patronage of Michael Rennie (sigh), gets a chance to conquer the mountain that killed his mountain-guide father. As with The Eagle, BoT read the film as a coded story of manly love, though I think he's less convincing this time around. (For example, he says that the boy "forgets all about his tomboy girlfriend", which isn't true.) Still, BoT's post brought back memories, so I checked out the DVD from the library to see how it looks fifty years later. (WARNING: There are spoilers below.)

I loved Third Man on the Mountain when I saw it in the theater (I would have been eight years old), and saw it probably more than once on television, since Disney often recycled theatrical releases on their Sunday night television show. James MacArthur was one of my early celebrity crushes, and though I don't remember for sure, I probably identified with Rennie in this bromance, not MacArthur. Or with both of them, come to think of it. They meet cute when Rudi (MacArthur) rescues Captain Winter (Rennie) from a crevasse into which the latter has carelessly fallen: I'd have identified with the rescued -- both here and in The Day the Earth Stood Still, Rennie plays a rather passive character who must be saved, and gladly would I have saved him -- and the rescuer, especially when MacArthur took his shirt off. It turns out that James MacArthur played major roles in a number of Disney films from this period, all of which I saw. Yes, my parents took me and my brothers to see them, but some interested me more than others, usually because of the young male leads. I kept track of some male stars even at that age, and MacArthur was one of them.

As for the tomboy girlfriend, she represents the Disney obsession with heterosexualizing stories that weren't heterosexual before the machine went to work on them. According to several reviews I've looked at, Lizbeth was not a character in Banner in the Sky, the James Ramsey Ullman juvenile novel the movie was based on. But as played by the baby-butch Janet Munro, she's not intrusive at all, as women stuck in male love stories usually are -- she even encourages Rudi's interaction with Captain Winter -- and she is a tomboy, as interested in climbing mountains as Rudi is. (The director of the film recalled: "She had a great sense of balance and being able to look out for herself and fall well. She was one who would do anything. It was basically a matter of me deciding what I would risk her on. She was a wonderful girl to work with.") That may be why she doesn't drop out of sight as soon as Captain Winter arrives on the scene.

The most notable thing about Third Man on the Mountain is that it was shot on location in Switzerland, and the principals got some intensive training in climbing so that they could do much of their own stuntwork. Local guides doubled for them in long shots, and there's occasional matte work because in real life, the mountains were often obscured by clouds, but the reality of the setting is palpable. I didn't know that when I saw it as a kid, but I'm sure it added to the vividness of the experience. I went through a brief fascination with the idea of learning to climb mountains, though growing up in the cornfields of Indiana offered no opportunities for that activity, and I never followed it up.

Which brings me to an amusing user review of the film at IMDB, titled "Hollywood Could Learn from the Past." (No permalink that I can find.) The writer says he first saw the film at the age of 8, just like me, but he did follow up the desire it inspired to take up mountain climbing. Fair enough, but then he goes off an a typical hate-filled-old-geezer rant:

In an age where Hollywood gratifies violence, profanity, and promiscuity, caring parents would do well to, not only let their children see this great adventure story; but to sit with them and watch it as a family. As a teenager, I never once attended a 'house-party', drank, or engaged in the trash that often creates arrogant, ungrateful, and belligerent adolescents. The memory of this film never left my mind, and kept me focused in life. Honour, self discipline, respect for our elders and caring about what others think of us; as well as a great story of personal determination and effort, young people today need to be presented with the values that used to be 'normal' in society.

The real locations used in the filming provide a welcome relief from the slick, computer-animations and green-screen fakery of modern celluloid, and the climbing depictions are far, far superior to anything that has since been passed off by Hollywood, as 'mountaineering'. Having to EARN respect, working and striving for goals, personal sacrifice, and a good story: parents owe this film to their children.

Of course, the location shooting in TMotM was unusual in its day, as the writer was vaguely aware, though the special effects to simulate mountain scenery and the like were analog and optical instead of digital as they commonly (though not universally) are now. He also is evidently unaware that MacArthur had played troubled juvenile delinquents before he went to work for Disney. I'm a decade older than the reviewer, and though I grew up on "family" movies like TMotM I went to a "house-party" or two and later drank, smoked the marijuana, and turned out to be a (gasp) homosexual and an atheist. None of which means that I don't think that respect, working and striving for goals, personal sacrifice (when it's appropriate), or good stories aren't good things.

