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But downstairs at TASTE , the museum restaurant run by Bon Appetit, a woman representing a folksier strain of female creativity is getting disappointingly short shrift. In conjunction with the show, executive chef Craig Hetherington has created a menu based on Lizzie Black Kander 's 1903 The Way to a Man's Heart , a cookbook first issued for immigrant clients of the Milwaukee Settlement House (SAM press materials identify the author only by her byline of Mrs. Simon Kander.) "I knew using some of these 'man-serving' recipes would be a cool contrast to the strong women artists featured in the show," Hetherington is quoted as saying in a release, which claims his versions of braised short ribs and grilled lamb "subvert the cookbook's subservient ethos from a more repressed time." The Way to a Man's Heart , renamed The Settlement Cookbook in later printings, wasn't a radical feminist document: An early edition included ads for corsets and high-heeled shoes, neither of which were likely compatible with the fire-building, dusting and dishwashing outlined in the book's first chapter. But to offer up Kander as the antithesis of "strong women" is unfair: In 1878, 42 years before women won the right to vote, Kander's valedictory address at Milwaukee's East Side High graduation was entitled "When I Become President." ( The Milwaukee Sentinel called the speech "the event of the evening.") The daughter of a dry good shopkeeper and a talented home cook, Kander joined an immigrant aid society soon after graduation. Her position took her into the city's meanest slums, where she urged newly-arrived Russian Jews to "Americanize" and keep their small homes clean. Her commitment to cleanliness - a preoccupation of the Progressive movement , forged alongside a growing acceptance of germ theory - led her to establish a bathhouse attached to the Schlitz Brewery, with water piped in from the bottle sanitizing room. In 1900, Kander helped establish the Settlement House, where she taught cooking classes. The cookbook was conceived as a way to underwrite the Settlement House's operation costs: It kept the House afloat for nine years. In 1910, Kander prepared a fundraising dinner so successful that the group was able to purchase a new building. "Although considered one of the most successful fund-raising cookbooks in American history, The Settlement Cook Book emanated from Kander's efforts to Americanize Russian immigrant women through cooking classes," Angela Fritz wrote in a 2004 article for the Wisconsin Magazine of History . To Kander, Americanization meant eating more red meat than fish; using brand-name processed foods; giving up Jewish dietary laws; garnishing plates with lettuce leaves and carved tomatoes; measuring ingredients in a scientific manner and keeping an orderly kitchen. It also called for cocktails and truffles. " The Settlement Cook Book tried to bring elegance and decorum to the Jewish home through haute cuisine," Fritz writes. "(It) served as a manual for the dramatization of middle-class values at the Jewish table with the inclusion of cocktails such as Manhattans, Mint Juleps, and Champagne Punch. Kander had been greatly influenced by French cuisine, including recipes for Delmonico Salad Dressing with chopped truffles, Water Lily Salad, and pate de foie gras." Although many of the dishes Kander promoted may have seemed frivolous in a tenement context, she firmly believed the kitchen was the entryway to successful society. And her recipes were good: "If I consult a cookbook at all, it is likely to be by one of these sensible, flat-heeled authors like the famous Mrs. Kander," James Beard told the New Yorker when asked to name his favorite cookbook (later to become the first cookbook inducted into the Beard Foundation's Cookbook Hall of Fame .) Despite The Settlement Cookbook 's original title, pleasing men was never chief among Kander's aims: The word 'husband' doesn't appear once in her text. Kander's full-throated defense of assimilation seems less heroic today, when diversity and individualism are conventionally prized. Her transformation of her pupils' beloved gefilte fish into an elegant "herring salad" would likely strike many contemporary cooks as disrespectful and misguided. But a philosophical shift doesn't retroactively weaken Kander's leadership or culinary sense. Like many of the women showcased in SAM's galleries, she was subservient only to her values and vision. 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Follow me at @hannaraskin Location Info Venue Map Seattle Art Museum 1300 First Ave., Seattle, WA Category: General 12 user reviews Write A Review Save to foursquare Show additional locations » TASTE Restaurant 1300 First Ave., Seattle, WA Category: Restaurant Tags: art , cookbook , cooking , immigration , james beard , lizzie kander , progressivism , theme menu , women Email to Friend Write to Editor Print Article We Recommend 0 comments   Get Livefyre FAQ Sign in + Follow Post comment Link Sort: Newest | Oldest Powered by Livefyre Now Trending From the Vault Slide shows » Food Porn: SanMaRu Grill Food Porn: Joule in Fremont A Survey of Soups in Seattle More Slideshows >> Restaurants Precept Brands View Ad | View Site Maritime Pacific Brewing Co View Ad | View Site Bainbridge Organic Distillers View Ad | View Site Kau Kau Barbeque Market View Ad | View Site More >> Twitter Feed Follow swvoracious on Twitter More Twitter >> About Us Media Kit Mobile RSS E-Edition Site Map My Account Log In Join Connect Facebook Twitter Newsletters Advertising Seattle Weekly National Classified Company Work for Seattle Weekly Privacy Policy Terms of Use Site Problems? ©2013 Seattle Weekly, LLC, All rights reserved. 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Yes No Undecided Other View results The Bradley Project on America ’s National Identity issued a report which contends that America’s national identity is being weakened by the spread of multiculturalism and globalization. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation established this project in 2007. The vast majority of the 2,421 respondents in a Harris Interactive National Survey commissioned by the Bradley Project expressed concern that American society is increasingly polarized and divided - and that knowledge of the nation’s common heritage and ideals is eroding. The results are disturing and point to a growing problem that requires attention. The study reveals that 84 percent maintain that there is a unique American national identity. This consists of viewing American identity as based on a set of ideas and on a way of life - rather than founded on ethnicity. Those surveyed define American national identity as a commitment to freedom: This includes free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of opportunity and political freedom. The American ethos contains the following traits: competition, individualism, optimism, self-reliance, religious faith and patriotism. The majority of respondents view America as a unique democracy; the nation upholds the rule of law and a has a formidable Constitution. Yet 63 percent maintain that American national identity is growing weaker; 24 percent state that Americans are already so divided we can no longer sustain a common identity. Most alarming is the result among younger respondents: Those below age 35 are more likely to declare that there is no national identity. This points to a failure by the current generation of adults to transmit the nation’s heritage to the youth. The Bradley Project on American National Identity seeks to “initiate a conversation” on America’s “identity crisis.” The study reveals that the overwhelming majority share a fear that America is being balkanized; 80 percent of whites, 86 percent of blacks and 74 percent of Hispanics are concerned that America is increasingly divided along ethnic and cultural lines. Americans can therefore begin to demand changes in their communities based on the evidence available. For example, 89 percent state that new immigrants must be Americanized - which means they must learn English and embrace American culture. Also, the majority of parents insist that they would be upset if their children were taught in school that America is “fundamentally a racist country.” The majority of participants also agree that citizenship rather than ethnicity should be the focus of education. The advocates for this national conversation insist that their aim is to redress the balance: They are not demanding the creation of a uniform America, but an America in which both diversity and unity are in harmony. They declare that the pendulum has swung too far toward a devaluation of all that is good in America; there is instead a constant harping on America’s flaws. They also state that there is too much emphasis on our differences rather than on areas of common ground. The study recommends that American history be taught in elementary schools and colleges; this includes teaching primary documents and a celebration of American heroes. The authors of the report are calling for the end to the celebration of the generic Presidents Day and the restoration of the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln as national holidays. They also insist that newcomers must be taught American values, that we should provide civic education based on explaining the principles of American democracy (not “global citizenship”) and that we should institute a Presidential Award for American Citizenship to students and new immigrants. (We add English literacy to the list.) The study presents valuable information and provides good suggestions. Indeed, the “national conversation” on American identity that began more than 30 years ago - and has been raging in the education system and across our society ever since - requires increased focus based on the will of the majority of the American people. America’s national identity is being systematically and deliberately eroded by internationalists and mutliculturalists who occupy positions of influence: They seek to replace American nationalism with a globalist agenda. The data presented by the Bradley Project provides hope that Americans want to reclaim their national identity. A daily and long-term battle is necessary in order to resist current trends. Reclaiming America’s heritage will require the sustained and determined action of Americans in each community for years to come. 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Search Speakeasy1 Article Video Comments (17) Speakeasy HOME PAGE » smaller Larger facebook twitter google plus linked in Email Print facebook twitter google plus linked in Email Print smaller Larger facebook twitter google plus linked in Email Print By Jeff Yang Getty Images PSY performs onstage during the 40th American Music Awards held at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on November 18, 2012 in Los Angeles, California. A month ago, on a riotously lovely morning in Orange County, California, I stumbled into perhaps the most convincing display I’ve yet encountered of the potency of  hallyu   – a Korean term that literally translates as “The Korean Wave.” I’d been invited to be a panelist at KCON ‘12 , which billed itself as “the first-ever large scale convention dedicated to the hottest entertainment coming out of Korea.” The event was conceived of and organized by the cable channel MNET America , the U.S. branch of the hugely popular Korean music network that might be called the “MTV of Korea” (except that MTV  is  in Korea and MNET is way bigger). I’ll admit that my initial response was skeptical. Even as I accepted the invitation to speak, I suppressed a nagging fear that MNET was forcing into existence something that wasn’t there, trying to engineer a need among K-Pop fans to gather as a collective from the top down, rather than letting it spring up from the grassroots. It’s a concern that worried the executive who spearheaded the event, too. “We knew that the fandom was out there. We’d seen these fan gatherings spontaneously manifest at other events we’d sponsored,” says Ted Kim, EVP and U.S. chief of MNET America’s parent company, CJ Entertainment America . “But we were struggling, because it’s very hard to get good data when it comes to phenomena like this. You’re just not able to quantify things. And at some point, you just need to make a leap of faith.” That leap entailed booking the Verizon Amphitheatre in Irvine, California, for an event that combined workshops about organizing fan clubs and breaking into K-Pop, karaoke showdowns and dance-offs, autograph sessions, food trucks and merchandise booths and a grand-finale concert featuring some very attractive young people and a Technicolor SFX lightshow that could probably be seen from space. “We kept on debating about how many people we should expect,” says Kim. The number they finally hit upon was 10,000. “We thought to ourselves, if we can get that many people to come out for this, well, that’s wildly successful. That’s fabulous validation that the fandom does exist and that they do want to gather together. But I’m going to say right now that there was tremendous nervousness. Behind the scenes, we were secretly whispering, ‘What if throw the biggest party in the world and no one shows up?’” They needn’t have worried, and nor should I. Walking from the parking lot toward the Amphitheatre’s fairgrounds, I soon found myself in a delighted mob of fans, many of whom had been lined up since 8:30 am. Some had handmade signs: I LIKE LUHAN MORE THAN FREE WIFI, said one. They were well behaved, queuing quietly without complaint, despite most events and kiosks being crowded beyond belief or comprehension. The exception? The beer stand, whose two disgruntled-looking vendors said had sold exactly two brews all day. That’s because the vast majority of attendees were too young to drink, and looked even younger. The mostly teenaged crowd was also mostly non-Korean, and probably half non-Asian. Kim’s hoped-for headcount had likely been reached by midmorning, with more attendees (and their parents) arriving throughout the day. “It wasn’t just the numbers, it was the energy,” says Kim. “On a scale of one to 10, I don’t think it dropped below eight all day. The fans…I had this one woman come over – 19 years old, a white woman from Oklahoma – she told me she drove 27 straight hours to got to KCON. And then she lifted up her sleeve, and showed me a Band-Aid and a bruise on her arm. She said she’d sold her blood in order to afford the trip. I was kind of horrified. But…that’s the kind of dedication you’re talking about.” Now, don’t get me wrong: I never questioned the size of K-Pop’s audience. I’ve been covering its emergence for years, and am fully aware that K-Pop’s audience is huge and insistent both here in the U.S. and globally, and that Korea is now unequivocally the wellspring of Asia’s most popular and influential pop cultural phenomena – supplanting Japan as the primary source of Asian cool, as my friend Euny Hong , lifestyle editor of The Atlantic’s new online business mag Quartz, asserted in a provocative essay this past Friday. K-Pop is here. K-Pop is now. And, riding the consumer dollars of its burgeoning tween-teen fanbase, K-Pop will thrive for the foreseeable future. There are real and educational reasons for its rise, some of which I’ve written about in the past, and some of which Hong details in her story, “ Why it was so easy for Korea to overtake Japan in the pop culture wars .” But I’m just not as convinced as Hong that K-Pop in its current incarnation can sustain itself as a long-term global phenomenon. Japan’s pop culture primacy spanned two decades, and while it is has fallen off its peak, it has hardly vanished completely. On the contrary, in fact: J-Pop has simply become so mainstream, so infused into the DNA of global pop culture that it has become immanent, and thus invisible. The aesthetics of J-Pop, its conceits and conventions, have become so much a part of the fundamental language of contemporary design, technology, entertainment and fashion that they’re no longer easily distinguishable as Japanese in origin, as opposed to in influence. That’s also why I feel compelled to question some of the assertions Hong makes in her “king is dead, long live the king” piece detailing Korea’s dethroning of Japan from the top of the pop pyramid. First there are the metrics that she cites as defining K-Pop’s ascent. PSY Oppa’s 770 million YouTube views . Google Trends showing that searches for “K-Pop” skyrocketed past searches for “J-Pop” beginning in 2010. Japan’s flagging recorded music industry revenues, which (like the rest of the world) have fallen every year from 2009 on, while Korea’s have grown. And then, the slump in revenues for Sanrio, parent company of Hello Kitty, among others. Statistics obviously can be found to support just about any position, and more of them don’t necessarily translate into a stronger case. And these in particular are a bit questionable. PSY’s viral YouTube success is arguably not only exceptional, it’s actually a counterexample to K-Pop’s rise: Oppa is, quite consciously, the antithesis of the standard Korean pop poster boy, with a look, musical style, career history and attitude that make him an anomaly among the sleek, pretty, possibly bioengineered lads of the K-Pop Machine. His success is both welcome and puzzling to Koreans , and even to PSY himself: “I am not sure how I became so popular in the U.S., because [in Korea] I am a B-rated star,” he said at a press conference in September. PSY has drawn attention to K-Pop, but he’s a unique quantity, and still has to prove that he’s even able to duplicate his success himself. (I, personally, have faith.) Regarding Google searches for K-Pop versus J-Pop: The trendline shows that searches for J-Pop were never very high, even at the peak of Japanese pop culture glory…because most fans of Japanese pop culture don’t use the term “J-Pop” for anything other than Japanese pop music, which has probably the smallest footprint out of the Rising Sun’s various fan-favorite emanations. Here’s an alternative Google search plot that’s a more relevant comparison. Searches for anime and manga absolutely  crush  those for K-Pop. On the one hand, this could simply reflect the fact that Google searches are a pretty poor metric for determining the relative popularity of broad-spanning phenomena. On the other, it could be an indicator that anime and manga, here in the United States, are no longer imported culture – they’re part of the landscape. Go to any library or bookstore (there are still physical bookstores, right?) and you’ll see that manga has an enormous dedicated section all to its own, larger than many of the other genre sections, and generally surrounded with clusters of absorbed youth lounging like they own the place. It’s not a teen fad, it’s a teen consumption category: Snacks, fashion, manga. Hong goes on to list a half-dozen  reasons why Japan has fallen off in the pop culture game relative to Korea. The first is that Japan has become increasingly idiosyncratic in its cultural output – that “Japan makes stuff only for Japan.” She cites comparisons of Japan to the Galapagos Islands , where Darwin first noticed the unique divergent evolution of finch populations on separated atolls. For what it’s worth this isn’t a very apt metaphor for Japan, given that it would imply the presence of a great diversity of ideas and products  within  the Japanese archipelago; a more relevant one might be Australia , a place whose species were isolated from other continents for so long that they evolved in drastically different and weird ways, e.g. koalas, kangaroos and platypuses. But it’s not clear that this is a liability in global pop-culture competitiveness. In fact, this eccentricity is Japan’s strongest remaining asset. The more blandly similar a nation’s output is to your own, the less likely it is to tempt you to seek it out – it’s the sense of novelty, of fresh stimulus, of strange and fabulous dissimilarity, that leads us to explore alternative pop-culture horizons, after all. Which explains the popularity of PSY: Gangnam Style is weird. It’s weird in Korea, and it’s weirder in the U.S. And totally awesome. Hong also states that Korean pop culture has the advantage of being “puritanical,” a reflection of Korea’s clean-cut and sexually restrictive society. This is a hard argument to make to anyone who’s watched a video by any Korean girl group. Yes, there’s no overt or even implied sexual behavior. But there are also legs that extend from the ground to the sky, propped under miniskirts that could probably do double duty as wristbands, and the dance routines invariably include plenty of pelvic thrusting and catlike stretching (and ugh, I feel like a perv just having written that). The primary difference between sexuality in Korean pop and Japanese pop is that the former is focused on willowy teens on the proper side of pubescence, while the latter – well, let’s just say that middle-school uniforms seem unaccountably popular in Japan. But intimations of sex are there in both cases, all the more suggestive because of the repressive mores of both cultures. And you’ll never convince me that the secret to global pop dominance in this day and age is virginal purity. Hips don’t lie, people! Another reason that Hong gives is that Americans are seen as heroes of the Korean War, and as a result, Korea has been more “closely influenced” by U.S. pop culture than Japan – noting that even today, there are still 30,000 American soldiers (actually, around 28,000) permanently based in Korea. Yes, but there are also over 35,000 American soldiers permanently based in Japan, plus another 5500 military-employed American civilians and 10,000 American military spouses and dependents. Did Korea embrace American pop culture more readily than Japan because the U.S. was seen as heroic? That’s not clearly the case. Despite, or more properly because of its defeat, Japan after World War II actively sought to immerse itself in the culture (especially the popular culture) of its triumphant occupiers, leading to a rapid “Americanization” period in which the media fantasies and material goods of the U.S. vision of the “good life” were prized above all. As Rikyo University law and political science professor Akio Igarashi notes, “In the immediate postwar period, what a majority of Japanese hoped for was the realization of a rational and affluent society… The spacious rooms and the big white refrigerator in the comic strip, Blondie, helped people to imagine the affluence of the American lifestyle….For Japanese at the time, America’s prosperous culture of consumption, symbolized by chewing gum, chocolate, and women’s fashion, represented ‘the American Dream.’” Korea embraced American ideas, media, fashion and consumer aspirations after the Korean War too, but in the ensuing decades, a sharp and growing sense of ambivalence has emerged toward the U.S.  Panmi , or anti-American sensibility, has generally strengthened since the Eighties, peaking in 2002 following controversy over short-track speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno’s Olympic gold medal over South Korean rival Kim Dong-Sung, and the accidental deaths of two Korean middle-schoolers under the wheels of a U.S. military vehicle. (This was the year in which a RAND survey found that over 60 percent of South Koreans felt “unfavorable” attitudes toward the U.S.; meanwhile Japanese favorability toward the U.S. has remained over 50 percent for decades and is the second-highest in the world right now, after only the U.S.’s opinion of itself. 