Pat’s Polemics

A judge has just struck down the controversial components of the notorious Arizona anti-immigration law, SB1070. I heard that in the middle of a discussion with the writer of a book on a Muslim Indian becoming a great French chef (Richard Morais' The Hundred Foot Journey). The part about the young man seeing a hog butchered in France and realizing his calling to cook would have to overcome his religious upbringing brought to mind my Pakistani friends.

Here is a divide in our culture, part of the culture wars. On one side people say the foreigners are bringing their foreign ways that will undermine our culture. On the other side, people pooh-pooh that and point to what immigrants contribute to the society. A real point on the pro-immigrant side is that even if you don't like immigrant cultures, don't worry b/c by the third generation it'll all be gone or just about gone. Grandma will be called nonna or nana and on holidays ethnic foods will be prepared - and if religion is involved, there'll be battles over ethnic-based churches "diluted" by new-comers of other ethnic groups.

What disturbs me is that so many of our immigrants go into high tech jobs whose educational requirements just about preclude a broad education..... or what some of us just call "an education". This allows them to live in a bubble where their children, simply by being of X origin, will retain X culture while acquiring just enough of our culture to allow them to get a good job. My friend's parents travel all over the world but never try local food; they always find an Indian restaurant to eat in. That's the bubble I am referring to.

So what happens? Their children get gob-smacked by school culture, media culture, peer culture, etc. And you have the seeds of family conflict and a good deal of unncecessary unhappiness. I don't think it affects our society but it does affect individual families.

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Last night I went to a wedding. Very, very nice (and very, very expensive). Young couple, about 200 guests. Everyone was very nice, the ceremony was beautiful, the reception a lot of fun. The dance music was predictably eclectic, with old folks' music - Marvin Gaye and the Beatles - and young folk's music - don't ask. All the bridal party was introduced, dads did their toasts, etc.A very typical American wedding if a tad on the high side.

This is interesting b/c 80-90% of the people were Chinese, or, as we used to say, of Chinese extraction.

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Here's a couple of items on culture:

In a book on Hawaiian, the word 'perhaps' is introduced with a cultural note that it is used much more frequently than its English equivalent. It is used as a softener. At the point, the author talks a little about the native Hawaiian enjoinment to attend the feelings of others. In our own culture, we've had some pretty funny descriptions of how "Bless his heart" is used in the South to kind of take the sting out of an observation, as in "The boy ain't quite right, bless his heart."

I noticed in the video teaching series Destinos the name of the Spanish reporter's sidekick, Jose Maria. Recently I was talking with an Ecuadoran teacher at my school and she pointed out that Maria Jose is also used for females, but, ONLY those names can be combined male and female like that. The reason is obvious, but I had made a wrong assumption that there were possibly other combinations of male and female names in Spanish.

Speaking of names, I've known two men with connections to England who had the name Wanda in one case and Carol in the other. Quite usual in England, I understand. Anyone know for sure? John Oliver, where are you?

This was posted by my friend, Brian. It is the sort of cultural exploration I wish I saw more of. Of course we want to teach the high-points of the culture of the TL: the great literature, music, art, philosophy, and so on. But how well can we understand what makes this high art "high" and its sources if we don't understand the quotidian culture out of which it sprang? It hasn't been very long that we've even used the work culture to refer to what used to be called customs and mores or folkways. This derives, in my understanding of European artistic and intellectual history, from the fact that the aristocracy leaped borders, sharing European high culture to a large degree. The culture of the masses of peasants had little to do with this, or so it seemed.

It was left up to the perspicacious artist like Leo Tolstoy to see the roots of high culture in the culture of the peasants; witness the scene where Natasha "instinctively" responds to Russian folk music out of her Russian "soul", despite having been raised speaking French and living in the cosmopolitan and Gallicized world of Moscow. Tolstoy was asking us how we can understand Glazunov or Pushkin without understanding the Russian soul.

Here is Brian's lively description of his most recent trip to Mexico.

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This message came from Wes, our guru:

>I once heard someone say "People really are basically good. It’s society

>that makes them bad." I thought, "Hmmm, people are good but society is

>bad. And what is society? People, right?"

The loop from humans to society and back, this is what we have been
discussing off and on on this List for over a decade. Do societies change?
Of course they do. Do humans change from generation to generation? Most of
us would say evolution takes longer than a few generations, so it must be
society that makes for changes. But how basic are those changes? Are
students really less polite than they were 30 years ago? I know Southern
kids certainly sound more polite than Western kids, but then maybe it’s the
accent.

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Have you ever watched big kids throw around an object like a ball that a little kid is trying to get? They throw it just over his head and he keeps leaping up trying to catch it or runs toward one kid who has it and even stretched out his hand as if offering to him only to toss it quickly to another kid.

That’s the image that came to mind when thinking about the way concepts, visions, stereotypes, notions, ideas, movements, all get tossed around. We've heard the phrase "ideas have consequences, words have meanings". When ideas and words are wielded as tools, even weapons, the persons affected by their use would like to grab hold of them, to have some input into how they are used. It’s sort of like people living in an oil-rich patch of the world wanting to have some say over how the oil is extracted, what is done with it, and so forth.

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There’s a guy on the Latin lists who regularly defends the validity of IQ score as a reflection of ability. The fact is, IQ does vary according to social group. Unfortunately, many people have not got the message that "race" is not a biological fact but what is called a social construct. As usual, this observation gets pulled into the quicksand of the culture wars. But even this guy on the Latin lists, a very sharp person, had to admit having a jolt when I pointed out that people identified as African-Americans do not make up a homogeneous gene pool by any means (Henry Louis Gates has had a couple of programs on PBS - yes, that liberal, commie tv network - showing the immense diversity of the Af-Am gene pool). The so-called "test score gap" between Whites and Blacks in this country is due to social factors. Attempts to base it in biology is so fraught with problems that most people doing so have an agenda in terms of restructuring the society so that Blacks are kept in a secondary position, e.g. Charles Murray. My view of voucher programs is jaundiced, to say the least, since I see this sudden concern for minorities on the part of conservatives as being a ploy to get money for private schools so as to escape the restrictions on religious indoctrination in public schools. Poor minorities will not be able to afford private schooling even with vouchers, so it’s all a sham and a stalking horse.

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Let’s see how divisive I can get. Journalists applied the labels 'divisive' and 'hate-filled' to the Rev. Wright’s sermons. While I didn’t hear any of that in the sermons nor in his two speeches and one interview I heard, I think I can supply some.

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On CNN, a spokesperson for an organization called Citizens for Community Values piqued my interest. Going to their website, I discovered it is a James Dobson organization devoted to shoring up Judeo-Christian values. Curious, I looked for an issue closely connected to schools and found one on homosexuality in the schools. Hmmmm. What do they say about that? I noticed something about clubs for gays and even something that suggested such clubs might not be a good thing for a public school campus.

So, I clicked.

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Stanley Fish wrote a column in the NYT on Monday’s website:

In it he says that norms are set by society and those who fall outside it adapt to that marginalization in a variety of ways. He includes many categories of people outside the norm, all the way from Blacks through the deaf on even to pedophiles and serial killers.

My guess is that most people will find his argument silly because they "know" what is deviant and what is not. But as they read it, they may be forced to rethink their facile categories of deviancy. How about the deaf? Surely they would want cochlear implants and be able to hear, right? No, most donít.

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