But best of all, TMotM is short on "honour, self discipline, respect for our elders and caring about what others think of us" -- Rudi defies his elders, including his mother and uncle, who want him to give up his dream of conquering the Citadel in favor of managing a hotel. He refuses to concentrate on his respectable job as a dishwasher, and keeps running off in the middle of his shift to roam and daydream. He doesn't think that much about what "others" think of him: he wants the respect of those who've earned his respect but has little for the rest. And despite his disrespect and disobedience, he climbs the Citadel with Captain Winter (though he doesn't actually reach the summit) and returns to his village in triumph for a big Code-approved dry smooch from Lisbeth. The writer of the review is entitled to his personal values, but he shouldn't pretend that they're embodied in a film that doesn't in fact share them.

This ...

... is totally gay. And I mean that in the most positive, multicultural, lust-filled way I possibly can.

Even I haven't been able to avoid the Jeremy Lin phenomenon, best described by Andrew Ti at Deadspin as the way an "Asian player who, through a combination of circumstance, luck, timing, and some monster performances, has captured America's admittedly infantile and famously fickle imagination." Still, the first full article I read about him was Alexander Chee's slobbering encomium at Salon today, comments under which led me to Ti's article and from there to the clip above. Here's the thing. Sure, it's nice that another racial line has been breached. It might even make a difference to Asian-American kids who are currently the most-bullied ethnic demographic in the country, but anti-black racism is still epidemic despite the high visibility of African-American college and professional athletes. Jeremy Lin has earned his success, but it has no real importance or significance.

It occurs to me, though: what will happen when we finally get an openly gay basketball star of the same prowess?

Laughter Is the Best Medicine

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Avedon wrote at The Sideshow today:

"The canard is that 'forcing' organizations to provide contraceptive health coverage means forcing them to pay extra for it. Of course, the reverse is true - policies that omit contraceptive coverage cost more than policies that provide it, because pregnancies cost more than contraception. And that means that what the no-contraceptive-coverage crowd really wants is to force people to pay extra for an exception that nobody needs. There's a similar canard related to the whole idea of forbidding funds for abortions for welfare recipients - it's cheaper for the state to fund it than not to fund it, so the rest of us are having to pay the costs of not funding it. This is, of course, a consistent theme with right-wing policy. Fully-funded, WIC programs used to save us $45,000 for every $100 spent, but they kept cutting down until it saved not nearly that much, and yet it still saves us money, though every cut means it saves less again. And so on."

Jon Stewart paraphrased Rick Santorum's political philosophy as "We should all be free to live by Christian law." No, Santorum wants us all to be free to live by Roman Catholic law. Protestants don't have a uniform view on contraception, for example, though many Jews, especially the ultraorthodox, would agree with Santorum and Gingrich in opposing contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, and Darwin's theory of descent with modification by Natural Selection. I think that Joan Walsh was wrong, and that Santorum's critics have not been stressing Santorum's Catholicism enough.

Stewart did zero in on a central matter: Is this issue upsetting most Catholics (let alone other believers) or just "the old guys who run it"? The old guys who run it, of course.

But how about this religious exemption? Will Catholic hospitals perform circumcision? Do employee insurance plans cover this, uh, non-Catholic procedure? (That's a biblical doctrine, by the way: the apostle Paul forbade his gentile converts to undergo circumcision, though he wasn't fully consistent about this in practice.) Can Jewish hospitals insist on circumcising all boy children of their employees, or they won't cover pregnancy and childbirth? Can religious hospitals refuse to treat people who don't belong to their denomination? If not, why not? Of course that would be discrimination, but so is refusing to provide full insurance coverage to non-Catholic employees who don't share their employers' reservations.

Dragons' Teeth and Crocodile Tears

Okay, Duncan, get to work!

I've been meaning to write about this for weeks, but you know how I am; it took me until yesterday to change my holiday-themed profile picture on Facebook, and then only because several people nagged me. I mean, c'mon, if I delay just a few months more it'll be War on Christmas Season again and the picture will be timely. But anyway.

I think I detect a slight waning of Apple adoration, and even of Jobs worship, since the media began covering the horrific work conditions in the Chinese factories where Apple products are made. I could be wrong, though. Some writers have argued that it's not fair to pick on Apple, because conditions are no better in the factories that manufacture electronics for other companies. True, Apple is not the only offender, but it's appropriate to single them out simply because Apple devotees were so damned smug about their electronic pets, and so cultish about Jobs. And to be fair, it seems that some of them have admitted that using people up might be too high a price to pay for having the coolest toys. That's progress.