2002 was also the year singer Yoon Min-Suk released his cult-hit song “F*ckin’ USA,” to massive media attention.) And it’s not even obvious that embracing American ideas is necessarily the path to pop-culture export success for Asian countries anyway. In the U.S., Asian performers and products that have attempted to ape American sensibilities for the sake of global crossover have universally failed. Dozens of Japanese performers, from Seiko to Utada, Hong Kong’s Coco Lee and Korea’s BoA, Se7en, Wonder Girls and Girls Generation have all made runs at breakthrough success by singing English-language songs and engaging in massive media and PR campaigns, all without much to show for their hard work. The exception to this rule, PSY, was a pop-culture land mine who blew by accident, refusing to be anything but himself and performing a song with Korean lyrics that are incomprehensible to non-Koreans even in translation. In fact, the most successful Korean pop exports that Hong cites, from its idols to its films and dramas to Samsung’s effervescent avalanche of consumer electronics and VOOZ’s winsome licensing franchise Pucca , all represent evolutionary improvements on Japanese templates — not American ones. Korea has effectively dominated the pop culture cosmos by out-Japanning Japan, and, as Hong points out, doing so even in Japan itself, which is still in the throes of a Korean-pop obsession. The question remains, however, whether Korea’s impressive winning run can continue indefinitely, or even long-term. I’m not yet convinced that’s the case. Japanese pop culture has come to the American landscape in the form of visual media — primarily anime and manga . (Games too, but up until very recently, Japanese video games came to the U.S. with most of their unique cultural context flensed away so as not to freak out American parents.) Because those media forms were naturally produced and presented in Japanese, J-Pop fandom erupted organically and grew epidemically out of a kind of language-hacking Underground Railroad of pirate BBS’s that offered downloadable English script translations and VHS-tape-trading marketplaces. In short, fandom flourished because the only way to enjoy authentic J-Pop in that early era was through connections  to the fan community. (In fact, the hardest-core fans eventually  became  the U.S. anime and manga industry, launching the first legit English-language distribution houses, and thus laying the foundation for a subsequent generation’s total immersion in Japanese cultural products.) K-Pop fandom is centered around music. (Yes, Korean live-action dramas and movies are popular as well, but they appeal to different demographic segments, and don’t tend to generate the fannish intensity that Korean pop idols do…unless they happen to star Korean pop idols). K-Pop fans don’t need translations of their music to enjoy it; as Ted Kim notes, when Mnet asked their viewers if they wanted their music videos to carry subtitles, the response was horrified: “No way, they told us, we want to see them the way they’re shown in Korea.” And because music is auditory, not visual, it’s a medium that lends itself to addictive consumption and maniacal appreciation, but not the kinds of collaborative phenomena that are the pillars of most pop-culture activity and community — things like cosplay (dressing up as favored characters) and fan fiction (extending or re-envisioning beloved works through original fanmade stories and art). All of these factors point to the reality that K-Pop in its current modes isn’t a very blendable medium. Its fans want to consume it in as pure and unadulterated form as possible — with incomprehensible language, odd visual idioms and untranslatable nuances entirely intact. The visual media of J-Pop have been culture-hacked and hybridized from the very beginning, often in ways that have caused hard-core fans to grit their teeth — but this flexibility has also allowed it to readily mainstream into U.S. culture, even to the point where even American-made homages (like virtually every cartoon now airing on kiddie TV) are as popular as the Japanese originals. By contrast, I don’t think it’s obvious that an American artist emulating K-Pop tropes can succeed either in the U.S. or abroad (though it’s not for want of a few earnest artists trying). This would seem to sharply limit the market upside of K-Pop, and its ultimate long-term influence. It’s ironic: K-Pop’s recent success is in no small part because it has played on its own terms. But its long-term future depends on its ability to cling to the things that make it unique while relaxing its purist Koreanness. For it to become a truly global phenomenon, it needs ambassadors who are idiosyncratic but have universal appeal, who can speak English fluently but wear their cultural pride on their sleeve. It needs artists who can collaborate with foreign performers and who inspire mash-up creativity among overseas audiences. There’s only one star in K-Pop’s constellation who could possibly fit that bill, and he’s the unlikeliest one of all. PSY Oppa : Please report to headquarters. Your mission, should you choose to accept it…. Gangnam Style , K-Pop , PSY , Tao Jones Previous in Speakeasy ‘Life of Pi,’ ‘Rise of the Guardians,’ ‘Red Dawn’: Review Revue Next inSpeakeasy The Woman Who Helped Make ‘Hitchcock’ Terrifying Speakeasy HOME PAGE Add a Comment Error message Name We welcome thoughtful comments from readers. Please comply with our guidelines . Our blogs do not require the use of your real name. Comment Comments (5 of 17) View all Comments » 6:33 pm January 15, 2013 Anonymous wrote: But the trainee concept was in Japan since the 1950s. Look at the world of enka. 6:30 pm January 15, 2013 crap from crappy writer wrote: terribly written article. why not show some objective backings to this article like numbers in terms of sales and fan base. 7:47 pm December 17, 2012 Love1 wrote: Please don’t compare kpop artists to AKB40. The trainee concept in Korea was in place since the early 90′s. 9:51 pm November 29, 2012 GoodMoMusic (again) wrote: Also….. Hallyu is a Chinese term for Korean Wave. 9:47 pm November 29, 2012 GoodMoMusic wrote: Jeff, awesome article again. I find your articles very thoughtful. I do however think you trailed off in the middle, somewhat. You are absolutely correct about out-Japanning Japan. The very concept of trainees that Lee Soo Man of SM Ent introduced to Kpop is very similar to the trainee concept in Japan, 4 instance AKB 40. Although I agree on the puritanical nature of Kpop, however this is rapidly changing and I think with detriment to the concept of Kpop. I guess all things must evolve to progress. I just feel it’s in the wrong direction. Finally, your point on relaxing the purist Koreaness is a valid hypothesis, that may indeed be proving to be part of the solution to Kpop’s global success. Ideal example? Wonder Girls pairing up with Akon for “Like Money” and Psy pairing up with MC Hammer at the AMAs. You can read more on my thoughts at goodmomusic.com/k-pop About Speakeasy RSS Speakeasy is an online magazine covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by senior editor Christopher John Farley , Alexandra Cheney  and Barbara Chai with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually at @cjfarley, @alexandracheney  and @barbarachai . 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The Way We Ate: The Americanization of The State Dinner - NYTimes.com Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular Edition: U.S. / Global Search All NYTimes.com Dining & Wine World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Fashion & Style Dining & Wine Home & Garden Weddings/Celebrations T Magazine Travel Jobs Real Estate Autos November 24, 2009, 11:38 am The Way We Ate: The Americanization of The State Dinner By MICHELE HUMES David Scull/The New York Times Joseph Chvatal, a butler at the White House, counts place settings in preparation for the state dinner for Boris Yeltsin hosted by Bill Clinton in 1994. For more than a century and a half, The New York Times has been recording the pleasures and prejudices of the American palate. “The Way We Ate” is a weekly tasting menu of vintage food writing from the Times archives, with an extra installment this week in honor of tonight’s state dinner at the White House. Woodrow Wilson loved fried chicken. Benjamin Harrison couldn’t get enough Smithfield ham . Lyndon Johnson liked chili, spoonbread and Texas barbecue, and didn’t care who knew it. Despite our presidents’ homegrown tastes, White House state dinners have almost always been distinctly French in flavor. Even the Kennedys, who made a point of serving American wines on state occasions, never thought to pair them with American cooking. Blame Thomas Jefferson. Craig Claiborne did, at any rate. In 1961, Claiborne, then the New York Times food editor, pointed a loving finger at the Francophile founding father, who introduced boeuf à la mode and veal estouffade to the White House—and set the tone, described here in an 1884 Times piece , for nearly 200 years of state dinners: An old time Virginia cook is good enough for every day, and in many respects can’t be beaten, but only a Frenchman can devise the variety and the extensive ornamentation necessary on state occasions. If a regime of Chateaubriand and Camembert was just fine by Mr. Claiborne, it didn’t sit so well with Julia Child. Eager to see the nation’s burgeoning culinary culture get its due, America’s own French Chef became the first prominent critic of Frenchified state dining. Writing for The Times in 1977, Ms. Child appealed to the incoming first lady, Rosalynn Carter, to “make White House entertaining more American.” It wouldn’t be too hard, she promised; it was really just a question of “packaging”: A quiche aux crevettes becomes an open-faced tart of Louisiana shrimp, a filet de boeuf is a prime tenderloin of Texas steer. Though her tone was lighthearted, her message was clear: Every course of a state dinner is an opportunity to showcase the nation’s edible bounty; don’t let it go to waste. Since the Carters, state dinner menus have no longer been written in French. But Child wouldn’t truly get her wish until, in a decision that seemed as much health-related as political, the famously fat-averse Clintons banished rich French sauces from the White House. Tonight, President Obama hosts his first state dinner, honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Our well-established national cuisine no longer needs any particular boost from the White House, freeing the Obamas to devise a menu that is American in a more nuanced sense of the word. We don’t yet know what will be served, though there have been murmurs of curry. But we do know who will be doing the cooking: the Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised, naturalized American, Marcus Samuelsson. The melting pot, it seems, has finally absorbed the state dinner. Restaurants , Barack Obama , Craig Claiborne , Marcus Samuelsson , state dinner , The Way We Ate , White House Related Posts From Diner's Journal The State Dinner Menu Marcus Samuelsson To Cook White House State Dinner? The Way We Ate: Too Old to Tiki? The Way We Ate: Fear of Garlic The Way We Ate: The Year Harry Truman Passed on Pumpkin Pie Previous Post Tavern Creditors Say the City Is Hurting Their Interests Next Post Murray’s Cheese Will Open 50 Locations in Kroger Markets Search This Blog Search Previous Post Tavern Creditors Say the City Is Hurting Their Interests Next Post Murray’s Cheese Will Open 50 Locations in Kroger Markets Follow This Blog Facebook Twitter RSS Inside Diner's Journal Restaurants Drinking Cooking January 22, 2013 Dining Calendar Events about food and drink throughout New York. January 18, 2013 Weekend Fare Food-related events around New York. More From Restaurants » January 22, 2013 Modestly Sweet Wines for Spicy Super Bowl Snacks Capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot chiles, is a tricky match with wine. Sweet wines, well balanced with zesty acidity, are exceptions. January 4, 2013 Brooklyn Brewery Is on Tap for Stockholm The mystique of Brooklyn, and its beer, alight on Stockholm’s harbor. More From Drinking » January 18, 2013 The Many Ways to Clean a Leek Leeks usually come from the market full of soil. January 11, 2013 Spices: When to Grind, When to Toast Save the whole spice grinding for special occasions. More From Cooking » January 18, 2013 The Many Ways to Clean a Leek Leeks usually come from the market full of soil. January 11, 2013 Spices: When to Grind, When to Toast Save the whole spice grinding for special occasions. More From Cooking » About Diner's Journal Diner’s Journal embraces news and opinion about recipes, wine, restaurants and other matters culinary. Contributors include Eric Asimov , Melissa Clark , Glenn Collins , Susan Edgerley, Florence Fabricant , Patrick Farrell , Jeff Gordinier , Elaine Louie , Julia Moskin , Robert Simonson , David Tanis , Emily Weinstein , Pete Wells and others. Visit us on Facebook » Follow us on Twitter » E-mail us with tips and suggestions. » Subscribe to our feed » Diner's Journal Loading Twitter messages... Recent Posts January 24 What We’re Reading A collection of links from the reporters and editors of the Dining section. January 23 What We’re Reading A collection of links from the reporters and editors of the Dining section. January 22 Are You a Master of Cheese Description? If you've got a favorite cheese, and a fragrant way with words, we here at the Dining section invite you to submit your wittiest description. January 22 Front Burner Each week, Florence Fabricant recommends what you should read, taste, covet, order, cook, give and more. January 22 Dining Calendar Events about food and drink throughout New York. 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I spent many summers (and the occasional biting, shocking winter) in rural Minnesota. I always considered both countries home. In truth, though, the India and America of my youth were very far apart: cold war adversaries, America’s capitalist exuberance a sharp contrast to India’s austere socialism. For much of my life, my two homes were literally — but also culturally, socially and experientially — on opposite sides of the planet. All that began changing in the early 1990s, when India liberalized its economy. Since then, I’ve watched India’s transformation with exhilaration, but occasionally, and increasingly, with some anxiety. Mr. Kapur concludes by saying, “India’s Americanization” has been a “wonderful thing” as it has begun the “process of dismantling an old and often repressive order.” But he worries about what will replace that order. “The American promise of renewal and reinvention is deeply seductive — but, as I have learned since coming back home, it is also profoundly menacing” he writes. Read full story here . America , India Related Posts From India Ink Where Is the Indian Economy Headed? A Conversation With: Economist and Author Vivek Dehejia India’s Parliament Opens Door to Foreign Retail Investors Boris Johnson Woos Delhi India and China Deepen Economic Ties Previous Post Newswallah: Bharat Edition Next Post Newswallah: Long Reads Edition Search This Blog Search Previous Post Newswallah: Bharat Edition Next Post Newswallah: Long Reads Edition Follow This Blog Twitter RSS Latest News of India Urging Action, Report on Brutal Rape Condemns India’s Treatment of Women India Undermined by Lack of Long-Term Vision For Rape Victims in India, Police Are Often Part of the Problem India Warns Kashmiris to Prepare for Nuclear War Times Topics | India » India Ink on Twitter Loading Twitter messages... Special Series From the rise of a new private sector–and the billionaires that sustain and exploit it–to the beginning of a vast national identity database, articles in this series examine the messy and maddening road to progress in India. Previous Articles in the Series » About India Ink This report on India from the journalists of The New York Times and a pool of talented writers in India and beyond provides unbiased, authoritative reporting on the country and its place in the world. India Ink also strives to be a virtual meeting point for discussion of this complex, fast-changing democracy – its politics, economy, culture and everyday life. More about the blog » E-mail the editors » Our writers » Follow us on Twitter » Archive Select Month January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 Recent Posts January 24 Dalai Lama Stresses Science and Secularism in Jaipur The Jaipur Literature Festival focuses on Buddhism this year. January 24 Octogenarian Opens Jaipur Lit Fest With Rousing Speech Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi on trouble-making and the mischievous desire to live again. January 24 India Rape Trial Starts With Renewed Ban on Media Coverage As closely-watched trial gets underway, judge warns lawyers against speaking to the media. January 24 A Conversation With: Bar Council of India Chairman Manan Kumar Mishra Why India's government does not want a strong judiciary, and the problems facing the legal practice in India. January 24 What Made ‘Dabangg 2’ a Hit? Muslim actor Salman Khan turns a much-panned action adventure into a top Bollywood earner. Global Business News DealBook: Choice for S.E.C. Is Ex-Prosecutor, in Signal to Wall St. January 24, 2013, 10:20 am DealBook | The Trade: An Asset So Toxic They Called It ‘Nuclear Holocaust’ January 24, 2013, 10:05 am DealBook: Commerzbank to Cut Up to 6,000 Jobs January 24, 2013, 9:53 am U.S. Jobless Claims Reach Lowest Mark in Five Years January 24, 2013, 8:56 am Euro Watch: Data Point to Slow Recovery in Euro Zone January 24, 2013, 5:11 am Read all Global Business News » NYTimes Opinion Friedman Krugman Kristof Cohen Break All the Rules At a time when we measure our secretaries of state more by miles traveled than milestones achieved, what’s the next secretary to do? Here’s a plan. Obama’s 1-2 Punch? Here’s hoping the president goes big in his plans for his second term. Collaborate vs. Collaborate That one word seems to have two different meanings on the two coasts. The Dwindling Deficit The budget deficit isn’t our biggest problem. Not by a long shot. In fact, to a large degree, it’s mostly solved. Japan Steps Out Guess who’s breaking with economic orthodoxy. Coins Against Crazies About that $1 trillion coin. Hey, desperate times call for creative answers. For Obama’s New Term, Start Here The president said equality for all is a main goal of his second term. He could begin by helping to make sure a child’s potential for success isn’t limited by a ZIP code. Chipping Away at Poverty -- an Exchange A back-and-forth about SSI, my reporting and how best to make progress on poverty. Warnings From a Flabby Mouse Studies suggest that endocrine disruptors, chemicals found everywhere from couches to shampoos, may contribute to obesity along with Twinkies and TV. The Israeli Center Lives The election proved that persistent obituaries of the center-left were premature. Diplomacy Is Dead Still, there are modest reasons to think the lid on diplomacy’s coffin may open a crack. The Blight of Return Illusion and division sap the Palestinian national movement at a time when its West Bank achievements have laid the basis for statehood. © 2013 The New York Times Company Site Map Privacy Your Ad Choices Advertise Terms of Sale Terms of Service Work With Us RSS Help Contact Us Site Feedback Even Americans Find Some Britishisms 'Spot On' | KERA News Jump to Navigation Listen Live On Air Now KERA Home Radio Television Support this station KERA Part of the NPR digital network Latest News Government Economy Health/Science Environment Education Arts Commentary Search form Search The High Five National 'Battleground Texas' Project Wants Our State Blue Texas News Bridging The Money Gap: 2nd Calatrava Span For Cyclists, Runners Gets Cash Infusion Sports Space: The Final Frontier For Dirk Nowitzki? Now Playing Loading streams... Podcasts & RSS Feeds All Content close News podcasts Use iTunes Use a different playe r RSS View all podcasts & RSS feeds Join Our Email List Connect with Us Find us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter People BJ Austin Reporter Sam Baker Senior Editor and Morning Edition Host Stephen Becker Editor, Art&Seek Anne Bothwell Director, Art&Seek Shelley Kofler Managing Editor/Senior Reporter Justin Martin All Things Considered Host Jerome Weeks Producer-Reporter, Art&Seek Bill Zeeble Reporter Opinion 12:30 pm Thu November 1, 2012 Even Americans Find Some Britishisms 'Spot On' Share Tweet E-mail Comments Print By Geoff Nunberg Enlarge image Credit Zdenek Ryzner / iStockphoto.com Geoff Nunberg says that, like a lot of the Britishisms peppering American speech these days, "spot on" falls somewhere in the blurry region between affectation and flash. Originally published on Thu November 1, 2012 2:26 pm Listen Mitt Romney was on CNN not long ago defending the claims in his campaign ads — "We've been absolutely spot on," he said. Politics aside, the expression had me doing an audible roll of my eyes. I've always associated "spot on" with the type of Englishman who's played by Terry-Thomas or John Cleese, someone who pronounces "yes" and "ears" in the same way — "eeahzz." It shows up when people do send-ups of plummy British speech. "I say — spot on, old chap!" But that wasn't really fair to Romney. Actually, "spot on" doesn't sound snooty when it's used as an adjective meaning accurate or on-target, as in "a spot-on impersonation." And it has become more common in American speech than it was even 10 years ago, when it made a notable appearance in a 2003 episode of The Wire . Detective Jimmy McNulty is posing as an English businessman in order to bust a Baltimore brothel. He speaks in a comically bad English accent, the inside joke being that McNulty was actually played by the English actor Dominic West. Before he goes in, his boss Lt. Daniels and Assistant DA Rhonda Pearlman are prepping him for his role and giving him the signal to have them come in to make the arrests: Lt. Daniels: It'll be your call when we come through the doors. You want us in, you say ... [turns to Pearlman] what was it? Pearlman: "Spot on." It means "exactly." And remember, they have to bring up the money and the sex first, then an overt attempt ... to engage. McNulty (in an exaggerated English accent): Spot on! Now, I doubt whether somebody like Daniels or McNulty would know the expression even now. But you do hear it from decidedly unplummy people like Sarah Palin and Rick Perry. "Spot on" falls somewhere in the blurry region between affectation and flash, like a lot of the Britishisms that have been showing up lately in American speech. The New York Times blogger Ben Yagoda has a site listing more than 150 of these imports. They're a motley crowd, from "daft" to "dodgy" and "keen" to "kerfuffle." Adding a foreign word to your vocabulary is like adding foreign attire to your wardrobe. Sometimes you do it because it's practical and sometimes just because you think it looks cool. Some of the new arrivals are clearly useful. "One off," for example — it's a nicely concise noun for a one-time event. Other words have a whimsical appeal. "You're a dab hand at the Google," I told my wife the other day. I'd put "spot on" and "gobsmacked" in that group. And still others announce the arrival of imported sensibilities. "Snarky," for example. It was pretty much unknown in America before the early 2000s, when it was was attached to the tone of snide knowingness that has become the stock patois of sites like Gawker, Wonkette and Deadspin. But other words are imported just for effect. "I'm not very keen on it, but I'll have a go." People claim to discern some useful nuances of meaning there, but who are they kidding? It's like explaining that you bought that $800 Burberry plaid tote bag because it gives you a better grade of vinyl. I got a call not long ago from a BBC reporter doing a piece about these Britishisms. She described me as quivering with revulsion over the expressions. It must have been a bad phone connection. I mean, when I quiver, I quiver, but not about some American saying "dodgy" or "keen." Mostly I'm a little embarrassed for the speaker, particularly when the word adds nothing but the clink of teacups. "Fortnight"? "Bespoke"? Really? Actually, the British are the ones who have conniptions over foreign words. Whenever the British media run a piece on Americanisms, it gets hundreds or thousands of comments, most of them keening indignantly over the American corruption of English: "I cringe whenever I hear someone say 'touch base.' " "Faucet instead of tap??? Arrrrrrrghhh!" That might seem a little over the top for a race that's not known for its demonstrativeness. But the Brits have had to endure an inundation of American popular culture that has saturated every corner of their vocabulary with Americanisms — probably including the word "Brits" itself. Not long ago, the Financial Times columnist Matthew Engel warned that if the flood of Americanisms isn't stanched, it will lead to "51st statehood." We react very differently to Britishisms. To the British, our words "wrench" and "sweater" are abominations; to us, their words "spanner" and "jumper" are merely quaint. To Americans, after all, Britain is just a big linguistic theme park. The relative handful of Britishisms that do find their way here may raise some eyebrows, but they're hardly a threat to American culture. After all, British English comes to us through a much narrower pipe than the one that floods Britain with our words. They pick up our language from Friends and The Avengers. We pick up theirs from Downton Abbey and Inspector Morse . And when they do send us an occasional blockbuster like Harry Potter , they're considerate enough to Americanize "dustbin" to "trash can" and "pinny" to "apron." No doubt some of the newcomers will wind up as naturalized American citizens. After all, "tiresome" and "fed up" were considered affected Britishisms when they made their American debut in the 19th century. My guess is that "spot on" is already on the way to becoming everyday American. But it will be awhile yet before it reaches the cultural outer boroughs. Like the Baltimore Police, I think I'll hold back until I hear it from McNulty. Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. Transcript TERRY GROSS, HOST: Spot on, kerfuffle, cheeky. We think of those words as British words but they've been showing up more and more frequently in American speech. Our linguist Geoff Nunberg has these thoughts about the new British Invasion. GEOFF NUNBERG, BYLINE: Mitt Romney was on CNN not long ago defending the claims in his campaign ads. We've been absolutely spot on, he said. Politics aside, the expression had me doing an audible roll of the eyes. I've always associated spot on with the type of Englishman who's played by Terry-Thomas or John Cleese, someone who pronounces yes and ears in the same way, as in eeahzz(ph). It shows up when people do send-ups of plumy(ph) British speech. I say - spot on, old chap! But that wasn't really fair to Romney. Actually, spot on isn't heard as snooty when it's used as an adjective meaning accurate or on-target, as in a spot-on impersonation. And it has become more common in American speech than it was even 10 years ago, when it made a notable appearance in a 2003 episode of "The Wire." Detective Jimmy McNulty is posing as an English businessman in order to bust a Baltimore brothel. He speaks with a comically bad English accent, the inside joke being that McNulty was actually played by the English actor Dominic West. His boss Lt. Daniels and the Assistant DA are prepping him for his role, telling him the signal for them come in. (SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE WIRE") LANCE REDDICK: (as Lt. Daniels) It'll be your call when we come through the doors. You want us in, you say - what was it? DEIRDRE LOVEJOY: (as Rhonda Pearlman) Spot on. It means exactly. And remember, they have to bring up the money and the sex first, then an overt attempt to engage. DOMINIC WEST: (as Jimmy McNulty) (in an exaggerated English accent): Spot on! NUNBERG: Now, I doubt that somebody like Daniels or McNulty would know the expression even now. But you do hear it from decidedly unplummy(ph) people like Sarah Palin and Rick Perry. Spot on falls somewhere in the blurry region between affectation and flash, like a lot of the Britishisms(ph) that have been showing up lately in American speech. The New York Times blogger Ben Yagoda has a site listing more than 150 of these imports. They're a motley crowd, from daft to dodgy and keen to kerfuffle. Adding a foreign word to your vocabulary is like adding foreign attire to your wardrobe. Sometimes you do it because it's practical and sometimes just because you think it looks cool. Some of the new arrivals are clearly useful. One off, for example - it's a nicely concise noun for a one-time event. Other words have a whimsical appeal. You're a dab hand at the Google, I told my wife the other day. I'd put spot on and gob smacked in that group. And still others announce the arrival of imported sensibilities. Snarky, for example. It was pretty much unknown in America before the early 2000s, when it was attached to the tone of snide knowingness that has become the stock patois of sites like Gawker, Wonkette and Deadspin. But other words are imported just for effect. I'm not very keen on it, but I'll have a go. People claim to discern some useful nuances of meaning there, but who are they kidding? I got a call not long ago from a BBC reporter doing a piece about these Britishisms. She described me in the piece as quivering with revulsion. It must have been a bad phone connection. I mean, when I quiver, I quiver, but not about some American saying dodgy or keen. Mostly I'm a little embarrassed for the speaker, particularly when the word adds nothing but the clink of teacups. Fortnight? Bespoke? Really? Actually, the British are the ones who have conniptions over foreign words. Whenever the British media run a piece on Americanisms, it gets hundreds or thousands of comments, most of them keening indignantly over the American corruption of English: I cringe whenever I hear someone say touch base. Faucet instead of tap??? Arrrrrrrghhh! That might seem a little over the top for a race that's not known for its demonstrativeness. But the Brits have had to endure an inundation of American popular culture that has saturated every corner of their vocabulary with Americanisms - probably including the word Brits itself. Not long ago, the Financial Times columnist Matthew Engel warned that if the flood of Americanisms isn't stanched, it will lead to 51st statehood. We react very differently to Britishisms. To the British, our words wrench and sweater are abominations; to us, their words spanner and jumper are merely quaint. To Americans, after all, Britain is just a big linguistic theme park. The relative handful of Britishisms that do find their way here may raise some eyebrows, but they're hardly a threat to our culture. After all, British English comes to us through a much narrower pipe than the one that floods Britain with our words. They pick up our language from "Friends" and "The Avengers". We pick up theirs from "Downton Abbey" and "Inspector Morse." And when they do send us an occasional blockbuster like "Harry Potter, they're considerate enough to Americanize dustbin to trash can and pinny(ph) to apron. No doubt some of the newcomers will wind up as naturalized American citizens. After all, tiresome and fed up were considered affected Britishisms when they made their American debut in the 19th century. My guess is that spot on is already on the way to becoming everyday American. But it will be awhile yet before it reaches the cultural outer boroughs. Like the Baltimore Police, I think I'll hold back until I hear it from McNulty. GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist who teaches in the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. His new book is called "Ascent of the A Word." (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GROSS: You can download Podcasts of our show at our website freshair.npr.org and you can follow us on Twitter at @nprfreshair and on Tumblr on nprfreshair.tumblr.com. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio. Related program: Fresh Air View the discussion thread. KERA News American Public Media BBC PRI NPR News Arts Business Government Politics Science Sports Business/Economy Health/Science Environment Education Arts & Culture Texas News Commentaries Archive KERA KERA Home Television Radio Art&Seek Kids and Family KERA E-Newsletter KXT 91.7 Support KERA Donate to KERA Television Donate to KERA Radio Volunteer at KERA Corporate Support Donate your Vehicle Member Rewards On Demand Listen Live Podcasts Watch Video KERA Mobile Apps ©2013 KERA News About KERA Privacy Policy Community Discussion Rules Contact Heritage language learners stay connected to culture and country through language ABOUT | CONTACT | REPORTERS | MEDILL DC | RSS | HOME Story URL: http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=213017 Story Retrieval Date: 1/24/2013 10:00:42 AM CST Illinois flu death toll reaches 50, vaccines still available Groupon removes gun-related deals, stirring debate Genetic link provides another clue in autism mystery Wage theft law helps protect vulnerable low-wage employees What to expect when you're expecting: Gorilla style Wrigley renovation would boost revenue, foot traffic in the neighborhood, team says Protein imaged in retired NFL players linked with concussions Military steps up preventive intervention after record high suicides South Side church preaches gender equality through female pastor Cook County land bank created to address increase in foreclosed local properties Here’s a Valentine’s idea: Have a drink and run around in your underwear – to raise money to fight children’s tumors Open mic provides haven for teens to share their stories Perez Elementary School students show the potential of the CPS arts education plan Respite for ill and injured homeless on city's West Side Massive cluster in space could challenge Einstein’s assumptions Men are cheating, but not where you think North Side farm offers outlet for Asian refugees Abbott profit shrinks on drug business spinoff McDonald’s modest fourth-quarter profit growth reflects Europe's economic travails First Midwest Bancorp shares fall on earnings near miss Printer-Friendly Version E-mail This Story Nadya Faulx/MEDILL Dunia Al Bayati has taught Arabic to young Iraqis for two years.آ  She said she incorporates Iraqi culture and current events from her homeland into her classes so her students will "know what happened to their country." Heritage language learners stay connected to culture and country through language by Nadya Faulx Dec 06, 2012 Nadya Faulx/MEDILL, American Community Survey Over 36 percent of Chicagoans over five speak a language other than English in the home, and the number has been steadily on the rise since 2009. Nadya Faulx/MEDILL Like his teacher, 11-year-old Omar is also an Iraqi refugee.آ  He has been in her Arabic class for nearly a year. Nadya Faulx/MEDILL Peggy Luu (right), a coordinator with the Chinese American Service League, said interest in Mandarin classes has grown steadily in the ten years since she joined the organization.آ  Most of the students in the class are ethnically Chinese and are part of a growing number of heritage language learners in Chicago. Nadya Faulx/MEDILL Polish teacher Jolanta Dohrmann discusses her experiences working with adult heritage language learners. 'I've left this language and culture behind': adult heritage language learners Children aren’t the only heritage language learners, said Joy Peyton of the Center for Applied Linguistics. More adults are seeking out classes to re-learn languages they spoke as children but forgot with time. “What often happens is, then when they get older and they’re realize, â€کOh my gosh, I’ve left this language and this culture behind,’â€‌ she said, “then they’re striving to get it back.آ  Because they know they had it.â€‌ She said when a child loses touch with his cultural and linguistic identities, he often comes to regret it later in life. “He had it when he was very young, but he went through a period of his life where he said, â€کNo, I’m not connected with this, this is not me,’" Peyton said. آ  Sometimes, she said, when that person gets older and pursues a career in which he might have used that language, he regrets not learning it. Poland native Jolanta Dohrmann has been teaching Polish with Multilingual Chicago in Logan Square for three years. She said she has a steady number of students with Polish backgrounds coming in to her classes and monthly social meetings to refresh their language skills. “In our social groups, there are a few people with Polish roots,â€‌ she said, noting that while they are usually unable to read and write their native language, their speaking skills are still strong. “You can hear that they have an accent, they don’t know grammar,â€‌ she said.آ  “But they know language they learned from their parents.â€‌ Dohrmann has also seen an increase in adult students coming to learn Polish for their spouses: If partners “have strong contact with Polish parents, then you have to deal with Polish in-laws,â€‌ she said. Amanda Suchecki’s husband is Polish, and said she began attending Dohrmann’s class as a way to “embrace his family, his cultureâ€‌ and pass it down to future generations. “Having another language is so important, and their culture, in my husband’s family, it’s very important to them,â€‌ she said.آ  “Everybody speaks Polish, so if I ever have a child or something, I want them to learn.â€‌ When 11-year-old Omar and his younger sister Ban came to the U.S. from their native Iraq, they had no problems picking up the language – and customs – of their adopted country. “I’m not Iraqi,â€‌ Omar will say in his perfectly un-accented English.آ  “I’m Muslim, but I’m not Iraqi.â€‌ Although they speak Arabic at home with their family, the two first-generation Americans risked losing their mother tongue.آ  For almost a year now, their father has been taking them to Arabic classes at the Iraqi Mutual Aid Society in Rogers Park, where he, Ban and other young Iraqis – some born in the U.S., many not – learn the alif baa taa s of their native language. Every Saturday morning, Omar joins his fellow students singing, in perfect Arabic, the Iraqi national anthem, “Mawtani.â€‌ آ  My homeland. These students are part of a growing number of heritage language learners in the country, people who, unlike traditional language learners, have a cultural connection to the language they are studying, said Joy Peyton, a senior fellow at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington. Heritage language learners often seek formal classes to learn reading, writing and grammar, but typically already speak the language at home with their families. “They often have knowledge and communication skills that others don’t have,â€‌ Peyton said. Approximately 36 percent of Chicagoans speak a language other than English in the home, and the number has been increasing slightly since 2009, according to the American Community Survey. Peyton said that the idea of heritage language learners has been around for decades.آ  It is only in recent years, آ  Since the first Conference on Heritage Languages in 1999, linguistics experts have been studying the educational needs and unique job opportunities of heritage language learners. Because they already have a strong background in the language and the ethnic community, many heritage language students have an advantage in the job market, particularly in careers where language skills are needed, such as positions with the Department of Defense and the National Security Languages Initiative, Peyton said. Chicago is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the country, with nearly 22 percent of the population foreign-born, according to the 2011 American Community Survey.آ  The benefits of studying a heritage language go far deeper than just a career boost; by retaining their native languages, young first-, second- and third-generation Chicagoans like Omar are reinforcing a link to their homelands that would otherwise be lost in the shuffle of acculturation and Americanization. Peyton said that this desire to uphold cultural traditions motivates many parents to enroll their children in a heritage language program.آ  “They want their children to maintain the language, and to develop their knowledge about the culture and their skills in it,â€‌ she said. “People are unified around their native culture,â€‌ she said.آ  “And preserving those cultural components and passing them to their children often has a language component of that.â€‌ Culture is a key emphasis in Dunia Al Bayati’s Arabic classes at the Iraqi Mutual Aid Society.آ  She has been teaching Arabic with the organization since coming to the U.S. from Iraq as a refugee in 2010, and provides a linguistic thread to a country many of her students knew just briefly, if at all. She teaches them about important holidays, like Eid al-Adha, and talks to them about what is happening in Iraq.آ  It’s important for her students to “know the culture of Muslims and to know what happened to their country,â€‌ she said. Anass Al Bayati, director of program administration at the Iraqi Mutual Aid Society, says the organization began offering an Arabic class to “build a generation who are bilingual.â€‌آ  Iraqi refugees are some of the most recent arrivals to Chicago; since they began settling in the city in 2003, their population has grown to around 3,000, according to the organization.آ  It is a unified community, with pockets in Albany Park, West Rogers Park and Edgewater.آ  The near impossibility of many of them returning to Iraq underpins the need to stay connected to each other and their former home, through language and cultural traditions. “I believe it’s very important,â€‌ Al Bayati said.آ  “It’s not about teaching the Arabic or teaching the alphabet letters, it’s about communication between each other.â€‌ Al Bayati came to the U.S. with his family in 2010, and he says it can be a challenge to make sure his two children speak Arabic.آ  He enforces an Arabic-only policy at home.آ  His seven-year-old daughter also attends the organization’s Arabic class, at his insistence.آ  “My daughter, she believes that we are the four people all over the world who speak Arabic,â€‌ Al Bayati said.آ  “She said, â€کNobody speaks this language, Dad.آ  Why are we speaking it?’آ  She’s still young, so I try to let her know that there are many people who speak Arabic and it’s a good language.â€‌ The Center for Applied Linguistics’ Peyton said community-based organizations like the Iraqi Mutual Aid Society are leading the way in heritage language education.آ  Though traditional K-12 schools have begun offering a wider array of language courses, such as Spanish for Spanish speakers and Mandarin Chinese, she said ethnic community organizations are instrumental in “developing the language proficiency of our country,â€‌ she said. The Chinese American Service League serves the community in and around the distinct neighborhood, which just celebrated its 100th anniversary this year.آ  The organization offers three levels of Mandarin for Chinese Americans, but the class also attracts children from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Stan Lau of the Northwest Side is ethnically Cantonese, but after his parents, Chinese immigrants themselves, moved him and his brother away from Chinatown years ago, he said he slowly forgot how to speak Cantonese.آ  He brings his seven-year-old daughter Annabella to Mandarin classes and said he hopes one day he can take her to China to see where her grandparents grew up. “I’m first-generation born here in the U.S., and I want my daughter to continue to have an understanding of her heritage,â€‌ he said.آ  “Even though my wife is not Chinese, I want her to understand where she comes from, and understand where her grandparents come from, so part of it is language.â€‌ Peggy Luu has coordinated dance and language classes for the organization for ten years, and said she has seen an increase in the number of families seeking Mandarin classes for younger Chinese Americans.آ  Since she joined the organization, the number of classes has gone from one to three, and the demand continues to grow. Nikki Sriver is ethnically Chinese, but having grown up in Thailand she does not speak Mandarin. She and her husband, who is not Chinese, enrolled their seven-year-old daughter Kalaya in dance class at the Chinese American Service League when she was just three years old; two years later, she began Mandarin lessons, and so did Nikki. She will sometimes sit in the back of the class with her daughter, picking up characters here and there so she can help Kalaya with her homework later. After taking a trip to Shanghai in August, Sriver said she wants to take Kalaya back to look for family she has lost touch with. “My dad came from China,â€‌ she said, “so in the future, we want to go in China and say, â€کSee, this is your grandfather here, your family.’ â€‌ Peyton said the issue of identity is key among heritage language learners and their families. Some first- and second-generation Americans may wish to embrace their ethnic heritage, like Kalaya, while some, like Omar, seek to distance themselves from it in favor of a more Americanized culture. “One really chooses what their identity is,â€‌ Peyton said.آ  “We all choose our connections.â€‌ آ©2001 - 2013 Medill Reports - Chicago, Northwestern University.آ  A publication of theآ  Medill School . Sartre and Camus in New York - NYTimes.com Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular Edition: U.S. / Global Search All NYTimes.com The Opinion Pages World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Editorials Columnists Contributors Letters The Public Editor Global Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Autos The Stone July 14, 2012, 5:06 pm Sartre and Camus in New York By ANDY MARTIN The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. Tags: albert camus , jean-paul sartre , New York City , Philosophy In December 1944, Albert Camus, then editor of Combat, the main newspaper of the French Resistance, made Jean-Paul Sartre an offer he couldn’t refuse: the job of American correspondent. Perhaps, in light of the perpetual tension and subsequent acrimonious split between the two men, he was glad to get him out of Paris. What is certain is that Sartre was delighted to go. He’d had enough of the austerities and hypocrisies of post-liberation France and had long fantasized about the United States. Camus himself would make the trip soon after, only to return with a characteristically different set of political, philosophical and personal impressions. The Chrysler and Empire State buildings seemed to Sartre to be like ancient ruins. In some sense, existentialism was going home. The “roots” of 20th-century French philosophy are canonically located on mainland Europe, in the fertile terrain of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. But it was not entirely immune to the metaphysical turmoil of the United States at the end of the 19th century. French philosophy retained elements of the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce and the psychologism of William James (each receives an honorable mention in Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”). More significantly, both Camus and Sartre had learned and borrowed from 20th-century writers like Faulkner, Hemingway and dos Passos —and, of course, from the films of Humphrey Bogart. Camus, in particular, cultivated the trench coat with the upturned collar and described himself as a mix of Bogart, Fernandel and a samurai. When Sartre stepped off the plane in New York in January 1945, only months after the liberation of Paris, his head full of American movies, architecture and jazz, he might have expected to feel in his natural habitat — the pre-eminent philosopher of liberté setting foot in the land of freedom, a nation temperamentally and constitutionally addicted to liberty. Was there not already something of the existential cowboy and intellectual gunslinger in Sartre’s take-no-hostages attitude? Camus must have thought so in dispatching him to the United States. Cecil Beaton/Conde Nast Archive — Corbis Albert Camus Sartre wrote dozens of articles for Combat while in the States, often phoning them back to Camus in Paris, and eventually went on to talk philosophy at Harvard, Princeton, Yale and elsewhere. In the process, he acquired an American girlfriend (about whom he wrote abundantly and explicitly to Simone de Beauvoir: “I am killed by passion and lectures.”). But the very personal article he wrote for Town & Country, “Manhattan: The Great American Desert,” records that he suffered on arrival from “le mal de New York.” He never really recovered. Sartre, leaving the confines of the Plaza Hotel, walked up Fifth Avenue beneath a frozen sky, looking for New York, but not finding it. There was nothing on which to focus his gaze; it was a city for “the far-sighted,” he wrote, since the natural focal point was somewhere around infinity, over the horizon. He missed the intimate quartiers of Paris, finding in their place only “filmy atmospheres, longitudinally stretched masses with nothing to mark a beginning or end.” Just the kind of place, one might think, where an expatriate existentialist ought to fit right in. And yet he suffered stubbornly from a sense of disorientation. “In the numerical anonymity of roads and avenues, he wrote, “I am just anybody, anywhere.” New York put him in mind of the steppes or the pampas. But soon enough he started to realize what his fundamental objection really was. The whole point of the city was to fortify itself against nature. But Manhattan failed to do that: an “open” city with a limitless sky above, it let nature in on every side. It was, of course, an island, and thus too exposed to the elements: to storm, hurricane, snow, heat, wind, floods. It had no real protection against anything. “I feel as though I were camping in the heart of a jungle crawling with insects.”` Therefore he learned to appreciate it only while crossing it in a car, as if he were “driving across the great plains of Andalusia.” Cecil Beaton/Conde Nast Archive — Corbis Jean-Paul Sartre And just as he inverts the perception of the American city, so too Sartre turns the notion of American freedom inside out. By February, having been shuttled to and fro across the States, wined, dined and given propaganda tours to industrial installations, he comes to the conclusion in another article, written for Le Figaro, that America is the land of conformism. He finds that beneath its notional attachment to “individualism,” America does not actually trust the solitary individual. Despite the “liberal economy,” America is an embodiment of a Rousseauist “social contract” in which the general will of the “collectivity” dominates: “Each American is educated by other Americans and he educates others in turn. Everywhere in New York, in colleges and beyond, there are courses in Americanization.” Existentialist anomie is prohibited: America is hyper-normative, producing citizen clones. It is Sartre’s most powerful and recurrent complaint: that people are being treated as things. The “nausea” of the 1930s, elicited by pebbles and trees and ocean depths (and thus, as in New York, nature in general) morphed, in the ’40s and ’50s, into a specific aversion to the nonorganic products of economic forces. In America he understood that things (the “in-itself”), in all their massiveness, were threatening to reify the amorphous human (or “for-itself”) and produce what he called in a later formulation the “practico-inert.” Still, Sartre holds out the hope that New York is moving in a generally Sartrean and semi-apocalyptic direction. All those skyscrapers? Obviously, they are doomed. “They are already a bit run-down; tomorrow, perhaps, they will be torn down. In any case, their construction required a faith that we no longer have.” The Chrysler and the Empire State already appear to Sartre like ancient ruins. Camus — officially a cultural emissary of the French government — followed in Sartre’s footsteps in 1946, providing an ironic commentary on his predecessor. Where Sartre was obsessed with architecture, Camus was indifferent, oblivious. “I notice that I have not noticed the skyscrapers, they seemed to me perfectly natural.” He had no issues with commodity capitalism. He admired colors, foodstuffs, smells, taxis, tie shops, ice cream, the “orgy of violent lights” that was Broadway, a jazz bar in Harlem and the giant Camel advertising icon of “an American soldier, his mouth open, puffing out clouds of real smoke.” He fell in love several times over, notably with Patricia Blake, a 19-year-old student and Vogue apprentice. He read her pages from “The Plague” and she, in return, noting his fascination with the American way of death, found him issues of undertakers’ trade magazines — Sunnyside, Casket,and Embalmer’s Monthly. He particularly admired a funeral parlor ad: “You die. We do the rest.” Camus had to keep explaining to American students that he never had been an ‘existentialist.’ At Vassar he gave a lecture on “The Crisis of Mankind” and was dazzled by the spectacle of “an army of long-legged young starlets, lazing on the lawn.” But he was preoccupied by what he thought of as the “American tragedy.” The tragedy of the students was that they lacked a sense of the tragic. For Sartre the tragic was the mechanization and objectification of the human. For Camus, the tragic was something more elusive: whatever it was, it was missing in America. There was an obvious difference of context between Camus and the students he was addressing. He’d come from Europe, which had just spent several years tearing itself apart, whereas they remained more or less physically untouched by the war. Camus was welcomed both as literary luminary (the translation of “The Outsider” came out during his stay) and Resistance hero. But his tragic perception of life was not reducible to the question of the Second World War. Sailing back from New York to France, at night in the middle of the Atlantic, staring down from the deck into the ocean, mesmerized by the wake of the ship, Camus spoke of his love for “these seas of forgetfulness, these unlimited silences that are like the enchantment of death.” Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series. Camus, the Resistance philosopher of solidarity, discovered (or perhaps re-discovered) the problem of other minds in New York. Unlike Sartre, he had no difficulty with things, trees, the Empire State Building, the impersonal ocean. It was only on looking into the face of another human being that he fully experienced a sense of the tragic. While hell-is-other-people Sartre came to invoke a notion of the “group-in-fusion,” Camus — who had to keep explaining to the students that he was not and never had been an “existentialist” — increasingly redefined the “absurd” in terms of an inevitable failure of language to bridge the gap between individuals. And it was not just the problem of inadequate English in speaking to Americans. He had the same feeling in Quebec. The clash between Sartre and Camus would come to be defined by their political divergence in the ’50s, crystallized by the publication of “The Rebel” by Camus. But already, in their different reactions to the United States — and particularly New York — we have the ingredients of a philosophical schism. Sartre, on his return to Europe, recalls above all America’s racism and practice of segregation, the inevitable counterpart to its drive to conformity. He writes a play, “The Respectful Prostitute,” that dramatizes the episode of the Scottsboro Boys in the ’30s. The split between contending forces — East and West, black and white, bourgeoisie and proletariat, humans and things — becomes the defining concern of his philosophy, summarized in the (admittedly rebarbative) phrase he comes up with in his “Critique of Dialectical Reason” to define boxing, but which also applies to his relationship with Camus: “a binary praxis of antagonistic reciprocity.” Existentialism in this form, inflected with Marxism, infiltrates the American intelligentsia, is absorbed into black power philosophy (“black existentialism”) and finds an echo in writers as disparate as Richard Wright and Norman Mailer. Camus, on the other hand, begins to sound more like Samuel Beckett. While Sartre after the war was more than ever a self-professed “writing machine,” Camus was increasingly graphophobic, haunted by a “disgust for all forms of public expression.” Sartre’s philosophy becomes sociological and structuralist in its binary emphasis. Camus, all alone, in the night, between continents, far away from everything, is already less the solemn “moralist” of legend (“the Saint,” Sartre called him), more a (pre-)post-structuralist in his greater concern and anxiety about language, his emphasis on difference and refusal to articulate a clear-cut theory: “I am too young to have a system,” he told one audience. And it is this anti-systematic aspect of America that he retains and refuses to clarify: “After so many months I know nothing about New York.” Paradoxically, it is clear that Sartre took his notion of collective action from what he witnessed in the United States rather than in the Soviet Union. It is typical that he should choose to frame his notion of freedom and the fate of individual identity in essentially literary (or textual) terms. Beware the editor! He didn’t like the way his articles were butchered when they appeared in American journals and admits to being apprehensive of something similar — “le rewriting” — happening to his plays, should they ever be put on in the United States. The F.B.I., while accusing Camus of writing “inaccurate reports,” also misidentified him as “Canus” and “Corus.” Sartre and Camus’s love-hate relationship was played out and reflected in their on-off romance with America. As Camus put it, “It is necessary to fall in love … if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.” Above all the two thinkers emphasize that America is always balanced precariously, like a tight-rope walker, on the thread of a philosophical dialectic. Andy Martin is a lecturer at Cambridge University. He is the author of “ The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs. Camus .” albert camus , jean-paul sartre , New York City , Philosophy Previous Post What Is Real Is Imagined By COLM TOIBIN Related Posts from Opinionator The Drama of Existentialism Freud on the Beach: Wave Theory The Way of the Agnostic Things I Saw — No. 53 Stone Links: Dating Made Easy (All Too Easy) Next Post Jokers Wild By PAUL VANDEVELDER Search This Blog Search Previous Post What Is Real Is Imagined By COLM TOIBIN Next Post Jokers Wild By PAUL VANDEVELDER Follow This Blog Twitter RSS The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com . Please include “The Stone” in the subject field. The Stone RSS Inside Opinionator Thomas B. 