I was writing about this before Jobs became late, and in my first post about his legacy I used Apple as only one example of the human costs of capitalism. Judging by some of the articles I read which focused mainly on Apple, they may just have felt betrayed: But, but, Steve -- I thought you were cool! I mean, you're a genius and a visionary! Say it ain't so!

We learned from the new biography that Jobs had criticized Obama for not being "business-friendly" enough.

"You're headed for a one-term presidency," he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where "regulations and unnecessary costs" make it difficult for them.

If this sounds like a typical "economic freedom" whine, a la the Koch Brothers, it is. For all that such people complain about government interference in the economy, they couldn't succeed without it, and indeed they expect and demand it. Tabloid Friend on Facebook linked to this New York Times article which contains a now-famous anecdote about the development of the iPhone. Jobs demanded scratch-proof glass, and he got it from China.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

Notice the sentence I put in boldface there; most people apparently didn't. Mostly the lesson we were supposed to learn from this story was "supply chains." China has the newest and best and the US doesn't. But supply chains aren't a natural product of "economic freedom," they're complex infrastructure that capitalists aren't interested in building themselves.

Some might argue that this isn't really capitalism, it's residual Communism that the Chinese haven't fully weaned themselves from. But this sort of government subsidy is exactly how capitalism works in the real world, as opposed to the propaganda of "economic freedom."

In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said. ... Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility.

I'm not sure that the executives' contention should be believed, partly because an engineer with a bachelor's could probably do the job just as well, but would probably cost too much. And notice that they clearly want those "factories with sufficient speed and flexibility" to just grow out of the ground. Building such factories themselves would be expensive, and cut into profits. That's why Apple and other companies go overseas, where the factories have already been built with government subsidies. The same goes for the engineers "China provided"; they didn't emerge from their mothers' wombs with the skill set they needed. But who's going to pay for training those engineers? Not I, said the Jobs.

Alexander Cockburn wrote a good column on this for The Nation, quoting a Reagan-era trade negotiator who had been angered when an Apple executive told the Times, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

In the 1981–86 period, Prestowitz says, Jobs and his executives “had the funny notion that the US government had an obligation to help them…. We did all we could, and in doing so came to learn that virtually everything Apple had for sale, from the memory chips to the cute pointer mouse, had had its origins in some program wholly or partially supported by US government money…. The heart of the computer is the microprocessor, and Apple’s derived from Motorola’s 680X0, which was developed with much assistance, direct and indirect, from the Defense Department, as were the DRAM memory chips. The pointer mouse came from Xerox’s PARC center near Stanford (which also enjoyed government funding). In addition, most computer software at that time derived from work with government backing.”

Prestowitz points out that Apple also assumes the US government is obligated to stop foreign pirating of Apple’s intellectual property and, should supply chains in the Far East be disrupted, to offer the comforting support of the Seventh Fleet. “And those supply chains. Are they the natural product of good old free market capitalism, or does that scalability and flexibility and capacity to mobilize large numbers of workers on a moment’s notice have something to do with government subsidies and the interventionist industrial policies of most Asian economies?”

What Prestowitz says is what the arch-heretic Noam Chomsky (among others) has been saying all along: the wonders of American free enterprise were in reality products of government intervention and subsidy. And remember that bit in Jobs' complaint to Obama, about the ease with which companies can build factories in China? It's a lot easier when the Chinese government and American taxpayers are footing the bill. Why do American companies get tax breaks for operating overseas? That is what the Right calls "social engineering" and "redistribution of wealth" if it goes in the other direction. But it should: tax breaks, perhaps, for returning production to the US; maybe even subsidies for building up our supply chains; but it would also be legitimate to raise taxes on companies which operate overseas.

Last Friday Democracy Now! did a segment on the human cost of cheap, cool high technology. One guest was Charles Duhigg, a New York Times reporter who'd done a series on conditions in the factories. Mostly he gushed about the "amazing products" Apple produces, and the infrastructure that makes that cornucopia possible:

Well, one of the things that President Obama asked was, is it ever possible to bring back those jobs to the United States, to make iPhones in the U.S.? And what Steve Jobs said was—I think accurately—those jobs are never coming back. And the reason why isn’t just because workers are cheaper in China, although that—they are cheaper in China; it’s because China has established a huge competitive advantage over the U.S. There are supply chains that exist in China and Asia now which the U.S. simply can’t replicate. And there’s a system of labor there that allows factories to hire 3,000 people overnight or, as Mike can speak to, create facilities that house 250,000 workers and change them in a couple of hours or a couple of days from one product to another. It’s an amazing, amazing manufacturing capacity that’s grown up overseas—with harsh costs associated with it, but that makes it possible for us to get a brand new iPhone every single year.

"There's a system of labor there" that "by American standards, would be almost unconscionable." But Apple is "enormously well-meaning," and "you have to take Apple at their word, because this is a major corporation, they usually don’t lie about stuff like this." (I sat there astounded as this nonsense poured giddily out of the man's mouth.) But the important thing is that it makes it possible for us to get a brand new iPhone every single year; one shudders to think about the consequences if we couldn't.

The other guest, Mike Daisey, was more critical. He's doing a one-man show called The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, based on interviews he did with Chinese factory workers.

MIKE DAISEY: Well, Foxconn chose to deal with the suicides, in the period when I was visiting—what they had done, after month after month of suicides, was put up nets.

AMY GOODMAN: Nets.

MIKE DAISEY: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: To catch the bodies.

Duhigg's response?

Without Foxconn—and there’s only really one or two other companies that can do what Foxconn does—you can’t produce 300 million iPhones. You need a partner like this that you can give designs to, and they can start it rolling out a week later. And Foxconn does it amazingly. Now, conditions inside the plants are fairly harsh, as Mike so eloquently describes. But it is—it’s a new type of company that really we haven’t seen in history.

Well, that's all right then. Mr. Duhigg will no doubt flourish at the Times. But it does appear that Apple's lustre has begun to tarnish. Not only The Daily Show but This American Life -- both epitomes of US media cool -- have done segments critical of Apple, and that's got to hurt. Apple is fighting back, though.

In the last month, Apple has released a damning audit which found that almost 100 of Apple’s supplier factories force more than half their workers to exceed a 60-hour week. The company announced responsibility for aluminum dust explosions in Chinese supplier factories that killed four workers and injured 77. Hundreds more in China have been injured cleaning iPad screens with a chemical that causes nerve damage.

This is a familiar tactic, though, as Jeff Ballinger, the author of the article I just quoted, points out. It's what Nike did when conditions in its factories were revealed. By ostentatiously taking responsibility while limiting transparency and insisting on voluntary monitoring, companies can maintain a good PR front without changing conditions very much, except for the people who really matter.

This is not to say that these high-profile monitoring operations are worthless. Just ask the shareholders who saw Nike bounce back from being equated with slavery to join the top rankings of “responsible” companies. “Corporate social responsibility” has proved invaluable at repairing brand images and wrong-footing the anti-sweatshop movement – maybe what Bill Clinton had in mind when launching the Apparel Industry Partnership, precursor to the FLA.

Yesterday FAIR had a blog post on the other leg of Apple's defense: that, as New York Times tech writer David Pogue, put it, "Bringing workplace standards and pay in Chinese factories up to American levels would, of course, raise the price of our electronics. How much is hard to say, but a financial analyst for an outsourcing company figures a $200 iPhone might cost $350 if it were built here." And while "we" feel deeply for the Chinese workforce, "we" don't want to pay more for our iPhones! FAIR then linked to a Columbia Journalism Review piece by David Chittum which demolished Pogue's arithmetic.

Even if Pogue were right, and as much as I love my cheap laptop and other electronics, nobody has a right to lower-priced toys at the expense of other human beings' lives or health. We've been spoiled, and we will have to grow up. But it looks like our artificial people, the corporations, will have to grow up first. Apple takes a huge profit margin on the goodies it sells to those of us who want to be cool, Chittum says 71%, and by his calculations Chinese workers could have decent pay and tolerable working conditions without the margin dropping below 50 percent, without having to raise the price of an iPhone at all. Apple would make huge profits instead of obscene ones. Since their profits depend not only on degrading and shortening the lives of their factory workers but on government subsidies in both China and the US, I don't think they'd have grounds for complaint. The world doesn't owe Apple Computers, or any other company, a living. Nor does it owe me, or you, inexpensive computers and cell phones.

Remember: "business-friendly" means "corporate welfare."