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You Are Going to Die By TIM KREIDER When we put the old and the sick out of sight, we enable a baseless fantasy of eternal health and youth. What is it doing to us? The Way of the Agnostic By GARY GUTTING What do believers have to believe? A Hospital Network With a Vision By TINA ROSENBERG Blending the humanist principles of an Indian mystic and the management style of McDonald’s, Aravind Eye Care System has become a global success. My Dark Materials: The Music of Depression By KEERIL MAKAN My music had always been deeply informed by my depression. Listen to what happened when it finally began to lift. Previous Series Line by Line A series on the basics of drawing, presented by the artist and author James McMullan, beginning with line, perspective, proportion and structure. The Elements of Math A series on math, from the basic to the baffling, by Steven Strogatz. Beginning with why numbers are helpful and finishing with the mysteries of infinity. Living Rooms The past, present and future of domestic life, with contributions from artists, journalists, design experts and historians. Specimens This series by Richard Conniff looks at how species discovery has transformed our lives. Subscribe Opinionator RSS The Stone RSS © 2013 The New York Times Company Site Map Privacy Your Ad Choices Advertise Terms of Sale Terms of Service Work With Us RSS Help Contact Us Site Feedback OPINION - How India Became America - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com Log In Register Now Help Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular Edition: U.S. / Global Search All NYTimes.com World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Autos OPINION; How India Became America By AKASH KAPUR Published: March 11, 2012 ANOTHER brick has come down in the great wall separating India from the rest of the world. Recently, both Starbucks and Amazon announced that they would be entering the Indian market. Amazon has already started a comparison shopping site; Starbucks plans to open its first outlet this summer. "> CORRECTION APPENDED Pondicherry, India ANOTHER brick has come down in the great wall separating India from the rest of the world. Recently, both Starbucks and Amazon announced that they would be entering the Indian market. Amazon has already started a comparison shopping site; Starbucks plans to open its first outlet this summer. As one Indian newspaper put it, this could be ''the final stamp of globalization.'' For me, though, the arrival of these two companies, so emblematic of American consumerism, and so emblematic, too, of the West Coast techie culture that has infiltrated India's own booming technology sector, is a sign of something more distinctive. It signals the latest episode in India's remarkable process of Americanization. I grew up in rural India, the son of an Indian father and American mother. I spent many summers (and the occasional biting, shocking winter) in rural Minnesota. I always considered both countries home. In truth, though, the India and America of my youth were very far apart: cold war adversaries, America's capitalist exuberance a sharp contrast to India's austere socialism. For much of my life, my two homes were literally -- but also culturally, socially and experientially -- on opposite sides of the planet. All that began changing in the early 1990s, when India liberalized its economy. Since then, I've watched India's transformation with exhilaration, but occasionally, and increasingly, with some anxiety. I left for boarding school in America in 1991. By the time I graduated from high school, two years later, Indian cities had filled with shopping malls and glass-paneled office buildings. In the countryside, thatch huts had given way to concrete homes, and cashew and mango plantations were being replaced by gated communities. In both city and country, a newly liberated population was indulging in a frenzy (some called it an orgy) of consumerism and self-expression. More than half a century ago, R. K. Narayan, that great chronicler of India in simpler times, wrote about his travels in America. ''America and India are profoundly different in attitude and philosophy,'' he wrote. ''Indian philosophy stresses austerity and unencumbered, uncomplicated day-to-day living. America's emphasis, on the other hand, is on material acquisition and the limitless pursuit of prosperity.'' By the time I decided to return to India for good, in 2003, Narayan's observations felt outdated. A great reconciliation had taken place; my two homes were no longer so far apart. This reconciliation -- this Americanization of India -- had both tangible and intangible manifestations. The tangible signs included an increase in the availability of American brands; a noticeable surge in the population of American businessmen (and their booming voices) in the corridors of five-star hotels; and, also, a striking use of American idiom and American accents. In outsourcing companies across the country, Indians were being taught to speak more slowly and stretch their O's. I found myself turning my head (and wincing a little) when I heard young Indians call their colleagues ''dude.'' But the intangible evidence of Americanization was even more remarkable. Something had changed in the very spirit of the country. The India in which I grew up was, in many respects, an isolated and dour place of limited opportunity. The country was straitjacketed by its moralistic rejection of capitalism, by a lethargic and often depressive fatalism. Now it is infused with an energy, a can-do ambition and an entrepreneurial spirit that I can only describe as distinctly American. In surveys of global opinion, Indians consistently rank as among the most optimistic people in the world. Bookstores are stacked with titles like ''India Arriving,'' ''India Booms'' and ''The Indian Renaissance.'' The Pew Global Attitudes Project, which measures opinions across major countries, regularly finds that Indians admire values and attributes typically thought of as American: free-market capitalism, globalization, even multinational companies. Substantial majorities associate Americans with values like hard work and inventiveness, and even during the Iraq war, India's views of America remained decidedly positive. I HAVE learned, though, that the nation's new American-style prosperity is a more complex, and certainly more ambivalent, phenomenon than it first appears. The villages around my home have undeniably grown more prosperous, but they are also more troubled. Abandoned fields and fallow plantations are indications of a looming agricultural and environmental crisis. Ancient social structures are collapsing under the weight of new money. Bonds of caste and religion and family have frayed; the panchayats, village assemblies made up of elders, have lost their traditional authority. Often, lawlessness and violence step into the vacuum left behind. I recently spoke with a woman in her mid-50s who lives in a nearby village. She leads a simple life (impoverished even, by American standards), but she is immeasurably better off than she was a couple of decades ago. She grew up in a thatch hut. Now she lives in a house with a concrete roof, running water and electricity. Her son owns a cellphone and drives a motorcycle. Her niece is going to college. But not long before we talked, there had been a murder in the area, the latest in a series of violent attacks and killings. Shops that hadn't existed a decade ago were boarded up in anticipation of further violence; the police patrolled newly tarred roads. The woman was scared to leave her home. ''This is what all the money has brought to us,'' she said to me. ''We were poor, but at least we didn't need to worry about our lives. I think it was better that way.'' Hers is a lament -- against rapid development, against the brutality of modernity -- that I have heard with increasing frequency. India's Americanization has in so many ways been a wonderful thing. It has lifted millions from poverty, and, by seeding ideas of meritocracy and individual attainment into the national imagination, it has begun the process of dismantling an old and often repressive order. More and more, though, I find myself lying awake at night, worrying about what will take the place of that order. The American promise of renewal and reinvention is deeply seductive -- but, as I have learned since coming back home, it is also profoundly menacing. PHOTO: Shoppers in the Mantri Mall, the largest in Chennai, in southern India. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES) Correction: March 18, 2012, Sunday This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: A photo caption with an opinion article about the Americanization of India last Sunday incorrectly identified the mall in the image. It was the Express Avenue mall in Chennai, not Mantri Square mall, which is in Bangalore. ANOTHER brick has come down in the great wall separating India from the rest of the world. Recently, both Starbucks and Amazon announced that they would be entering the Indian market. Amazon has already started a comparison shopping site; Starbucks plans to open its first outlet this summer. 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Style » The Courtesy Control Malfunctions © 2013 The New York Times Company Site Map Privacy Your Ad Choices Advertise Terms of Sale Terms of Service Work With Us RSS Help Contact Us Site Feedback France Abuzz Over the Whopper's Return - NYTimes.com Global News Global Opinion Go View From Europe November 30, 2012, 7:57 am France Abuzz Over the Whopper’s Return By HARVEY MORRIS LM Otero/Associated Press A Burger King sign in Richardson, Texas. LONDON — Eat your hearts out, gastronomes. The topic du jour , according to social media and headlines in the French press is the return to France of Burger King , the American fast food chain, after more than 15 years. From enthusiastic posts on Twitter to sociological reflections in the ever-so-serious Nouvel Observateur, France this week has been celebrating, or in some cases lamenting, the second coming of the Whopper. Julieta Salgado in Brooklyn was among those who spotted the trans-Atlantic trend: apparently lots of folks like to tweet about #burgerking in French — Julieta Salgado (@whereufromfrom) November 29, 2012 “It’s official. Burger King is returning to France,” proclaimed Capital , a French business magazine, headlining the announcement on Thursday that the Miami-based chain is to open two outlets, in Marseille and in Champagne, in an agreement with Italy’s Autogrill restaurant operator. The confirmation came after a mounting wave of rumors that served to underline France’s love-hate relationship with all things American. Ahead of the announcement, the Nouvel Observateur dedicated a 1,400-word article to the speculation, in which the magazine’s Olivier Cimelière pondered whether it reflected an orchestrated marketing buzz or a recurring hoax. So what’s all the fuss about? Mr. Cimelière asked the same question and concluded that ever since the chain ended a 17-year presence in the French market in 1997, its eventual return had taken on the aspects of an urban legend on a par with the elusive Himalayan yeti. “The outlets closed but a myth was born among French aficionados,” Mr. Cimelière wrote. “Burger King is in their eyes the sole and authentic hamburger with the taste of America. Everything else is just a pale imitation — junkfood!” The chain had pioneered hamburgers in France by opening its first restaurant on the Champs Elysées in 1980 at a time when most Parisians were still heading at lunchtime to mom-and-pop corner bistros. Since then brands such as Quick Burger and what the French call “MacDo” have spread to satisfy the country’s increasing appetite for fast food, to the despair of culinary purists. The sector even has an online magazine — Snacking.fr . In 1999, José Bové, a union activist, famously led demonstrators who dismantled a McDonald’s restaurant in southwest France just days before it was due to open in a protest against globalization. A decade later, McDonald’s succeeded in outraging fine art lovers and gourmets alike by announcing plans to open an outlet near the Louvre. The buzz over Burger King, however, is a rough indicator that for every French person who decries the Americanization of French culture there is another who embraces the country’s obsession with Americana, whether it comes in the form of fast food or Hollywood film noir . Marion de M., an “engaged citizen” also writing in the Nouvel Observateur , was not sure whether the burger brand’s return was good news or not. She believed the hype was the result of a combination of absence and rumor. “Our best memories of the Whopper are revived, making us forget the sweet, post-onion rings breath.” Burger King’s return was like “a shared collective joy,” she wrote. “To say you’re happy about it means signing up to that community. You’re part of a group. It’s cool (or you think it is).” She said she knew plenty of people who would make a pilgrimage to Burger King. “They’ll go once, maybe twice and then B.K. will become a banal part of their lives. They’ll pay no more attention and the B.K. myth will be over.” View From Europe Related Articles Also Tagged: americana , burger king , fast food , France , Hamburgers In Saint-Émilion, Rich and Proud of It France and Germany: No Longer a Couple, but Divorce Is Impossible How Far Will Europeans Support France’s Counter-Jihad? 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Facebook Twitter RSS Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company Privacy Terms of Service Native Americans ‘slaughtered, sacrificed, fenced in reservations’ in US — RT VERSIONS: روسيا اليوم NOTICIAS FREEVIDEO РУССКИЙ RTД RTДРУ Welcome back, ( log out? ) LOG IN SIGN UP RT live Schedule Where to Watch News Today Sci-Tech Features Top Videos Programs Schedule Keiser Report The Truthseeker Why you should care! 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The peaceful protest ended with at least five arrests. Native Americans ‘slaughtered, sacrificed, fenced in reservations’ in US Get short URL Link copied to clipboard email story to a friend print version Published: 24 October, 2012, 16:43 TAGS: Human rights , USA Russell Means, 2008 (Photo by Nadezhda Kevorkova) The prominent Native American activist Russell Means passed away on Monday. In 2008 he met with RT to talk about the Native Americans withdrawal from the US, their fight for recognition and his unhappiness with US citizenship. ­At the end of 2007, a large group of Native Americans from South Dakota declared the independence of the Lakotah Republic from the United States, and renounced their US citizenship. Following the incident RT’s Nadezhda Kevorkova met Russell Means, who told her about his struggle for independence. RT: Russell, you are no longer a U.S. citizen, are you? Russell Means: I am not. I am a Lakotah citizen, and I really regret about those who are hesitant to terminate their U.S. citizenship. RT: In Russia many people dream of getting US citizenship, and they consider it stupid if anyone could’ve stayed in the U.S. under any pretext but failed to do so. What do you make of that? RM: The United States is a fake country that has no culture. It’s easy to manipulate such a country, and to channel its people. The U.S. has a façade shown to the rest of the world, but few know of its reverse side as thoroughly as Indians do. The picture people see is not the reality of today’s United States. Even the President who’s in office today wasn’t really elected, like back in the year 2000. Young people certainly strive to get here to achieve their dreams. But really anyone coming only has one reason: they want to become rich and successful, and they want to get their opportunities [to succeed]. Once you talk to them you realize they don’t even dream of anything beyond money-making. This was the reason Europeans came here. This is the principle of the American life. The world is sick and tired of American prosperity. The world is waking up. RT: You have declared the Republic of Lakotah’s independent from the United States. What has the response been like? RM: The world has shown a great response that’s been growing by the day. Thanks to the internet, we see how keen people are about our freedom. A large number of people support us, and welcome us. People are vividly interested in our independence. The world understands us; while the US government doesn’t. RT: Who’s been supporting you? RM: People don’t merely support us; thousands of people demonstrate their willingness to come to the Republic of Lakotah. Unlike the unfortunate refugees fleeing to the U.S., those willing to join us are highly qualified professionals – doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers, scientists, various profile engineers, computer specialists, farmers. When people employ their minds they understand the meaning, and value, and the true meaning of freedom. We’re excited about anyone. If Americans want to join us we welcome them as well. The Lakota are a free people in their free country. The global situation has never been more favorable for us. Chief Oliver, descendant of the legendary Chief Red Cloud, a supporter of Russell Means (Photo by Nadezhda Kevorkova) RT: There’s a notion that Native Americans are now running casinos in their reservations, and making huge profits from them. RM: Casinos are legalized robbery. Only weak-minded and weak-spirited would want to spend their time playing in them. There won’t be any casinos in the Republic of Lakotah. We don’t want people to be robbed under a pretext that this kind of business is profitable for a tribe. RT: What kind of difficulties do you expect to face, such as traveling outside the U.S. without a passport? RM: A passport is required to be able to return to your home country. You only need an ID within the country; and the same applies to Europe. People will need their Lakotah passports to travel the world; this is something we’ve been working on now. As for me, I don’t expect any problems leaving the country; but they may want stop me from getting back in, that’s a possibility. It would be interesting if an American-born wouldn’t be allowed to return to his homeland. According to a UN convention, all groups of nationalities have the right to their own passports. So we are operating within international law. RT: What is the meaning of freedom that Lakotah represents? RM: Today the world lives by 17th-century values. That’s when the idea emerged that interests of an individual were protected by representative democracy. Few understand that a national government isn’t the most balanced kind of representation. The strongest kind of representation is an association of communities where each community is a group of free citizens that guarantees their protection. The United States was intended as such a union of communities but they are no longer that way. They became an old-fashioned system of hierarchal governance. The Republic of Lakotah will be designed on a communities principle based on consensus between them. Each community will have their own judges, law enforcement teams, and electoral councils. A community governed by its people doesn’t need police. The patriarchal governance system is based on fear that produces various phobias. Men fear women, and women gain so much power that their identity gets modified. Refugees storm the state borders, and states protect their borders, maintain armies of prisoners, and practice torture and execution. The entire society is saturated with fear that’s been stirred up artificially. A patriarchal state believes in negative only, and expects negative only from its people. It was generated together with the market; and it made people its slaves. A union of free communities is based on the principle of freedom rather than fear. A lot of people worldwide do realize it; this is why the Republic of Lakotah has so many supporters. If racists want to join us they are welcome to come here and live in a racist community. Freedom implies an opportunity to be an idiot and to live in a community of the likes. RT: Native Indians aren’t represented in the U.S. Senate, or Congress, or the Supreme Court, are they? RM: They aren’t, and they haven’t been throughout all these centuries. We intend making the U.S. government liable for the genocide of ethnic Indians. We’re now preparing paperwork to start a case at the International Court in The Hague. We are convinced that many countries will support our cause. RT: Many journalists paint a picture of your program as a return to wigwams, fires and ritual dances, is it not true? RM: Some would probably find this picture quite attractive, but this isn’t a possibility. We have to proceed from the reality. By returning our culture we mean using all the opportunities. I’ve traveled to Europe many times, and I’ve learned of various approaches to preserving the national culture. Back in the Soviet times, I visited Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, and East Germany – everywhere except Russia and the Arctic region. So I can make comparisons between places. The United States doesn’t even have opportunities for culture; it is only focused on money and on those forms of culture that yield money. Any art that sells is the kind of art that generates profit. It’s a terrible fodder turned into a machine for generating profit. What we see now is the world being Americanized, the profitability principle, expanded. It’s caught up even with Russia which is however trying to resist it. We don’t want to see any further Americanization, but are no revisionists either – we aren’t calling people to going back to the Stone Age, to isolation, to an ethnographic museum type of life. Or to perform paid rituals, a kind of a spiritual prostitution that’s been involving Indians under the pretext that this is our way to preserve our identity by publicly performing our sacred dances. So they say, if you don’t like Columbus, and progress, and democracy, you should give up using electricity, and computers, and phones. This is exactly what we will do immediately, as soon as those strangers and immigrants get on their boats and go back to their countries. One of Russell Means’ achievements: A school for Native American children in Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota (Photo by Nadezhda Kevorkova) RT: What do you have to offer instead of the pragmatic American system? RM: We have a special group that’s developing a whole new system, from creating alternative energy sources to our own banks that won’t be robbing our citizens. You have no idea just how positive people are about Indians. This is something I felt quite strongly in my travels – they were positive about me just because I was an ethnic Indian rather than an American. With this kind of trust credit, we will overcome all our difficulties, together with our allies. The governments will have to recognize us and give us sovereignty. Their laws say it’s our land. If they refuse to do so, we will file a suit to the Supreme Court. They will have to make that decision – you know they keep talking about the supremacy of law. Now it will backfire. So far they’ve been trying to ignore us, with the American press marginalizing us. But now, with the advent of the internet, these tricks have stopped working. The best idea for them would be to sit down and negotiate. Otherwise our next step would be going to the International Court in The Hague and demanding that genocide against American Indians be recognized. And we hope that as a founder of this court, Russia will support us. Gandhi once said: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then condemn you, then you win. RT: Vladimir Putin also holds Gandhi in high esteem. He says that after Gandhi died, there is no one to talk to.You have something to build upon. RM: Putin was talking of the double-standard democracy in America. The US supports the sovereignty of all peoples, save for those who live in the US. So we are certain Russia will back us. There’s more on this. China’s resources are now worth around 40% of what the US has. Few people at all know that China has promised Bush a market collapse if the US attacks Iran. So there is a variety of tools for peoples to support one another. RT: What if special services assassinate you? RM: We the Indians are not afraid of death.And I haven’t been, either. Thirty-four years ago at Wounded Knee we defeated a whole army of special services. We will defeat it now, too. You know the best thing about the Republic of Lakotah people? For centuries they slaughtered us, sacrificed us, fenced us into reservations, and stole our land, our air, our water. But we survived! We have things to offer. By contrast, they have nothing to offer. So they pretend we are non-existent. RT: What are your arguments against the US government? RM: According to the US data, when Europeans came here, there were around 12 million Indians across 