The Importance of Being Connected

I've read a lot about the importance of social media in the worldwide struggle for democracy in the past year, and I don't deny that they have their uses. But today I'm reading Ashraf Khalil's new book Liberation Square (St. Martin's Press, 2012), about the Egyptian revolution. (Full disclosure: I knew Ash when he was studying journalism at IU in the early 90s. We had several friends in common, and kept in touch when he got started working.) It fills in a lot I didn't know about the background of the uprising, with plenty of details about the uprising itself. Ash was working in Egypt at the time, and covered it throughout.

Today I just want to notice that non-electronic communication isn't dead yet. It shouldn't surprise anyone, since a good many revolutions have taken place and succeeded without smartphones, Facebook, or Twitter. But even in Egypt, while the Internet was useful in stirring things up -- Liberation Square mentions a young veiled Egyptian woman who posted an inflammatory video to Youtube, daring Egyptian men to join Egyptian women in the streets -- and putting potential activists in touch with each other, electronics played almost no role on the Day of Rage, 28 January 2011, when the regime shut down the Internet and cell phone communications. That should have been the end of it, by the logic of the Twitter boosters, but it wasn't. In fact, the move may have backfired.

All through that day and deep into the night, Cairo reverted to a surreal word-of-mouth storyteller society. If you were walking on the street and you saw protesters coming in the other direction, you asked them where they were coming from and what the situation was like there. It was intimate and even pleasant. …

“There was no Internet and no cell phones. That more than anything brought people into the streets,” said Maha Elgamal. “If you wanted to know what was happening, you had to go out. If you were a mother scared for your son, and wanted to make sure he was all right, you had to go out. But even on the twenty-eighth, it was impossible to predict that a revolution was coming. I was still working on the assumption that we were five years away.”

Rawya Rageh, the Al Jazeera International correspondent, covered January 28 from Alexandria and observed an identical phenomenon. The lack of information produced a huge pool of curious onlookers, who were then either emboldened by the numbers around them or enraged by the violence they witnessed.

“Even those who had no interest in the revolution headed out to see what was going on. Then when they saw the brutality, they joined the protests,” Rageh said [164-5].

This also supports what I gathered from Sarah Sobieraj's Soundbitten (NYU Press, 2011): that the striving of much US activism to get corporate media attention, as though it was the media that mattered, gets social movements nowhere. It distracts them, in fact, from what ought to be their real goal: reaching the general population. Sobieraj noticed that activist groups often made no preparation, and so didn't know what to do, when people approached them. In Egypt, activists bypassed the official media to reach the public and get them involved.

There were other factors, of course -- you can't get people to revolt against a government that isn't corrupt to the bone, like the Mubarak regime, and one tipping point was the public murder by police thugs of a young slacker, Khaled Saieed, in Alexandria during the summer of 2010. Up till then, most Egyptians believed that if they simply minded their own business and kept their heads low, they wouldn't get into trouble and could get by.

Which reminds me of another interesting anecdote -- Liberation Square contains many -- about the regime's belated attempt at damage control after Saieed's murder. Mubarak's son (and presumed heir apparent at the time) Gamal, "issued a statement claiming that the National Democratic Party 'insists on the accountability of any wrongdoer within the framework of justice, transparency and the rule of law'" (80). Sounds familiar, doesn't it? We've heard virtually the same words many times here in the US.

One of Us! One of Us! Or Are You?

I just finished reading Nancy Abelmann's The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation (Duke, 2009). Abelmann is an anthropologist from whose work on Koreans, both in Korea and in the US, I've learned a lot. As you can tell from the title, her most recent book is about Korean American students at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where she teaches. It's based on interviews and participant-observing (or "hanging out," as she wryly glosses it) with a large number of students and their families, often over a period of years. And it goes deeper than you might think, because Abelmann and her informants probe questions of what "the" university is for, for anyone; Abelmann is also good at teasing apart the contradictions in the desire of immigrants and their children to belong and not to belong, to assimilate or not, so the book has implications not only for recent immigrants but for those whose ancestors came over several generations back.

The Intimate University made me think more about something that has been nagging at me for some time now, namely the meaning of "multiculturalism." On one hand, the term can mean recognizing that one's society -- any society, not just the US -- comes from not just one cultural source, but many, a recognition that means one should adopt a respectful attitude to other cultures. By "respectful attitude" I don't mean unthinking acceptance or celebration of everything in other cultures, any more than one should unthinkingly celebrate everything in one's own; only recognition that those other cultures had something worthwhile to contribute. To quote again an exchange from Thomas Mann: "Can anything be greater than love?" "Yes: interest."

On the other hand, multiculturalism can also intend to break down all barriers, and ultimately all differences between cultures, under the classical liberal guise of claiming that everyone has common humanity, which just happens to be upper-class Anglo-Saxon. This is not really so different from the old racist approach, except that the gate to acceptance is open as long as those outside divest themselves of any difference from the white norm.

I think it's this contradiction that leads to so much misery -- the word isn't too strong, though the misery is more intense for some than for others -- for so many of the Korean American students Abelmann writes about. They tend to view The University as a place that will inspire them, teach them the meaning of life, and lead them out of the immigrant enclaves where they mostly grew up into an open, accepting America. On the other, they are wary of American materialism, soullessness, and secularism (most of Abelmann's subjects are Korean Protestants, with a minority of Catholics and an even smaller group of others). But they also tend to see their families as only surface Christians. They don't even trust American churches, so they continue attending a big Korean student church off-campus. They insist that their parents don't fit the Tiger stereotype of obsessively pushy, instrumentalist, ambitious model-minority control freaks; yet they concede, or hint, that in fact they do fit the stereotype, and that they themselves feel the burden of that ambition. Many of them begin their undergraduate careers trying to broaden their horizons -- taking humanities courses, making non-Asian friends -- but drift back to mainly Korean social circles by their senior years. It doesn't help that many of the Koreans on campus already know each other from growing up in the same Chicago suburbs, the same high schools, the same Korean megachurches. Nor does it help, as Abelmann points out, that The University's role is changing; even during the years (1997-2004, give or take) when she was doing her fieldwork, the US economy was starting to crumble, and it was no longer certain that a college degree would get you a job, and more and more people were questioning the wisdom of going deep into debt for a liberal arts education. Much of the pressure on Korean students (and others) to stop exploring and stick to the robot-producing majors was economic.

Which brings me to the issue of "self-segregation," a charge that has been leveled at numerous minorities in the US, and to the question that this book made me ponder: What's wrong with self-segregation? Without it, there wouldn't be the beautiful cornucopia of diversity that multiculturalism is supposed to celebrate: "diversity" means difference, not sameness. Segregation is mainly a problem when it's imposed from outside, though admittedly as Abelmann and others have pointed out, there are other ways of imposing segregation than brute force and violence. Still, is it self-segregation if white kids from Chicago also find themselves hanging out in college with other white kids from the same suburbs, schools, churches instead of with white kids from other cities or states? The thing about a comfort zone, as Abelmann calls it, is that it's comfortable, and comfort can be positive as well as negative. It's important to remember too that some Korean students disaffiliate themselves and socialize primarily outside the Korean community -- some even (gasp) drop out of college -- but such students were not the focus of Abelmann's research, which makes me wonder if there isn't some circular reasoning going on here.

I once made fun of a campus rightist's misunderstanding of diversity issues by saying that as a strict professional enforcer of Political Correctness, I demand that every American be 51 percent female, 12 percent black, 12 percent Latino, 6 percent Asian, 2 percent Jewish, and 10 percent gay, lesbian, and bisexual. I also wondered what role minority students were ideally supposed to play in integration. Would every black student have to have 9 white friends, and so on? (The guy I was mocking seemed to think so.) The trouble is that we don't really know what a genuinely "diverse" society would look like. I'm pretty sure, though, that it wouldn't be one with all difference diluted into gray mush. (Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time is an intelligent suggestion of the kind of thing to aim for: on "race," for example, her imagined future society breaks the link between skin color and culture.)

Abelmann also wrote about

the persistent urge (or need?) of many students to distinguish themselves from other Korean Americans, regardless of the shape of their ethnic life. Their offered collectively powerful instances of what some scholars have labeled “intraethnic othering.” Both during and beyond the fieldwork phase, I wrestled with this: why were the members of this community working so busily to be anything but “typically Korean,” even in their most ethnic social circles, such as the Korean American church? ...

Well documented, for example, are the ways Asian Americans often disidentify with other communities of color, effectively claiming their own model minority status (e.g., from other Asian American groups, among them refugee populations in particular, and blacks and Latinos) [161, 162].

Intraethnic othering also occurs in non-ethnic groups -- gay men, for example, will gladly tell you at length how they aren't like those other trashy gays, while confirming in the process that they are exactly like them. It's not that different from interethnic othering.