48 states. By the early 20th century, only 250,000 Native Americans survived. About 70% of Indians are refugees in their own country; they have been displaced from their own land. The US carried out an unparalleled genocide: they killed 99.6% Indians. The US takes pride in its commitment to law and democracy. But throughout the years, there has been no respite in wars. There are only two countries in the world that keep breaching international law non-stop: the US and Israel. The US goes as far as neglecting its own constitution, which says that we are all free and can declare independence any time. Right now the Republic of Lakotah is a five-state area. Six more have already supported us and would like to join us, too. RT: Do you want to stick to peaceful means? And if it doesn’t work out, will you take up arms? RM: Never. This is inefficient. If you want to fight your way to freedom, you are no different from your enemies. You can’t protect your independence by throwing swords into the scale. Look at the Soviet experience: it was a failure. Russell Means poses for a portrait at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona, October 28, 2011 (Reuters / Joshua Lott) RT: I was shown the houses of drug dealers in the reservation. What should one do about them? RM: The communities will sort it out by themselves. There are two legal drugs in the US: alcohol and tobacco. Alcohol kills 75% of the population, while tobacco kills 24%, and the remaining 1% dies of illegal drugs. One day the six of us decided to block alcohol traffic to the reservation and formed a barrier on the border with Nebraska. But then came the police. They arrested us and let the dealers get away scot- free. RT: But it was the Indians who introduced tobacco to the world, wasn’t it? RM: Indians smoke a pipe with unadulterated tobacco as part of a ceremony, while the US produces cigarettes for daily consumption without any ritual meaning but with a lot of lethal chemical drugs. RT: Do you smoke? RM: I do smoke a pipe, but no cigarettes. Anyway, I don’t inhale the smoke – just like Bill Clinton. RT: Americans killed all the buffalo.Now the buffalo are back and white people eat their meat in restaurants. Have they turned your basic meal into fast food? RM: Americans crossbred the bison bull with domestic cattle. What they eat is the meat of this hybrid. They also add beef to buffalo meat. You can only taste buffalo meat at a dancing ceremony in our state and in Wyoming. RT: Thanks to you, South Dakota no longer celebrates Columbus Day. Instead, it observes Native American Day. Now what about Thanksgiving? What is the true background? There are conflicting accounts that come from Europeans: that it is a celebration of the first harvest, or that Indians brought gifts and saved the settlers… RM: This is all a lie. Native Americans have repeatedly saved the settlers, but there are no holidays to mark this. The true story is that the pilgrims massacred Indians, so the governor of Massachusetts issued a message to thank God for that and called on the other states to follow suit. Later on they tried to give the holiday a more peaceful meaning, but there’s no changing the past. RT: Now what do Indians do on Thanksgiving Day? RM: They eat turkey. Many of them don’t know a thing about it. They are a colonized people with a changed mentality and memory. Schools don’t teach them anything. Most of them don’t even know a thing about me. They believe I’m just a cinema star. Maybe the 1890 massacre rings some bell. But they are fully unaware of our 1973 victory at Wounded Knee. And that was a true triumph of Native Americans over the US government. A sacred Native American mountain in South Dakota, which was destroyed to create a privately owned museum about the great indigenous Chiefs (Photo by Nadezhda Kevorkova) RT: Could you please share some statistics on how American Indians live today? RM: They are struggling. The life span is getting lower by the year. Men hardly live longer than 44 years, and few women are older than 47. This is worse than in the poorest African countries. The unemployment rate is about 73%. The only fluent speakers of the Lakota language are at least 65 years old, and they are few and far between. Here’s why I built a school at my ranch, where all the subjects there are taught in Lakota only. Every fourth baby dies. Pharmaceutical companies take the healthiest kids away from their families, send them to orphanages and test drugs on them, including psychotic ones. To make matters worse, people kidnap children from reservations and sell them for organ removal or psychiatric experiments. A few cases have been started against these kidnappers. Beating and corporal punishment is rampant in schools. For kids from the reservations school embodies violence. Scores of reservation dwellers are infected with tuberculosis, polio, and other diseases which have been defeated in the US. There are many more instances of hypertension and diabetes in reservations than in the areas populated by white Americans. The reason for that is this particular free fodder that generations of our people have been fed. This free food contains nothing but carbs, while two thirds of our people cannot afford buying proper food. No other place in the United States has such death and disease rates as we do. Our water is intoxicated by uranium mines located in the Reservation. People living near uranium deposits suffer from cancer and all the associated diseases; women suffer miscarriages, and deliver unhealthy babies. Poor living conditions, uranium-intoxicated water and bad nutrition are the three reasons that have been killing off my people. We tried going all kinds of other ways such as rebellions, protests, marches, addresses, and strikes, but nothing got changed. The Republic of Lakotah was declared in the name of rescuing our people that the U.S. government didn’t care about. We began to die out, but we don’t want to anymore. Most of tribal unions aren’t doing anything but cooperate with the colonial regime. They are like the Vichy Government under Hitler – merely making an impression of self-governance in the reservations. But they are even worse than the occupants. They are now spreading rumors that we hadn’t consulted with our people and chiefs. This isn’t true. We did consult with those who are respected by people rather than the authorities. We reached an agreement with a hundred out of over 500 tribes, and with 480 families of several hundred people each. There are those in our tribes who we call miniature oligarchs, the caricature millionaires who made money on troubles of their people by selling alcohol and TVs. They also want to keep the current state of things otherwise they would lose their platform for developing their business. This mockery of life had ended on 17th December 2007. We are free. The Indian ‘Vichy’ wanted to keep their power over the Indian souls; but the Republic of Lakotah put an end to it. Vietnam War veteran Harry Roland, the director of the Wounded Knee Museum (Photo by Nadezhda Kevorkova) +18 ( 28 votes) Follow @rt_com Back to top Tweet Share on Tumblr previous next MORE NEWS 24.10.2012, 15:30 19 comments Siege of Bani Walid, Day 20: ‘Militia committing genocide’ – RT source Bani Walid, Libya, has been under siege for nearly three consecutive weeks. A man whose family is in the besieged city spoke with RT, and described the horrors allegedly taking place: Civilians are killed every day by toxic gas and heavy tank fire. 24.10.2012, 17:23 14 comments One security officer dead, two injured after militants open fire in Russia's Kazan (VIDEO) Law enforcement agencies in the Russian Republic of Tatarstan conducted a special operation to eliminate militants suspected of earlier attacks on local religious leaders. An FSB operative died during the fight, and another was wounded. 95 COMMENTS Rubin Schmidt November 01, 2012, 11:14 +1 Sad times, now all the great Americans I know, are dead. For me, this man ranked along side Jefferson, Jackson, Adams, Lincoln, William Jennings Bryant, (the greatest President America never had), Jacob Coxey, J.F.K. and of course Martin Luther King. Americans MUST find new leaders and ditch these corporate puppets, for their own survival,... and the peace of the world.!!! maga (unregistered) October 29, 2012, 02:28 +1 To Chad B. I wish you unite, find your people (even Internet is a tool, be careful) and could work together coming back to your roots... remember ghost dance from Bury my heart at Wounded Knee...? have you seen the video on youtube (Part 1) Indigenous Native American Prophecy (Elders Speak part 1) ...System in which we are now is trying to kill spirituality, i could hardly fit myself in as well. and you are right - it starts from the school, teaching competition/fight for money in our case, if you don't want to be a part of it, you are excluded and getting into troubles... The jobs they are proposing me now - like working for tesco, mcdonalds or bank....... no, thanks (propose me a job for an organic farmer) i will go my way as always, but just learning and not repeating mistakes. But i know the feeling, it is as this system works - it is like all your spiritual energy is drawn away. They cannot win. You are the real warriors, spiritual, not killers like them. If you could just grown your own food and find a place where you can cultivate your tradition. Maybe you can sell your products on the local market or art on the Internet just for starting, unite people.. today... can you ride a horse, give horse riding lessons....... Connect with your ancestors, ask them for energy and help. Be strong, you are strong and I hope you will stand up and thrive and one day will be the great Nation you once have been and in real you had never stopped to be! Shulbinsky October 28, 2012, 09:22 +2 A US internet user who lives in Canada (not Quebec) is arguing with an internet user from Europe on who ought to be judged and punished for enslavement of Africans and genocide of native Americans. US internet user who lives in Canada (not Quebec):"Your ancestors enslaved Africans and genocide the native Americans." The internet user from Europe:"At this very moment we type, I am in Europe. At this very moment we type, you are in North America. This fact alone implicitly explains whose ancestors have traveled to Nord Americo and committed the atrocities, and tells who the true sinner is." A second later the US internet user who lives in Canada (not Quebec) is destroyed by God. On Air Talent Corporate profile Job opportunities Partners Закупки Press releases Advertise with RT All RT sites Legal disclaimer Privacy Policy Feedback Contact us © Autonomous Nonprofit Organization “TV-Novosti”, 2005–2012. All rights reserved. What the New Dean at Pomona Looks for in an Essay - NYTimes.com Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular Edition: U.S. / Global Search All NYTimes.com Education World U.S. Politics Education Texas N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Autos January 12, 2012, 1:00 pm Comment What the New Dean at Pomona Looks for in an Essay By JACQUES STEINBERG Higher Education The Choice on India Ink Guidance on American college applications for readers in India from The Times’s admissions blog Visit The Choice Blog » Like The Choice on Facebook » As part of our effort to pass along authoritative guidance on applying to American colleges to an audience of students and families in India, we have recently posted the second installment in a regular Choice series on The New York Times’s India Ink blog. It is an essay by Seth Allen, the new vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid at Pomona College in California, about, well, the essay. While some of Mr. Allen’s advice about constructing admissions essays is particular to our readers abroad (the last of his seven tips is “When applying to schools in the United States, don’t try to ‘Americanize’ your application by focusing on your trip to the United States”), most of what he suggests is entirely relevant to American readers. Stephen Mally for The New York Times Seth Allen, dean of admissions at Pomona College in California Certainly his opening line is a powerful one worth heeding: “The essay just may be the most important aspect of your application to a United States college or university.” We hope you will give the post a look on India Ink, and leave a comment behind as well. Choice on India Ink , college admissions , College Essay , India , Pomona College Previous Post Part 4: Answers on the Fafsa, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid Next Post Part 5: Answers on the Fafsa, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid Add your comments... Your Name Required Your E-mail Required, will not be published Your Comment Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive. For more information, please see our Comments FAQ . Search This Blog Search Previous Post Part 4: Answers on the Fafsa, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid Next Post Part 5: Answers on the Fafsa, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid Follow This Blog Facebook Twitter RSS Welcome to The Choice Making a college list, filing applications, and marshaling the resources to afford an education can be rather intimidating. But it need not be. Join Jacques Steinberg, a New York Times senior editor and author of “The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College,’’ and Tanya Abrams, a higher education reporter for The Times and former high school teacher, as they examine all facets of the college admissions process. Introductory Post, March 26, 2009 » Video : How to Use Our Blog Contact us: thechoicenyt@gmail.com . Guidelines for comments and Why a post might be deleted . This Week: Guidance Office Fafsa Q. and A. Mark Kantrowitz , an expert on paying for college and the founder of FinAid.org, is answering select reader questions about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Introductory Post Answers: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Paying for College » The Choice Newsletter Sign Up for Our Weekly Newsletter The Choice is now available in your in-box. To sign up, visit our subscription page and enter your e-mail address. Every week, you'll receive the latest college admissions news and advice from The New York Times. Sign up for The Choice newsletter The Envelope, Please Eight high school seniors from around the world blog their college searches. Meet the Students: Candice Childress | Sush Krishnamoorthy | Will Walker | Thanh-Tran Nguyen | Leobardo Espinoza Jr. | Maimuna Abdi Yussuf | Bryan Stromer | Chandler Buckingham All Posts in the Series » College Planner Counselor's Calendar January College Checklists: Seniors | Juniors Guidance Office Q. and A. With Deans: Harvard | Penn. | Princeton Choosing a College Applying to College Paying for College Mark Kantrowitz: Financial Aid College Cost Calculator » Student Loan Guide » College Acceptance Rates 2013 Early Admission Trends 2012 Acceptance Rates 2012 Yield and Wait List Data Comments of the Moment “ If they were to not give credit for AP classes, I wouldn't even bother taking them . They take up too much time and honestly most of us take them to get credit and to look good.” — Steph Should Colleges Stop Giving Credit for High A.P. Scores? “ Students working this hard for two semesters should not have to slug through a quarter or semester of a survey class in college. That should be saved for the vast ocean of underachievers who hold themselves in high regard.” — M McClure Should Colleges Stop Giving Credit for High A.P. Scores? “ If the issue is truly about the quality of the high school instruction received, why not allow incoming freshmen to take an exam (as the psych students did in the example) to determine whether their AP course translates into college credit?” — Lisa Should Colleges Stop Giving Credit for High A.P. Scores? “ Having had 4 children go through the public school system and all of them taking every AP class that was offered as an alternative, I have become very skeptical and resentful of the whole process. In my experience teachers teach to the test, and boast of their student's success.” — Veronica Should Colleges Stop Giving Credit for High A.P. Scores? “ I congratulate Dartmouth on their brave decision and hope that my institution will do the same.” — Prof. Paul Should Colleges Stop Giving Credit for High A.P. Scores? By the Blogger The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College By Jacques Steinberg Given an unprecedented opportunity to observe the admissions process at Wesleyan University, Mr. Steinberg accompanied an admissions officer for nearly a year as he recruited the nation's most promising students. “The Gatekeepers” follows a diverse group competing for places in elite colleges. Education Life MOOCs: Massive and Multiplying The phenomenal growth of massive open online courses. Also: brain training, vet school, term-paper tips. The Brain Trainers Asian-Americans in the Argument Go to Education Life » Recent Posts January 24 Lessons From a College Student: Finding Your Fit on Campus The author, a sophomore at Barnard College, offers tips to help new college students become "involved and grounded on campus." January 23 Juggling ‘Too Many’ Scholarship Applications, and Learning to Let Go Leobardo Espinoza Jr., a high school senior in Kansas, says that "having a lot of scholarships to consider can be a double-edged sword." January 22 Should Colleges Stop Giving Credit for High A.P. Scores? Dartmouth College has recently announced that it will no longer give college credit to students who score well on Advanced Placement tests. January 22 Part 6: Answers to Your Questions About the Fafsa Mark Kantrowitz, an expert on financial aid, answers select reader questions about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Part 6. January 18 Among University of California Applicants, Latinos Take the Lead The U.C. system also received 174,767 applications this year, a record high. Archive Select Month January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 Latest Times Articles on College Admissions More Headlines » Follow The New York Times » Facebook Twitter .html','WT.ti','Follow-NYT-YouTube','WT.z_dcsm','1')">YouTube RSS © 2013 The New York Times Company Site Map Privacy Your Ad Choices Advertise Terms of Sale Terms of Service Work With Us RSS Help Contact Us Site Feedback Greece’s New Americanized Health Care System Truthout Thursday , 24 January 2013 / TRUTH-OUT.ORG How Can Obama Tackle Climate Change in His Second Term? The EPA wants to cap carbon emissions from new power plants despite industry pushback.  Wisconsin Anti-Union Law Upheld and Why It Doesn’t Matter The decision would appear to be a loss for unions, but it's not as bad as it seems. Home News Opinion Video Art Cartoons Graphic Journalism Truthout on Flickr BuzzFlash Buzzflash Headlines Buzzflash Commentary Speakout Progressive Picks About Us Submission Guidelines Contact Newsletter Sign-Up Donate Skip to content Greece’s New Americanized Health Care System Friday, 26 October 2012 09:14 By Sam Sacks and Thom Hartmann , The Daily Take | Op-Ed Tweet font size decrease font size increase font size Print Email Dr. Giorgos Vichas, a cardiologist who helped set up an underground network to help Greece's uninsured cancer patients, at the Metropolitan Social Clinic outside Athens, Greece, September 27, 2012. (Photo: Angelos Tzortzinis / The New York Times) Just when the austerity-ravaged people of Greece thought things couldn’t get any worse for them, their universal healthcare system is dismantled and turned into an American-style death system. As the New York Times reports this week, the Greek healthcare system that ensured coverage for all of its citizens before the financial crisis hit has today been completely decimated by Conservative technocrats and austerity-pushers. In the past, Greece provided universal care thanks to employers, individuals, and the government contributing to a fund to administer medical services to the entire population. Even those Greeks who lost their jobs still received health benefits for one year, and after those benefits expired, Greece made sure those individuals still received the healthcare they needed at no cost to them. But then, as we all know, the banksters swept into Greece and swindled the country. And when the global financial markets went bust, Greece was left with a debt crisis and the banksters demanded ALL of their failed investments back. So the banksters decided to suck whatever money they could out of Greece’s social services, in particular, its healthcare system. So in July of 2011, the banksters and technocrats put up their demands. They said they’d give Greece a bailout to ward off complete collapse, but in return they wanted a big chunk of the money that was being used to treat sick Greek citizens. Under pressure from the entire Eurozone, Greece agreed to the deal. And for the first time, unemployed Greeks who had lost their health benefits now had to pay out of their own pocket for any medical care they needed. If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because that’s essentially how our healthcare system works today. If you don’t have a job, and you don’t have healthcare, you’re on your own. And while Conservatives here tout our healthcare system as the best in the world – even though every international study disproves this claim – the Greek people are horrified with that they now have to deal with: Americanized healthcare. As Dr. Kostas Syrigos, the head of Greece’s largest oncology department told the Times, “We are moving to the same situation that the United States has been in, where when you lose your job and you are uninsured, you aren’t covered.” Today, that’s the case for roughly half of Greece’s 1.2 million long-term unemployed workers. As reported by the Times, one of those unemployed workers is a woman named Elena who was diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago, but under the new Greek law could not receive any medical care because her benefits had expired and she had no money. Without treatment, her cancer grew to the size of an orange and broken through her skin leaving a gaping wound. At this point, any sort of medical treatment for Elena was hopeless. She was, essentially, given a death sentence by the banksters. After seeing Elena, Dr. Syrigos told the Times, “Things like that are described in textbooks, but you never see them because until now, anybody who got sick in this country could always get help…In Greece right now, to be unemployed means death.” The same is true in the United States right now where being unemployed and being sick is literally a death sentence in the American healthcare system. As a 2009 study by Harvard University found, 45,000 Americans die every single year because they lack health insurance. The difference between the United States and Greece is we’ve never had a universal healthcare system that covers everyone like Greece has. So when we hear that tens of thousands of Americans die because they don’t have health insurance – plus thousands more who are condemned to death by for-profit health insurance death panels denying treatment – most Americans shrug it off as just the way things work here. And there are those like Mitt Romney who say , “We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance…No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for.” Unfortunately, that’s only after your cancer has grown to the size of an orange and ruptured through your skin and you’re already well into your death sentence. That’s the sort of ignorance you’d expect from a Plutocrat who resides in a different United States than the rest of us. That’s why we should all be paying close attention to how the Greek people handle their new Americanized healthcare system, because it will give us a clue as to what we as Americans, living in the wealthiest nation on the planet, should be demanding from our government when it comes to health services. In the face of rising unemployment, lost pensions, and skyrocketing suicide rates, we’ve seen Greek workers pour into the streets demanding an end to austerity. And now, faced with a new healthcare system like ours that doesn’t care for the nation’s most vulnerable, then expect those protests to grow even fiercer. It’s still unclear what the endgame will be for Greece in its fight against Conservative austerity. But they certainly won’t go down without a fight. And it’s time for us in the United States to at least begin our fight for universal healthcare. This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source. Thom Hartmann Thom Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling Project Censored Award winning author and host of a nationally syndicated progressive radio talk show. You can learn more about Thom Hartmann at his website and find out what stations broadcast his radio program. He also now has a daily independent television program, The Big Picture , syndicated by FreeSpeech TV, RT TV, and 2oo community TV stations. You can also listen or watch Thom over the Internet. Sam Sacks Sam Sacks is a Progressive Commentator and former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill. He is currently the Senior Producer of The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann airing weeknights at 7PM EST on RT and Free Speech TV. Show Comments Hide Comments View the discussion thread. blog comments powered by Disqus back to top Follow @truthout Latest Stories On the News With Thom Hartmann: We Could Be Just Hours Away From Filibuster Reform in the Senate, and More By Thom Hartmann, The Thom Hartmann Program | Video Report Are "We the People" the Terrorists Now? By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks, The Daily Take | Report What to Make of Barack Obama? By Robert Parry, Consortium News | Op-Ed Does Preaching Apocalypse Work? 