Abelmann talks about what has been done at Champaign-Urbana -- principally a major discussion that led to new Asian American studies courses -- and what more she thinks should be done. A lot of it comes down to not being afraid of difference. She even says:

... I also think that the Korean American students in this book challenge the university and its observers to imagine segregated spaces that nobody has to worry about or apologize for, or for that matter to label as self-segregated. Instead, these ethnic [and, she might have mentioned, other] spaces can be understood as inevitable features of a country and a university still gripped by the realities of race, even as the university makes its own noteworthy efforts to forge new ties and spaces [166].

But as I suggested above, while race is a problem, eliminating race wouldn't eliminate people's tendency to group together and distinguish themselves from others. As trivial as it may sound at first blush, Asian American studies courses, joining the other racial/ethnic studies and quasi-ethnic ones like gender and GLBT studies probably do help a lot, by encouraging people to talk about and not be frightened by difference. They don't build walls (as the popular "balkanizing" accusation would have it), they make some openings in the ones we already have. It's not enough, but it's a start.

Infidels! Circle the Wagons!

Joan Walsh has a fairly good piece on the Catholic hierarchy's battle against covering birth control in their employees' insurance plans. She's an apostate Catholic from a working-class background -- sort of like me, except that I didn't know I'd been baptized until I was in my forties, so I never consciously abandoned the Great Whore of Babylon, as the Church is affectionately known in serious Protestant circles. She admits that despite her personal break with Catholicism, and her support of Obama, it makes her uncomfortable when "secular" types bash the church, and she wonders where that defensive reaction comes from, even in someone like her, let alone among the still faithful.

There’s a vestigial impulse to circle the wagons and protect our right to practice our persecuted religion (even if it’s no longer persecuted, and many of us don’t practice very much of it anymore). Where does it come from?

Walsh notices what many have missed, that this controversy is not about the religious freedom of ordinary believers, but "the 'freedom' of the Catholic hierarchy to impose rules that even most Catholics don’t live by", and indeed to impose Vatican doctrine on non-Catholics who work for Catholic institutions. She warns about the "many Catholics receptive to GOP blathering about out-of-touch 'elites' who supposedly disrespect their religious freedom" -- well, who's more out of touch than the Catholic hierarchy?

That Catholics, especially the elites, should accuse Obama of persecuting them should surprise no one. It's not a specifically Catholic tactic; even overwhelming majorities (gentiles, Christians, heterosexuals, whites) like to present themselves as endangered species, a pitiful few under siege from the powerful Jewish, secular, homosexual, Negro conspiracies to take over and remodel our society. Anyone who uses this tactic should be called on it, that's all.

I think Walsh gets some details wrong, though. True, as Walsh says, we secularists shouldn't judge all Catholics by the misconduct of the hierarchy; but when the hierarchy demands that they, and not the much greater numbers of the laity, be regarded as the standard for Catholicism, it's perfectly correct to judge the Church by them. Besides, even a more focused critique won't be welcome: focus on the bishops and the Pope (who was personally involved in the coverup of the child abuse scandal), and you'll still be called unfair. And I've often found that lay Catholics (including LGBT ones) who whine about mean outsiders picking on the Church don't hear it when I do distinguish between the elites and the laity; if I say "the Vatican," they hear "all Catholics." (Analogously, when I criticize antigay bigots, many people accusing me of lumping all heterosexuals together. In both cases, it's my critics who are doing the lumping.) I'm still staggered by the person I was debating online, who dismissed the Pope and the College of Cardinals as "marginal figures"; in a monarchical institution like the Church, such people are a numerical minority, but they are anything but marginal.

This is relevant when Walsh complains,

While the child abuse scandal makes most Catholics sick, sometimes even I wince when non-Catholics judge the whole church by the corruption of a comparative (though very powerful) few. I have cousins and uncles and aunts who’ve joined religious orders (though, truthfully, most of them left). I don’t like seeing all of them considered perverts or pedophiles, or people who cover up for predators.

First, it seems to me that a lot of this kind of overgeneralization, when it occurs, comes from Catholics, including lapsed Catholics, not non-Catholics. But again, when I've attacked the Vatican and the Bishops for protecting predator priests, Catholics tend to hear it as an attack on all Catholics -- that "circling the wagons" reflex Walsh mentioned. It's a perfectly natural, human reaction to get defensive in this way, but we shouldn't let it get past us. We who criticize Catholicism, or any sect, should be careful not to lump all its adherents together. Nor should we let Catholic apologists do it.