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Editorial by Schendel Editorial by Wu Palm Trees and Fishbowls Scrambled Eggs Southern Glamour We're All Mad Here Archives Today Yesterday Tuesday Friday Back Issues Special Issues Recent Photos Recent Videos Classifieds All (24) ANNOUNCEMENTS (2) CONDOS FOR RENT (3) EMPLOYMENT (8) FOR RENT (4) HOUSES FOR RENT (3) MERCH FOR SALE (1) TUTORING (1) UNFURNISHED APTS (2) Calendar About About Us Advertising Contact Us Editorial Policies Join the Beacon Staff Kindle Edition Our Archives Staff Subscriptions Website Info Opinion: ‘Traditional’ America not wanted by Preston Peeden , Associate Editor Thu Nov 15, 2012 I usually try to take whatever Bill O'Reilly says with a grain of salt. I understand that he's not only coming from a news station riddled with biases, but also that as a cable news "anchor," he and his show exist to gain viewers so as to stay on air. But following the presidential election, O'Reilly topped himself in the category of ridiculously insensitive statements. While discussing the reasons for Obama's victory (something that FOX News tried their best to resent as unfathomable), O'Reilly lamented the "white establishment's" new role as the "minority." O'Reilly went a step further by saying that "the demographics are changing," and that "it's not a traditional America anymore." When I heard this, I couldn't help but think that he was joking (I also couldn't help but wonder why I was watching FOX News). In thirty seconds, O'Reilly had not only racially qualified our nation's make-up, but also implied that, ultimately, Obama won the election not because he was the best candidate or because more Americans agreed with his view of this nation's future, but rather because simply there are less white people in this country. In O'Reilly's mind (in the context of this statement), the presence of more minority voters was not only a bad thing, but that it also undermined the "white establishment." O'Reilly's comment illustrated a long-standing fallacy in American perception, that being that there is a "traditional America," and that if there is such a thing, then it's an idea that we would really want to return to. For so long, Americans have called themselves members of a "Great Cultural Melting Pot," a place where all cultures are accepted and brought into the process of building a national identity that bears the markers of all those that constitute it. On the surface, this seems like an alright idea. But ultimately, this process of Americanization creates an ethnocentric worldview where a certain idea of what an American is and how an American acts becomes the norm, and in that way those that don't fit this view must try to conform to it. Americans look back at the early 20th century and view the influx of immigrants as a positive marker, but in doing so, people ignore the groups that weren't included (Asians, Eastern Europeans, etc.). If America had ever been a melting pot, why were their immigration quotas based on race and ethnicity for decades that existed unmolested for decades? If America isn't "traditionally" an accepting and all-inclusive nation, then what is it? Looking back solely at the Founding Fathers as a model for traditionalism, then our government and our nation exist to promulgate the rights of rich, slave-holding white men. Is that the "traditional America" that O'Reilly wants? Because if so, then essentially our voting population shrinks to only the top one percent. Our nation says that it was founded on principles of equality and liberty, but ultimately we were founded on those principles for a select few; for the rest, their stations didn't improve for over a century. "Traditionally" our nation is exclusivist. "Traditionally" our nation was founded on giving rights to some and keeping rights away from others. When O'Reilly spoke about a traditional American demographic, I hope he didn't mean what those words actually imply. If there is any traditional version of being an American, then that version is one that excludes others based on sex, race and ethnicity. Our nation likes to act like we're traditionally inclusive, but unfortunately it's the opposite. We have created a version of history in which we aren't the bad guy, because that view is convenient, but in reality, a "traditional America" is not something any of us should want based off of the values that we say and believe our country espouses. I believe in racial and sexual equality. I believe in America, but unlike O'Reilly, I don't believe in a "traditional America." I believe in the actual America. I believe in our changing society, and I value it. — Preston Peeden is a senior in history. He can be reached at ppeeden@utk.edu. 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All media content copyright © 2013 The Daily Beacon. All rights reserved. KaosBE CMS copyright © 2009-2013 Jamie Wilson . All rights reserved. Licensed to the Daily Beacon. Powered by Django & KaosBE KaosBE and site design by Jamie Wilson Holiday tree, this is the “War on Christmas?” | An Atheist in Wheaton Advertisement: An Atheist in Wheaton About Holiday tree, this is the “War on Christmas?” Tweet By James Kirk Wall , December 2, 2012 at 7:33 am There was so much spinning on the O’Reilly Factor this week that the people in New York thought Hurricane Sandy had returned. So what catastrophic event warranted all this hot air? In Rhode Island the Governor Lincoln Chaffee followed the example of the previous Governor and called a decorated tree in the State capital a Holiday Tree. Seriously, that was the big emergency that Bill O’Reilly needed to save our country from. So why is big bad blowhard Bill so animated over this event? Not surprisingly, his anger is fueled by ignorance. Bill insists that the tradition of a Christmas tree started in Germany. Bill is wrong. A decorated tree in December has been a tradition long before the Bible was ever written. It is a pagan tradition celebrating the Winter Solstice. Something to think about for those who don’t celebrate Halloween because it’s a pagan holiday, but put up a decorated tree in December and color Easter eggs in the Spring. So why does Bill have such a problem with Holiday trees? This is never explained. He insists a Christmas tree is a secular symbol. If that is true, what’s the beef with calling it a Holiday tree? To steal a line from Penn Jillette, doing Holiday instead of Christmas brings everyone in; not only the atheists, but Jews, Muslims and other religions as well. Bill accuses Governor Chaffee of removing a tradition. He says this while the governor is standing in front of the decorated tree. The tree is there! No one is taking it away or even talking about removing it. It’s just called a Holiday tree. Once again, what is the problem? Secularism is taking hold of the United States and has been for some time. It’s not the 1950s anymore. Easter break is now called Spring break. Christmas break is now called Winter break. This is not due to a war on Christianity; this is due to a desire to include everyone. The grand holiday in December is a mixture of Pagan traditions, the legacy of Saint Nicholas, and Americanization such as fat Santa and Black Friday. Many people of all religions come to settle in the United States and celebrate the winter holiday. Whether you celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, the Solstice, Kwanzaa, something secular or anything else, the grand celebration in December is for you. So in the spirit of being fair and balanced and looking out for everyone, even the people who don’t have the same beliefs that I do, Happy Holidays to all! And may logic and reason bless us, everyone. James Kirk Wall Filed under: Uncategorized Tags: atheist , Bill O’Reilly , Fox News , Jews , Lincoln Chaffee , Muslims , Pagan , secular , war on Christmas Tweet Advertisement: Leave a comment Welcome to ChicagoNow . Meet our bloggers, post comments, or pitch your blog idea. Sign in Pitch your idea Advertisement: Meet The Blogger James Kirk Wall James Kirk Wall has been featured in Radio and Newspaper. As an educated and plain speaking facilitator of knowledge, Wall is able to take the best from philosophy, science, history, and other academic studies to provide a holistic common sense perspective of life's biggest questions. This philosopher/ author can be contacted at jameskirkwall@yahoo.com. Recent posts When we can live to be 200 years old » James Kirk Wall on An Atheist in Wheaton Posted Monday at 7:12 pm Can we disprove god? 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ChicagoNOW About ChicagoNow • FAQs • Advertise • Recent posts RSS • Privacy policy • Comment policy • Terms of service • Chicago Internet Marketing Services ©2013 CTMG - A Chicago Tribune website - Crafted by the News Apps team What It Means To Be A 'Mooz-lum' | Films | Reviews | May 2011 | emel - the muslim lifestyle magazine Login | Sign Up? emel search Thursday 24th January 2013 Muslim Lifestyle Issue... 100 - January 2013 99 - December 2012 98 - November 2012 97 - October 2012 96 - September 95 - August 2012 94 - July 2012 93 - June 2012 92 - May 2012 91 - April 2012 90 - March 2012 89 - February 2012 88 - January 2012 87 - December 2011 86 - November 2011 85 - October 2011 84 - September 2011 83 - August 2011 82 - July 2011 81 - June 2011 80 - May 2011 79 - April 2011 78 - March 2011 77 - February 2011 76 - January 2011 75 - December 2010 74 - November 2010 73 - October 2010 72 - September 2010 71 - August 2010 70 - July 2010 69 - June 2010 68 - May 2010 67 - April 2010 66 - March 2010 65 - February 2010 64 - January 2010 63 - December 2009 62 - November 2009 61 - October 2009 60 - September 2009 59 - August 2009 58 - July 2009 57 - June 2009 9 - Jan / Feb 2005 8 - Nov / Dec 2004 7 - Sept / Oct 2004 6 - Jun / Jul 2004 5 - May / Jun 2004 4 - Mar / Apr 2004 3 - Jan / Feb 2004 2 - Nov / Dec 2003 1 - Sept / Oct 2003 Home Subscribe Latest Issue Back Issues Comments Features Life Style Life Forums Real Lives Reviews Editorial Table Talk Reflections Diaries Competitions Offers Blog Advertise With Us Join the mailing list Click here to read our privacy policy Subscribe to emel's RSS Feed What it means to be a 'Mooz-lum' Issue 80 May 2011 Worldwide demand for Mooz-lum, the movie, has rocketed after the film gained exceptional reviews across the USA. A wholly viral campaign to promote the film has brought it to the UK this week. Ethar El-Katatney shares her thoughts in this exclusive online review on why the film deserves recognition by the mainstream box office. I cried while watching a movie today. I never cry in movies. But today I cried because I saw pieces of my soul in a movie. It spoke to me; deeply. It’s a movie that, on some level, I was thirsty for. And I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was. I went to a nursery called ‘Tom and Jerry’. The first song I learned was ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’. The first cartoon I watched was Barney, the purple dinosaur. I went to middle school and started reading Roald Dahl. I devoured the Sweet Valley Twins series. I had a crush on Johnny Bravo. I went to high school and started watching movies like American Pie, about the trials of high school life: dating, drinking, dancing. But you see, these things were so far removed from my life. I am a Muslim. I don’t date. Drink. Dance. The issues I went through in high school were so much more than simply worrying about what that boy thought of me. Instead, I was struggling as the only veiled girl in the entire school. Struggling to come up with an excuse as to why I couldn’t go to a friend’s 13th birthday party where you had to “bring a date.” It was a time where I struggled, hard, to balance between aspects of my identity, which on the surface seemed contradictory. I knew no one going through a similar struggle—no family members, no friends. And there were no movies or books to at least reassure me that I was not alone. That the times when I felt like ripping off that veil or accepting that locket from a boy I liked were normal—that feeling that way did not make me bad. Instead, the media I consumed made me feel like an alien—telling me that the lifestyle I read about in books and saw on television was the norm, and that opting out of that lifestyle made me a freak, an oddity. Where were the people like me: in real life, in movies? Enter Mooz-lum, stage right. Mooz-lum is a movie that traces the life of Tariq, a young, Black Muslim American boy. Raised in an extremely conservative household, he rebels once he goes to college. 9/11 happens and lives change. It’s a movie about faith, identity, tolerance, struggle, coexistence, discrimination, coming of age and so much more. It’s a movie that every young Muslim will empathise with; a movie that showcases the nuances of struggling to fit in, of the journey we take to find out who we are and how to stay true to ourselves once we do. And it begins with peer pressure. And family. Peer pressure is hard, no matter what faith you belong to. We all want to fit in. No one wants to be different in high school, let alone different in a way that has such negative connotations—“that’s a Mooz-lum name!” laugh the students in Tariq’s school. I wanted to be blonde and white. I wanted to be like everyone else. I wanted a mum who would cook burgers and fries, acool dad who would drive me to prom. Because that is what ‘normal’ was. Instead, I got parents I loved deeply, but couldn’t understand how they were so different from me. Where I felt like I was bending over backwards to satisfy them but it was never enough. I always felt like I was failing them. Linkin Park’s ‘Numb’ was the soundtrack of my life. We are a generation that is just so, so different from our parents. My dad—like Tariq’s—proudly wears a thobe and kufi out in public. I was embarrassed of him as a child. And then ashamed at being embarrassed to have him pick me up from school. No matter how hard he tries to compromise, it is just never enough because we come from such different backgrounds. My paternal grandmother never went to high school and she got married at age 15, to a 40-year-old man. My father believes I am a spinster at age 23 and sees that fact that I went on to college and then graduate school, as the biggest compromise. That is the way he is, and that is the way he will stay. Tariq’s story highlights this beautifully—the struggle we go through to please our parents, and our comprehension that although they may try, they will find it hard to do as Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib advised: "Do not force your children to behave like you, for surely they have been created for a time which is different to your time.” At the same time, Mooz-lum makes you feel for the parents—they want children like them. Better than them; children who will get the chance to do what they couldn’t. And they want to protect them from the aspects of a culture that they see as against their beliefs. My dad forbade me to go to prom. I’ve never been to a concert. I’m home before 10pm every night. My dad wants me to read Arabic fluently. He wants me to learn the Qur’an by heart. He wants my brother to pray in the mosque; grow a beard, dress ‘Muslim.’ He wants us to be good Muslims in the way he understands good Muslims must be. And I cannot fault him for that. And as I grow older, the more I am able to appreciate how hard it was for him to compromise and the more I understand that being tough can sometimes be the hardest thing to do. But how to make parents understand that culture and faith are not the same. And how will we raise our own children? Where will we put the limits? How to raise them in a way that they choose to be Muslims? Choose to abide by the rules because they want to? Where do we relax the rules? When do we let them choose? Do we send them to the schools where they struggle so much? Or to Muslim schools that come with their own kind of problems? Tariq’s father sends him to a madrasah—a Muslim school where the children dress in thobes and kufis, eat on the floor from one big bowl, and basically live a life that is different from the world outside its walls. I went to a school like that in Yemen. But I went by choice as an adult, to see what life ‘away’ from the ‘world’ is like, where in no way am I odd or strange. I do not believe that Muslim schools, run by people from our parents’ generation, are the solution. If they’re not run properly, they run the risk of alienating the children. And to be run properly, they need people like me and like Tariq, to run them; who understand what it is like to grow up between cultures and with multiple identities. But I digress. The question Mooz-lum raises is how should one create a vibrant American Muslim culture? One that is wholly American and wholly Muslim at the same time, rather than neither nor? How do we become secure in who we are and what we believe in order to be able to develop this culture? How do we find our place in this world? Where we are proud of our roots and history, proud of our faith, and yet truly citizens of this world? And these issues aren’t just limited to Americans. We talk about globalisation. But the reality is, we’re talking about Americanisation. The world is becoming Americanised. I’m sitting at Starbucks in a mall right now, sipping my tall-skinny-vanilla-latte, while listening to Frank Sinatra. I just finished typing an analysis of a Harvard Business School case for my MBA class on my MacBook, I’m sending a bbm from my blackberry, and I’m staring at the Apple store across from me and wondering if I really need an iPad, and whether or not I maxed out my American Express credit card this month. I’m dressed in Levis jeans, Converse trainers, a GAP sweater, and I just came from Gold’s Gym. I’m meeting friends in an hour to see Tangled at the 3D cinema, where we will buy caramel popcorn and then have lunch at Chilis or TGIF, followed by dessert at Haagen-Dazs. Then we’ll walk around the mall—I want to buy the new Jodi Picoult book from Virgin, that dress I liked from Zara, and the new raspberry body butter from The Body Shop. But you see, I am not in America. I am not American. I have never even been to America. I was born in Saudi Arabia. The mall I am in is in Cairo, Egypt. I am Egyptian and I have lived in Egypt all my life. And yet—my identity is no longer purely Egyptian. In the world we live in today, so many Muslims are going through what I am going through, without ever having stepped foot in America. We don’t have to be American to be Americanised. And we don’t have to be Americanised to struggle as Muslims in a world where religion is seen as backward. Where modernity and civilisation seem to be mutually exclusive with faith. We’re all adrift in confusion; trying to make sense of our identity, and trying to see where we fit. As Muslims, we’re struggling to find the balance. Struggling against the loud voices that tell us our faith is violent; struggling to prove that it is not, struggling against ourselves and against an outside world that seems to be against us. It’s so hard. And sometimes, we slip up. Sometimes, a small little voice tells you: “Dude, your life would be so much easier if you could just go with the flow.” If you didn’t have to announce to the world that you were Muslim, with all the baggage and connotations and responsibility that it entails; if you were just like everyone else. Tariq decides to be T, to shed the part of him he doesn’t realise is his core. He goes drinking, clubbing, kisses a girl, and decides he doesn’t want any part of ‘it.’ But even when we slip up—the guilt is there. There aren’t enough words to describe the scene where Tariq recites the Qur’an out loud and tears up. Because that’s what it boils down to—if you truly, truly believe, you will not find a joy in this world that is as beautiful as the joy you do when you submit to God. And that is what makes the struggle worth it—to find the place where you are comfortable in your dual identities, part of the world and not isolated, yet not schizophrenic, torn apart. So, that was how Mooz-lum impacted me on one level. And partially, why movies like it are necessary—for Muslim youth who need to know that they’re not alone. But the movie is so much more that. In American society today, artistic expression and more specifically, movies, are the way to impact people. Once upon a time, it was poetry. Then, it was books. Now, it is movies. As Ingmar Bergman, the famous Swedish director and producer, said, “Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.”

When I left college I became a journalist. My job is media. I live in it. And I don’t think anyone would argue with me when I say that Muslims in western media are grossly misrepresented, that misconceptions are circulated, and that we have been reduced from rich, complex individuals into one-dimensional representations and a monolithic entity. In 2001, Jack Shaheen analyaed the way Arabs (might as well be synonymous with Muslims) were portrayed in over 900 movies for his book, Reel Bad Arabs. He found that only a dozen portrayals were positive and fifty balanced. The reality is that media shapes perceptions. And the western media of the world today has disfigured the image of Islam, ingrained misconceptions and stereotypes, and consequently, promoted intolerance, racism, hatred, and violence.

According to Media Tenor, a research firm that monitors and analyses media coverage of key issues, “The tone of statements in US television news in 2009 about Islam (40%) was twice as likely to be negative than the statements made about Christianity (20%). Two-thirds of the television coverage about Islam associates Muslims with extremism.” A Gallup study on religious perceptions in America released earlier this year showed that the more ignorant Americans were about Islam, the less prejudiced they were towards it. Why? Because they were ignorant—they were not exposed to as much media. If they had, they would have been more prejudiced, since the media image of Islam is violent and horrible and oppressive. And this disfiguration of the faith has gone virtually unchallenged in the public mind simply because Muslims in the west have not yet attained a high enough level of comfort in their identities to express their spirituality through the arts, whether that be music, plays, books or movies. But this is changing. Muslims are starting to speak up for themselves. The New York Times recently ran an article on Muslim artists who are bridging American and Islamic traditions with their art. And that’s why a movie like Mooz-lum is groundbreaking. It isn't a one-dimensional representation. It doesn't portray Muslims as angels or demons. It portrays the humanity: we love, we hate, we do good, we do bad. And yes, there are people out there who give Islam a bad name: who beat children, who preach violence. And there are those who do good: who call for mercy, for co-existence, who are great human beings doing great things for the world. Nothing is as black or white as it seems, and the actors do a beautiful job of portraying the complexities of the characters writer and director Qasim Bashir brought to life. Mooz-lum goes deep beyond the clichés and the headlines, straight to the heart. It isn't the best movie you'll ever see. But it's a damn good one, and it is groundbreaking. Because the only way for us to start tackling the stereotypes is in the same way they are perpetuated: movies. For non-Muslims, the movie is perhaps more important: a chance for them to hear Muslims speaking about what it is like to be Muslim, to see the nuances it would be impossible to get across in a conversation or two. And of course, to see how 9/11 impacted Muslims. In 2003, the FBI created an Arab-American advisory committee after hate crimes against people perceived to be Arab or Muslim increased by 1,700%. I believe that working in media, creating movies and songs and books that reflect ‘us’ is just as important as everything else Muslims have to do in the world today—reinterpret scripture, properly teach Islam to children, condemn violence, etc. But it’s a heavy burden, and not one many of us choose to bear—especially those of us who are successful, articulate, cosmopolitan and secure in who they are, and therefore the most qualified to stand up and say “Yes, I’m a Muslim. This is why. This is my community. These are my struggles. No, I am not x, or y, or z.” It could potentially harm your career. It’ll put you in the spotlight. You will be judged as a “Mooz-lum,” and not as a lawyer, a doctor, an anchor, a teacher. But it is our responsibility as Muslims. Actually, it is our responsibility as citizens and human beings to speak up for a beleaguered faith, which lacks the political and cultural power to fight back. I’m speaking up. http://www.moozlumthemovie.com back Reflections Comments Features Life Style Life Forums Real Lives Reviews - Books - Films - DVDs - CDs - Plays - Events - Restaurants Table Talk Editorial Diaries Competitions Offers Bookmark this Add to DIGG Add to del.icio.us Stumble this Share on Facebook Share this Send to a Friend Link to this Printer Friendly Print in plain text Comments 5 Comments 1 24 Sep 12, 23:53 Just don’t be overwhelmed after reading my comment but I simply could not stop myself from appreciating this wonderful piece of marvel. What a article…it traverses you to a whole new progressive world......:) 0 0 2 sahid ayobami 31 May 11, 20:04 thank u, u really captured many things regarding we Muslims.....i also feel the same way, trying to be western and at the same time identify with Islam.....so pathetic!!! .......i hope we Muslims can be more confident of our deen....we really need this awareness... 0 0 3 Sumaya 17 May 11, 21:35 Excellent review, Ethar! You've captured many of my own sentiments regarding the lack of positive or even neutral Muslim presence in mainstream Western media and the impact that this can have in our Youth given the Americanization of international culture. I can only hope and pray that this movie is not an anomaly but signals a change, even if slight it may be. 0 0 4 Mukhammad R Khaidar 4 May 11, 19:15 Assalamualaikum... It's remain me, that there was a sahabat turn to be murtad/non muslim. when first hijrah to abasia country. he loved drinking, and so on.... free to act in islam and no push/stress to the believers. it's free religion to be embrassed. To be muslim is real good, and to be khusnul khotimah, is just Allooh who choose and put the guidance on to the people. if Allooh ta'alla will. by: http://gebyokandfurniture.blogspot.com (place to buy furniture, from production) 0 0 5 faa 4 May 11, 17:53 MASHALLAH 0 0 Leave a comment Sign in or Register to leave a comment About us | Distributors | Stockists | Contact us | Advertise with us | Press | Terms & conditions | Privacy policy | Feed | Site by Make Me Believe © emel media limited. Registered in England and Wales. No. 4745601 Americanization or Globalization? | Global Envision Advanced Search > About Us • Contact Us • For Teachers • For Students • Contributor Login • Newsfeed via Email Home Americanization or Globalization? From the Archives Posted on October 2, 2006 Previously filed under: North America , Culture and Society PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS ARTICLE IS FROM 2006. VISIT OUR HOMEPAGE FOR NEW CONTENT. A Ugandan writer explores the meaning of globalization and the growing influence of American culture around the world. Global socio-political issues never cease to fascinate any interested soul. From the times of civilization came the era of colonialism then independence. This was followed by the cold war era where The Soviets were slowly but surely out-smarted by the more versatile capitalists of the day. The post cold war era led to the increasing influence of what some people these days call quasi-governments (such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). The IMF and World Bank consequently took on the role of the world's economic ‘police' telling particularly poorer nations how to spend their money. In order to receive more aid, these Bretton Woods institutions demanded that countries open up their economies to liberalization under Structural Adjustment Programmes that encouraged governments to fund privatization programmes, ahead of welfare and public services. Concurrently we had the influence of multinational organisations like the United Nations Organisation also greatly formatting global issues. Fast-forward to the new millennium things took a different path. All of a sudden we were being pumped with rhetoric titled globalization. Globalization is an umbrella term for a complex series of economic, social, technological, and political changes seen as increasing interdependence and interaction between people and companies in disparate locations. In general use within the field of economics and political economy, it refers to the increasing integration of economies around the world, particularly through trade and financial flows. The term sometimes also refers to the movement of people (labour) and knowledge (technology) across international borders. There are also broader cultural, political and environmental dimensions of globalization. For the common man it was always argued that the world had become like a global village of sorts. Globalization is an umbrella term for a complex series of economic, social, technological and political changes seen as increasing interdependence and interaction between people and companies in disparate locations. At its most basic, there is nothing mysterious about globalization. But not so fast, some people are now arguing that globalization has mainly benefited the already strong economies of the world and it has given them leverage to not only trade with the rest of the world but to also influence their general lifestyles and politics. Proponents of the school of thought contend that countries like U.S.A are using the globalization as an engine of "corporate imperialism"; one which tramples over the human rights of developing societies, claims to bring prosperity, yet often simply amounts to plundering and profiteering. Another negative effect of globalization has been cultural assimilation via cultural imperialism. This can be further explained as a situation of exporting of artificial wants, and the destruction or inhibition of authentic local cultures. This brings me to the gist of my submission. At a closer look, globalization is slowly shifting towards Americanization. Have you heard the word "Americanization"? Well in the early 1900's Americanization meant taking new immigrants and turning them into Americans...whether they wanted to give up their traditional ways or not. This process often involved learning English and adjusting to American culture, customs, and dress. Critics now say globalization is nothing more than the imposition of American culture on the entire world. In fact, the most visible sign of globalization seems to be the spread of American hamburgers and cola (Pepsi and Coca Cola products) to nearly every country on earth. The song Amerika by the German rock band Rammstein is often seen as a satire of Americanization. It has received mixed reviews: some perceive it as anti-American, others as being opposed to globalization. The band views it as a satirical commentary on "cocacolonization". The most visible sign of globalization seems to be the spread of American hamburgers and cola to nearly every country on earth. According to information from Globalisation.about.com even globalization champions like Thomas Friedman see it. In a recent column describing why terrorists hate the United States, Friedman wrote: "...globalization is in so many ways Americanization: globalization wears Mickey Mouse ears, it drinks Pepsi and Coke, eats Big Macs, does its computing on an IBM laptop with Windows 98. Many societies around the world can't get enough of it, but others see it as a fundamental threat." The rest of the world seems to be following Uncle Sam (U.S.A) and leaving behind its authentic ways of life. This has not spared even the ‘air tight' Chinese society. Americanization is the contemporary term used for the influence the United States of America has on the culture of other countries, substituting their culture with American culture. When encountered unwillingly, it has a negative connotation; when sought voluntarily, it has a positive connotation. How Are We Being Americanized? U.S.A, which has the world's biggest economy and strongest known army, has taken gigantic steps in persuading the rest of the world to think and act like them. Many people especially the Europeans have often despised Americans saying they have no culture. But as any sociologist will tell you, even having no culture is a culture in itself. So for many years, the land of immigrants has been on a process of creating an identity and hence a culture. Now they seem to be selling their culture to the rest of the world as anew and improved product of what we all have as culture. As far as fashion is concerned, the casual ‘American' style of wearing Jeans, T-Shirts and sports shoes is now common and acceptable in many places. For the office it is not rare to see someone wearing tight jeans with a long sleeved shirt plus a tie. His defence is of course that it is the American style (read modern). Cowboy hats, boots and large silver belt buckles are also a common imitation of the dress style of American especially those from Texas and Arizona. The American music industry has also gone a long way in influencing the dress culture of other people around the world. What about the example youths have picked up from famous American rap artists like 50-cent, Eminem, Tupac Shakur (R.I.P) and Snoop Dogg with their flashy fashions characterized by what is commonly known as "bling bling" (expensive shiny jewellery and watches). Look at the music played in the Nyamirambo bound taxis and you will be amazed at how it matches with the dress style of the passengers! The casual ‘American' style of wearing Jeans, T-Shirts and sports shoes is now common and acceptable in many places. Around the world the United States is perhaps best known for it's numerous and successful fast food franchises. Such chains, including McDonald's, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken are known for selling simply, pre-prepared meals of foods such as hamburgers, French fries (chips), soft drinks, fried chicken, and ice cream. Though undeniably popular, such food, with its emphasis on deep-frying, has been criticized by dietitians in recent decades for being unhealthy and a cause of obesity. It has thus become somewhat of a stereotype to associate American cuisine with obesity and junk food. The whole world now is full of similar eating joints. In Africa many are referred to as take-aways. Popular Culture This transmission of American culture has been mainly through several conduits with the number one medium being the electronic media. Television in particular has done a lot in Americanizing those who view images especially from Hollywood. The guys in Hollywood have made us to adore the tough cigar-smoking guys in the Casinos, the thin shapely long legged women, and to dream about rags-to-riches stories that are a common tag line of the movies. We now adore jazz, hip-hop, rap music, country music as well as gospel music all of which were pioneered by the United States. And trust us in following the Uncle Sam; many countries now have equivalents of the American awards of Oscars for the movies and Grammy's for the music. Just check out the PAM awards in Uganda or the Kisima awards in Kenya, not forgetting the continental Kora awards held annually in South Africa. Many countries have also gone a head to construct theme parks basing on the American Disney World model. Americanization has also led to the popularity and acceptability of what is known as American English. I have seen many posters here in Rwanda of schools claiming to teach American English. Many youths are now using this type of English considering it ‘modern'. We ought not to ignore the heavy influence that the United States has demonstrated in the development of the Internet and it's subsequent control. Remember the conference that was held at the beginning of this year in Tunisia where nations were complaining about the control the US has over the Internet. They were proposing that instead an international body should take over but the conference ended in defeat of this line of argument. The iPod, the most popular gadget for portable digital music, is also American invention. The number one medium for the transmission of American culture has been through electronic media, television in particular. American sports especially basketball have now become famous worldwide especially among college students. However other games like baseball and American football have not been easily adopted by other people in the world, as has been the case with basketball. Soccer, which is known to be the world's most popular sport, is not so popular in the US. However the US women's soccer team is one the of the world's premier women's sides. War on Terrorism Americans have also been known to spear heard the spread of the Pentecostal, Charismatic, Evangelical or born again religious movements worldwide. American preachers are always globetrotting all in the name of spreading the word of ‘Gad'. We should not ignore the fact that the United States Constitution enshrined individual freedom of religious practice, which courts have since interpreted to mean that the government is a secular institution, an idea called "separation of church and state". This notion of separating religion from the state is one of the controversial aspects of exporting American culture. This is embedded in the Bush administration's "War on terror" which some have gone ahead to read as a war on Islam. This controversial American policy is what inspired Prof. Mamdani to write a book titled, " Bad Muslim good Muslim". America, which has thousands of military servicemen around the world, has of late been preoccupied with fighting terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and it is getting ready to deal with the Iran problem soon. Actually some people are already speculating that the current crisis between Israel and Hezbollah is a precursor to America's war with Iran. That US is supporting the Olmert government to keep bombing Lebanon until Iran which is said to be the Godfather of Hezbollah gets angry enough to join the war. At this point it is argued that the US will join hands with Israel and fight the Iran government because "they have weapons of mass destruction". At the end of the war as usual US will be expected by many viewers to have conquered another oil producing country. Many see the War on terror as a veil for acquiring cheap oil to run the US economy. Returning to the Israeli conflict with Hezbollah, one can not fail to see an American tone in the whole conflict. Do you remember the first people to use the word "collateral damage"? This was what Americans first used to describe the death of innocent civilians and destruction of infrastructure by ‘precision' missiles during the Afghan war after the 9/11. This was an excuse used for having bombed the Chinese Embassy and a Red Cross facility during the war. Now compare it with the death of thousand of Lebanese civilians and the destruction of hundreds of buildings. The death of UN officers and the recent Qana massacre can be accurately referred to as collateral damage by the Israeli government. The notion of separating religion from the state is one of the controversial aspects of exporting American culture and is embedded in the Bush administration's "war on terror" which some have gone ahead to read as a war on Islam. This notion of separating religion from the state is one of the controversial aspects of exporting American culture. This is embedded in the Bush administration's "War on terror" which some have gone ahead to read as a war on Islam. The apparent determination by the US to appoint itself "Mr. Fix it all" is a somewhat naive but optimistic belief among Americans that all problems can be fixed with enough commitment and effort. This sometimes leads America into problematic situations such as Vietnam and Iraq. In some cases though, American fix it all attitude has positively led to large outpouring of humanitarianism. This is clearly evidenced by the enormous aid that Americans especially at the individual level, are sending to poor nations. Americans like Bill Gates and CNN's Ted turner are some of the world's biggest donors. In conclusion, therefore, the global stage is at a period of American conquest in many different ways than you can imagine. Globalization seems to be hijacked by the Americans. The world also seems to be clamouring for more of the Yankee lifestyle. However simply dismissing -- or demonizing -- globalization as mere Americanization is misleading. Globalization has the ability to alter much more than just the movies or food consumed by a society. And the results can be powerfully positive, devastatingly negative, or (more often) something in between. Contributed by Allan Brian Ssenyonga, a Ugandan freelance writer for The New Times , an English daily in Rwanda. He holds a bachelor's degree in Adult and Community Education and works as a secondary school teacher in Rwanda. Reprinted with permission from The New Times . To read another Global Envision article about globalization and American culture, see Americanization vs. Globalization . Return to top Bookmark/Search this post with Digg Facebook Google Buzz LinkedIn StumbleUpon Twitter Keywords: popular culture , globalization , Americanization , American culture , America Add new comment Printer-friendly version Comments Wed, 07/18/2012 - 08:19 — Anonymous in HK Great Hi. I feel so 'powerful' when i read your article. Actually i am doing the similar topic assignment with you and I found your article gives me some hints on how to analysis this phenomenon with different dimensions. It really useful and enlighten me on this issue. Just keep it up ! reply Sat, 12/03/2011 - 08:54 — Anonymous in somewhere in North America This is a great article. I This is a great article. I completely agree with you there. I was hoping if you have any sources as to where this information was taken from? I would like to take a look at them. reply Mon, 12/05/2011 - 10:44 — Kyla Springer in Portland, OR Thanks Thanks so much for your interest! This is an opinion article written by a freelance writer and reprinted with permission in 2006, so we don't have further sources on this particular piece. You're welcome to try to track down the writer and ask for further information. His name and affiliation is included at the end of the article. reply Thu, 07/28/2011 - 23:01 — Anonymous in america but what about the worlds influence on Amarica This article pushes strongly that America is pushing its self on the world, but does not in turn look at how the world influences America. America is if anything a mirror of the influence of many cultures coming together. Remember when pointing a finger at America for having an influence on your country you are pointing three fingers back at yourself. Brandon Glauner reply Tue, 10/13/2009 - 11:03 — Anonymous This artile is great. the This artile is great. the research on this article is huge and its true. I strogly belive that the word Globalization should change to Americanization. reply Wed, 06/17/2009 - 01:25 — Anonymous in Australia Thank you so much for posting Thank you so much for posting this article. It was very interesting to read and I do agree with it. I am doing an essay about this in school for my exam tomorrow and it gave me some great supporting facts and idea. Thanks again :) Mel. reply Fri, 09/28/2007 - 05:44 — sara (not verified) I think that what is being told in this article is more or less right, I would like only to stod and analyze a few points. It is true that American products and the American styles are spreading around the world, but I think that this is in great part our fault because America is able to invent and produce new products and clothes in a very short time. They are always at least four steps in front of us and must of us refer to them to have somenthing new and exclusive in our nations. In conclusion, they are only continuing on their road, I think that if I was on their place, I would do the same. reply Fri, 03/18/2011 - 07:35 — Anonymous Thank you for posting this. Thank you for posting this. It was a great article with a lot of great point. I am in the process of writing an essay for a class on the exact same topic and it was funny because as I was reading it I saw that a lot of the points you made, I had also made in my essay. 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Hilda Solis HuffPost Social Reading Some error occurred Login with Facebook to see what your friends are reading Enable Social Reading i Settings Read Share Settings Share everything I read Share only things safe for work Dont share what I'm reading Read Share History Learn More Ian Reifowitz Author of 'Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity' GET UPDATES FROM Ian Reifowitz Like 20 Obama's America at the Debate: Immigrant Kids "Understand Themselves as Americans" Posted: 10/17/2012 9:44 am React Important Funny Typical Scary Outrageous Amazing Innovative Finally Follow Barack Obama , Mitt Romney , Presidential Debates , Elections 2012 , Immigration , Obama's America , Politics News share this story Submit this story digg reddit stumble At last night's debate , President Obama said the following: "For young people who come here, brought here oftentimes by their parents, have gone to school here, pledged allegiance to the flag, think of this as their country, understand themselves as Americans in every way except having papers, then we should make sure that we give them a pathway to citizenship, and that's what I've done administratively." This remark, which refers to the Americans covered by the Obama administration's actions to provide work permits for young people brought here as children but without documentation, offers real insight into the president's inclusive approach to American national identity. Where some on the right would see nothing more than an "illegal immigrant," Obama recognizes a young adult who has been in this country, for example, for twenty out of the twenty-five years of her life and who has gone through an irreversible process of Americanization. That person is nothing but an American in terms of her national identity. He understands what it would mean to that person to be expelled from the only homeland she has essentially ever known. President Obama understands how national identities are formed, both on the individual and the societal level. He understand how and why an American comes to feel an attachment to this country and to his fellow Americans. The debate tonight was about many things, mostly about policy differences between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. For me, as a scholar of national identity, that one small remark stood out as demonstrative of something far larger. Only one of these candidates has demonstrated, for years and years, a public record of understanding how national identity works, and thus how to invigorate the national identity that binds together the American people. This Blogger's Books from Obama's America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity by Ian Reifowitz Follow Ian Reifowitz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ianreifowitz FOLLOW POLITICS Like 208k Get Alerts Mitt Romney Immigration Presidential Debates Barack Obama At last night's debate, President Obama said the following: "For young people who come here, brought here oftentimes by their parents, have gone to school here, pledged allegiance to the flag, think... At last night's debate, President Obama said the following: "For young people who come here, brought here oftentimes by their parents, have gone to school here, pledged allegiance to the flag, think... More in Politics... Virginia Electoral Votes Allocation Measure Advances In... Boehner 'Annihilate' Comment Points To Top Priority:... Paul Ryan: GOP Losses In 2012 Due... Deferred Action Immigrants To Be Given Driver's... Comments 86 Pending Comments 0 View FAQ Comments are closed for this entry Community Notice: We've made some changes to our badge program, including the addition of our newest badge: Community Curator. View All Favorites Recency | Popularity Page: 1 2 Next › Last » (2 total) arizcitizen 128 Fans 06:23 PM on 10/23/2012 WILLIIE SUTTON WOULD CONSIDER HIMSELF A 'WITHDRAWAL EXPERT' IF HE USED THE SAME REDICULOUS REASONING. THESE ILLEGALS ARE NOT USA CITIZENS, THEY ARE ILLEGAL ALIENS AND NO MATTER HOW THEY TWIST THE WORDS, THEY ARE STILL ILLEGAL ALIENS. arizcitizen: WILLIIE SUTTON WOULD CONSIDER HIMSELF A 'WITHDRAWAL EXPERT' IF HE http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/arizcitizen/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_199150207.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… HUFFPOST SUPER USER BiggpussJr pissin em off one comment at a time. 557 Fans 04:44 PM on 10/18/2012 I thought that Americans consider themselves ......wait for it....AMERICANS.... he was talking about latinos who fly flags of Guatamala, Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador, and Panama. I have NEVER seen an illegal fly an American Flag. So Mr. President you are WRONG AGAIN. BiggpussJr: I thought that Americans consider themselves ......wait for it....AMERICANS.... he http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/BiggpussJr/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197577423.html History | Permalink | Share it rhycochet is an illiterate, right-wing technocrat. 24 Fans 08:18 PM on 10/18/2012 probably because you never knew how many AMERICANS flying those flags are actually illegal. the president wasn't referring to those orange-peddlers you find on street islands and standing off the freeway ramp who can barely make out a sentence in english. but apparently, all illegal immigrants and their offspring should present themselves that such obvious ways, according to you. why were the jews forced to wear stars of david again? rhycochet: probably because you never knew how many AMERICANS flying those http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/rhycochet/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197655214.html History | Permalink | Share it HUFFPOST PUNDIT spytheweb 1370 Fans 09:58 PM on 10/19/2012 "A 2009 Pew Hispanic Center report found that over half of Latinos living in the U.S., between the ages of 16 and 25 identify their nationality by their family’s country of origin. 20 percent of those surveyed identified themselves simply as Hispanic or Latino, while less than 20 percent call themselves “American.” http://www.examiner.com/article/is-this-pizza-chain-really-promoting-illegal-immigration spytheweb: "A 2009 <a href="http://www.pewhispanic.org/">Pew Hispanic Center</a> report found that over http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/spytheweb/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_198030427.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… Steven Way 1 Fans 03:48 AM on 10/19/2012 Ya I can't stand all those immigrants flying their flags. Every time I see them lining the streets promoting their home countries, I wish they would just go back. And those damn parades and all that green beer! Bunch of drinkers. Steven_Way: Ya I can't stand all those immigrants flying their flags. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Steven_Way/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197750520.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… Karissa36 Saving lost boys and fighting pirates. 384 Fans 02:38 PM on 10/18/2012 So if I rob a bank, my kids can keep the money? How about if I bring them along? (I have at least one kid that would be a decent get-away driver. No license, but that's no big deal for illegals.) Does that make it all OK? This college fund planning can be brutal... Karissa36: So if I rob a bank, my kids can keep http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Karissa36/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197523766.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… alpina 329 Fans 01:07 PM on 10/18/2012 If I "understand myself" to be a Martian, or from France, does that make it so? We have laws in this (and other) countries about who is and who ISN'T a citizen, not fairy tales and wishes. alpina: If I "understand myself" to be a Martian, or from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/alpina/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197483650.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… Texas rebel 206 Fans 10:04 AM on 10/18/2012 These kids might understand themselves to be American, but in fact they are foreign nationals illegally in this country and need to be deported. Texas_rebel: These kids might understand themselves to be American, but in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Texas_rebel/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197407109.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… This user has chosen to opt out of the Badges program jweider I know where my towel is 178 Fans 10:00 AM on 10/18/2012 "Americans in every way except having papers" And we are all millionaires in every way except having money. jweider: "Americans in every way except having papers" And we are http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/jweider/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197405560.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… Armando Cedillo 191 Fans 11:56 PM on 10/17/2012 So Ian, would you have no problem with repatriating the adults who smuggled these quasi-Americans into our nation against our will? Do you have any doubts as to the culpability of sentient adults who willingly circumvent border inspection points or stay past their visa expiration date? Armando_Cedillo: So Ian, would you have no problem with repatriating the http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Armando_Cedillo/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197324538.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… HUFFPOST SUPER USER nasknit Freedom isn't free. 802 Fans 11:34 PM on 10/17/2012 "Immigrant Kids "Understand Themselves as Americans" " REALLY? So, IF someone thinks they RULE the world, WE should "make it so"? nasknit: "Immigrant Kids "Understand Themselves as Americans" " REALLY? So, IF http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/nasknit/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197319363.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… Brobdingnag 52 Fans 09:09 PM on 10/17/2012 Offering citizenship to unlawfully present children allows them to sponsor their unlawfully present parents. This creates an incentive for future and even more illegal entry and presence. It just perpetuates the problem but ironically is sold as a "solution". Notice how the emphasis by Democrat politicians is on getting them citizenship (so they can vote Democrat). What you call an "inclusive approach to American national identity" can also be viewed as debasement of American citizenship and rule of law. Brobdingnag: Offering citizenship to unlawfully present children allows them to sponsor http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Brobdingnag/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197277772.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… iuriggs6 Sure thing. Shoot, Timmy. 238 Fans 01:11 PM on 10/17/2012 Thanks to the criminal activities of their parents these young people are receiving amnesty. iuriggs6: Thanks to the criminal activities of their parents these young http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/iuriggs6/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197109877.html History | Permalink | Share it This user has chosen to opt out of the Badges program Chief Johnson2 74 Fans 07:35 PM on 10/17/2012 In our country we don't punish people for their parents crimes. Chief_Johnson2: In our country we don't punish people for their parents http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Chief_Johnson2/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197250025.html History | Permalink | Share it iuriggs6 Sure thing. Shoot, Timmy. 238 Fans 08:05 AM on 10/18/2012 That's correct, we reward them instead. iuriggs6: That's correct, we reward them instead. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/iuriggs6/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197374888.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. There are More Comments on this Thread. Click Here To See them All Loading comments… rubbercow 188 Fans 11:08 AM on 10/18/2012 We also don't reward the parents for their crime. rubbercow: We also don't reward the parents for their crime. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/rubbercow/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197431476.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. There are More Comments on this Thread. Click Here To See them All There are More Comments on this Thread. Click Here To See them All Loading comments… There are More Comments on this Thread. Click Here To See them All Loading comments… This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… James Greybush The rules should be the same for everyone 60 Fans 12:56 PM on 10/17/2012 obama said these 30 year old 'children': "Understand Themselves as Americans". I thought they were all scientists and doctors. Why can't they understand that NO, they are NOT Americans and never will be. Americans take charge of their own lives, they don't beg for scraps at the dinner table. They dont break the law and blame someone else. These people will never know what its like to be American. James_Greybush: obama said these 30 year old 'children': "Understand Themselves as http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/James_Greybush/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197103954.html History | Permalink | Share it This user has chosen to opt out of the Badges program Chief Johnson2 74 Fans 07:34 PM on 10/17/2012 They will be Americans on papers, too, and you can't stop it. Chief_Johnson2: They will be Americans on papers, too, and you can't http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Chief_Johnson2/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197249794.html History | Permalink | Share it James Greybush The rules should be the same for everyone 60 Fans 01:36 PM on 10/18/2012 i don't have to stop it. the legislation is fatally flawed anyway, thats why dream act hasn't passed in over a decade of trying. It is too broad and covers too many people to ever get enough support. James_Greybush: i don't have to stop it. the legislation is fatally http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/James_Greybush/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197496583.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. There are More Comments on this Thread. Click Here To See them All Loading comments… This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… arizcitizen 128 Fans 06:44 PM on 10/23/2012 WELL SAID. arizcitizen: WELL SAID. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/arizcitizen/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_199153699.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… John P Miller Historian, Truthseeker 1457 Fans 12:37 PM on 10/17/2012 I agree with you that only President Obama has the real insight for these young people & their future in America. Romney appeared to share this view at one time, but now would deport them instead or in one of his classic ideas they would self deport. John_P_Miller: I agree with you that only President Obama has the http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/John_P_Miller/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197095986.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… huffposer 83 Fans 11:55 AM on 10/17/2012 We all "understand" that they are lawbreakers and deserve to get sent back to the countries from whence they came. huffposer: We all "understand" that they are lawbreakers and deserve to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/huffposer/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197078234.html History | Permalink | Share it HUFFPOST BLOGGER Ian Reifowitz Author of Obama's America 202 Fans 01:01 PM on 10/17/2012 Let's be clear: someone is twenty-five years old, was brought here illegally as a five year old by their parents, has now graduated from college, has no criminal record, and has no memory of living anywhere but America, and speaks no language other than English. You would send that person "back" somewhere else? Obama's policy affected people like the one I described. hp_blogger_Ian Reifowitz: Let's be clear: someone is twenty-five years old, was brought http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/hp_blogger_Ian Reifowitz/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197105925.html History | Permalink | Share it HUFFPOST SUPER USER lrobb Gold Standard = four paws and a tail 787 Fans 01:25 PM on 10/17/2012 Unless and until the federal laws are changed, absolutely yes. A government where laws can be ignored at will is called anarchy. lrobb: Unless and until the federal laws are changed, absolutely yes. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/lrobb/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197115802.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. There are More Comments on this Thread. Click Here To See them All Loading comments… rubbercow 188 Fans 02:37 PM on 10/17/2012 Mr. Reifowitz, Respectfully. The propositions included in the DREAM Act are so wide open to manipulation and fraud that they cannot be taken seriously. I live in a neighborhood that is 92% Latino according to the last census. The children of illegal immigrants, whether born here or not, certainly speak the language of their parents. Do you honestly believe that the moment the parents crossed the border they stopped speaking their mother tongue or that the children instantly became unable to communicate with their parents? Of course not. The claim that these "kids" don't know any other language is false. Further, the transport of cultural norms is extremely strong within this community. Without making a value judgment I can tell you that fraud, cheating, lying and deception are quite common in this group and most of the time the individual does not even realize that those behaviors are wrong. Why should they? This is SOP in many of their home countries. There is also a decided reverence of the homeland. The Mexican flag, for example, is flown in lieu of the US flag on most homes and businesses in my neighborhood. Believe it or not, I have actually had a schoolboy flip me off for hanging a US flag on Memorial Day. If all of those seeking amnesty were outstanding people who were eager to assimilate we would not be having this discussion. rubbercow: Mr. Reifowitz, Respectfully. The propositions included in the DREAM Act http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/rubbercow/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197145012.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. There are More Comments on this Thread. Click Here To See them All There are More Comments on this Thread. Click Here To See them All Loading comments… Loading comments… Loading comments… Loading comments… Loading comments… There are More Comments on this Thread. Click Here To See them All Loading comments… Loading comments… This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… voyager48 Illegitimi Non Carborundum 276 Fans 11:09 AM on 10/17/2012 Obama flat out ignores the fact that the illegal immigration door is still wide open. Until it is shut there can be no meaningful discussion about those here illegally nor can the issue be resolved. voyager48: Obama flat out ignores the fact that the illegal immigration http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/voyager48/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197059027.html History | Permalink | Share it This user has chosen to opt out of the Badges program Chief Johnson2 74 Fans 07:25 PM on 10/17/2012 False, the border is safer than ever, and net illegal immigration is close to zero. Chief_Johnson2: False, the border is safer than ever, and net illegal http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Chief_Johnson2/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197246748.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… randyjet 288 Fans 11:07 AM on 10/17/2012 Unfortunately this is simply bait and switch tactics. The DREAM act mandate does NOT only refer to those who have been here most of their lives. A person who came here at age 16 is also elegible and there is no reality that a kid that old has no memory of their native country or thinks of themselves as American. The FACT is that most of these kids are NOT American at all, either legally or culturally since most of them speak their native language at home and even speak English poorly. Thus the problem of drop outs since they have a hard time learning English. THAT is the majority of the so called Dreamers. They are NOT all the valedictorians of their class, in FACT, they can get a GED in Spanish and French, so they do not even have to be fluent in English to meet the requirements of getting defered action. randyjet: Unfortunately this is simply bait and switch tactics. The DREAM http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/randyjet/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197058409.html History | Permalink | Share it This user has chosen to opt out of the Badges program Chief Johnson2 74 Fans 07:23 PM on 10/17/2012 Care to cite where did you get your statistics regarding your statements, like "most of them speak english poorly" or "That is the majority of the so called Dreamers". Chief_Johnson2: Care to cite where did you get your statistics regarding http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Chief_Johnson2/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197246332.html History | Permalink | Share it randyjet 288 Fans 08:33 PM on 10/17/2012 I guess you have not seen stats on the drop out rates for illegals, and forget that bilingual education has NOT produced students who are fluent in English. I live on the border and most folks speak Spanish on a day to day basis. American kids do speak English well, but illegals who have come here recently do not. You also forget that the GED does NOT require fluency in English at all. So according to the provisions, a "kid" of 16 can come here illegally, take the GED test in Spanish, enroll in some course and take TEN years to get a two year degree in Mexican American studies. THAT is NOT advancing our national interest which is the SOLE reason for immigration as the late liberal Barbara Jordan pointed out. randyjet: I guess you have not seen stats on the drop http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/randyjet/obamas-america-at-debate_b_1972421_197267269.html History | Permalink | Share it This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. There are More Comments on this Thread. Click Here To See them All Loading comments… This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… This comment has been down-ranked into oblivion. View comment You have not right to carry out this operation or Error this operation. Loading comments… Page: 1 2 Next › Last » (2 total) new comment(s) on this entry — Click to refresh Loading comments… Sponsor Generated Post Obama is WHO? Secret Service Codenames Declassified (INFOGRAPHIC) Quick Read | Comments (302) | 01.21.2013 2012 Election Results Obama Romney Electoral Votes (270 to win) 332 206 Obama leading Obama won Romney leading Romney won Battleground States Obama Romney Virginia 99% Rpt. 51.2% 47.3% Florida 100% Rpt. 50.0% 49.1% N. Carolina 100% Rpt. 48.4% 50.4% Ohio 100% Rpt. 50.7% 47.7% New Hampshire 100% Rpt. 52.0% 46.4% Colorado 100% Rpt. 51.5% 46.1% Wisconsin 99% Rpt. 52.8% 45.9% Iowa 100% Rpt. 52.0% 46.2% Nevada 100% Rpt. 52.4% 45.7% Popular Vote Obama Romney Total 65,367,939 60,707,106 Percent 51.0% 47.3% Senate 33 out of 100 seats are up for election. 51 are needed for a majority. Democrat leading Democrat won Holdover Republican leading Republican won Democrats* Republicans Current Senate 53 47 Seats gained or lost +2 -2 New Total 55 45 * Includes two independent senators expected to caucus with the Democrats: Angus King (Maine) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.). House All 435 seats are up for election. 218 are needed for a majority. Democrat leading Democrat won Republican leading Republican won Democrats Republicans Seats won 201 234 Click for Full Results FOLLOW US Connect with your friends Check out stories you might like, and see what your friends are sharing! 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TED more big news pages » Advertise | Make HuffPost your Home Page | RSS | Careers | FAQ User Agreement | Privacy | Comment Policy | About Us | About Our Ads | Contact Us Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. | "The Huffington Post" is a registered trademark of TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. All rights reserved. Part of HPMG News HuffPost Lightbox Review - Book explores culture's route to 'Inventing the Christmas Tree' News Watchdog Sports Business Food and Cooking Photo/Video Subscriber Services Login Home Movies Dining Music Arts Books TV & Radio Events Comics Beer Games & Puzzles Contests Horoscopes Lottery current subscribers Register me not a subscriber? See my options No thanks Already registered for JS Everywhere? Log in. current subscribers Register me not a subscriber? See my options No thanks Already registered for JS Everywhere? Log in. Log in current subscribers Register me not a subscriber? See my options No thanks forgot username/password? Register me See my options Go to homepage Already registered for JS Everywhere? Log in. Log in current subscribers Register me not a subscriber? See my options No thanks forgot username/password? Hot Topics: Packers salary cap | John Kerry hearing | Win an iPad mini | Nyger Morgan to Japan Home » Entertainment » Arts Arts Review Book explores culture's route to 'Inventing the Christmas Tree' By Jim Higgins of the Journal Sentinel Nov. 30, 2012 Tweet Email Print (0) Comments Inventing the Christmas Tree. By Bernd Brunner, translated by Benjamin A. Smith. Yale University Press. 108 pages. $18. Recommended Reading Recommended Reading Blog: Books editor Jim Higgins highlights things worth reading, in print and online. Recommended Reading: Two Wisconsin writers included in benefit ebook for Hurricane Sandy victims Recommended Reading: Previewing new books in 2013, via The Millions (5) Recommended Reading: Moore, Flynn, Wade, Strayed top Boswell Books' 2012 bestsellers View All Blog Posts If you've just returned from a tree lot and plan to pull out boxes of decorations this afternoon, you may find it hard to imagine that Christmas trees took well into the 19th century to be widely accepted in the United States. "In a sense," writes scholar Bernd Brunner in his compact cultural history of the holiday icon, "the Americanization of the 'German' Christmas tree runs parallel to the Americanization of German immigrants." Brunner unpacks the history of the Christmas tree as calmly and carefully as someone might unwrap keepsake ornaments. While there are many conjectures about the origin of Christmas trees, the first tree Brunner can document was in the Strasbourg Cathedral in 1539. Summing up the roots of this holiday icon, he quotes German historian Alexander Demandt: "The meaning is Christian, the origins are ancient, and the form of the Christmas celebration is Germanic." The book's many period illustrations include a 19th-century engraving of Martin Luther and his family sitting by a Christmas tree, proof of the power of images to make myth. Luther died in 1546; the first confirmed Christmas tree in his hometown, Wittenberg, didn't appear until the 18th century, and family celebrations around a tree didn't become common until the end of that century. But Luther had encouraged the celebration of Christmas; for a long time, Christmas trees in Germany, sometimes called Lutherbaum , were considered a Protestant thing. "The attraction of all things green, colorful, and glittering in the cold season is elemental," Bernd writes. While some people have used deciduous trees, conifers won out because of their year-round greenery. Fir trees, Bernd notes, "have traditionally been credited with extraordinary strength and perseverance." While some church leaders initially saw the trees as hedonistic symbols, their embrace by German nobility and bourgeoisie helped transform them into Christian icons. Changes in home architecture that led to sitting rooms and parlors also provided a convenient place for Christmas trees. Tree decorations have evolved over the centuries, too. Until the 19th century, nuts, sweets, baked goods and other edibles were the chief décor. Christian symbols became increasingly common in the 19th century. Tinsel, he contends, was inspired by the silver- and gold-plated copper wire left over from metal work. Some trees sported Dresdens , three-dimensional paper ornaments named after the city. Glass ornaments grew out of the glassblowing craft of Germany's central region. The tradition of placing an angel or another fancy object on the top of the three also grew in the 19th century, when fewer trees were hung from rafters or joists. Candles were the first Christmas tree lights. They could be dangerous, and people and houses were burned. Striving for safer illumination, one inventor made a gaslit cast-iron Christmas tree in the 1870s. That didn't catch on in this universe, but electric lights did. Brunner even addresses the history of the humble but necessary Christmas tree stand, without dwelling on the fingers that get caught in them. In times of adversity, he said, people were known to cut a rutabaga in half, and drill a hole in it to hold the tree. In the United States, Bernd reports, "Christmas trees remained exotica for some time, eyed with both interest and skepticism." Despite Puritanical opposition, the Christmas tree became as important to American celebrations as it is to European ones. From his European vantage point, Brunner noted that a heavy use of lights and a preference for symmetrical trees are the clichés of an American Christmas, the latter being "a preference famously lampooned in the popular television special 'A Charlie Brown Christmas,' which encouraged affection for imperfect trees." He notes the tradition of a "meticulously chosen" Christmas tree each year in the Blue Room of the White House, singling out Jacqueline Kennedy's Nutcracker-decorated tree. But New York City, Bernd suggests, can fairly be called "the tree's world capital," with pride of place going to the tree that graces Rockefeller Center each year. Bernd spares a few words for artificial trees, both realistic and deliberately not so, and for genetic research into the genotypes of evergreens. "Mysterious and ancient though its roots may be, the Christmas tree remains one of our more visible icons, and it is always being invented anew." © 2013 , Journal Sentinel Inc. 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Critic's Notebook; Haunting Cannes: The Monster Americanization - New York Times Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular Times Topics Most Recent Help Register Now Login Search All NYTimes.com Movies COLLECTIONS > BARTON FINK Critic's Notebook; Haunting Cannes: The Monster Americanization By VINCENT CANBY Published: May 23, 1991 Sign In to E-Mail Print Tuesday morning, a newspaper headline described it as "la Moisson Americaine" ("the American harvest"). Supporters of pure French cinema called it a scandal, if not a crime. Nastassja Kinski seemed to think it was all Whoopi Goldberg's fault, while Joel and Ethan Coen, the perpetrators, were modestly ecstatic. Their satiric comedy, "Barton Fink," which the brothers jointly wrote, produced and directed, had been given the 44th Cannes International Film Festival's three top prizes at the closing ceremonies on Monday night. This is a harvest reaped by no other film in recent memory. It takes at least five or six Oscars to constitute a sweep of the Academy Awards. In Cannes, where juries tend to split their votes among as many competing films as possible, three prizes are a landslide. "Barton Fink" won not only the Palme d'Or as the festival's top film, but also the prizes for best direction (shared by the brothers) and for best actor, which went to John Turturro, who plays the film's title role. Equally astonishing and, to some, disturbing, is the fact that "Barton Fink" is the third American film in three years to win the Palme d'Or. Supplementing the three "Barton Fink" awards is the special jury prize given to Samuel L. Jackson, the American actor, in acknowledgment for his performance as the festival's best supporting actor in Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever." This was the only prize to go to Mr. Lee's film, whose partisans were many and passionate. Immediately after the ceremonies on the stage of the Palais du Festival, Miss Kinski, the actress, who was one of the night's presenters, was seen cornering Ms. Goldberg, the only black member of the jury of 10. Miss Kinski wanted to know how Ms. Goldberg could have possibly allowed any film other than "Jungle Fever" to win the Palme d'Or. She might have more profitably cornered her old friend Roman Polanski. Mr. Polanski, who directed Miss Kinski in "Tess" in 1980, was the president of the festival jury. According to reliable reports on the jury's deliberations, Mr. Polanski's tastes (called Philistine by his detractors) dominated the jury, though "Jungle Fever" was not faulted for being too high-brow. It is said further that Mr. Polanski, Ms. Goldberg and Alan Parker, the English director, formed the nucleus of a voting bloc that was far from sympathetic to the kind of cerebral, self-referential, often leisurely film that is favored by European critics, and that was much in evidence here this year. "Boring, boring, boring," is the way Mr. Polanski is said to have characterized these movies. Two other jury members, Vittorio Storaro, the cinematographer ("Apocolypse Now" and "Dick Tracy"), and Vangelis, the composer ("Chariots of Fire" and "Blade Runner"), were also said to lean toward Mr. Polanski's views. The principal opposition is assumed to have come from Jean-Paul Rappeneau, the director of last year's "Cyrano de Bergerac," and Margaret Menegoz, who has produced films by Jacques Rivette, Marguerite Duras and Eric Rohmer, among others. If this is true, the swing votes would have been cast by Natalya Negoda, the Soviet actress, Ferid Boughedir, the Tunisian director, and Hans-Dieter Seidel, the German film critic. This sort of infighting, genteel as it seems to have been, carries implications that reach far beyond Cannes. It represents what many film makers interpret as an important stand against the homogenization, or Americanization, of European cinema. The further economic integration of the European Community next year is expected to result in an increasing number of mass-market international movies and fewer films of personal, idiosyncratic character. That the Cannes jury gave its Grand Prix, which is its runner-up prize to Mr. Rivette's "Belle Noiseuse" was seen as a compromise intended to squelch charges that the Polanski jury was hopelessly oriented toward fun, games and the marketplace. The Rivette film runs four hours and contemplates a painter (Michel Piccoli) as he overcomes a 10-year painter's block. It would seem to exemplify the kind of cinema Mr. Polanski says he finds so boring. By thus acknowledging the Rivette film, the jury also appeared to be avoiding the issue of another French entry highly regarded by film aficionados. This is "Van Gogh," Maurice Pialat's dryly witty, revisionist film that liberates the artist from his ear-slashing, mad-genius image. Mr. Pialat's van Gogh is played with cool, somber humor by Jacques Dutronc. He has occasional headaches, but he's a comparatively abstemious fellow. Kirk Douglas, who played the artist in "Lust for Life," wouldn't recognize him. It now turns out Mr. Lee's "Jungle Fever" was apparently never a strong contender for the Palme d'Or, and that there were at least two jury members who worked actively against its serious consideration. "Jungle Fever" does have its problems, but the overwhelming consideration among those of us who found it to be the festival's best film is that its problems are nothing compared to the brilliantly evident, steadily growing talent of the man who made it. "Jungle Fever" takes as its starting point an interracial affair, casually embarked upon. The man is a successful Manhattan architect who is black, with roots in Harlem. She is an independent-minded young white woman, a temporary secretary, whose heritage is Brooklyn Italian-American with a vengeance. They are the center of the movie, which, like "Do the Right Thing," becomes panoramic in scope, a kind of great urban mural that is wondrously alive in its accumulated detail. Mr. Lee has a vision that may be broader than even he realizes. His white and black characters are equally vivid. Further, he demonstrates a technical control of the medium that is light years ahead of his contemporaries. Yet "Jungle Fever" has two significant problems that may have stumped the Cannes jury: the character of the architect, played by Wesley Snipes, and the buildup to the penultimate sequence, a fight between a father and a son that fails to carry the emotional punch that audiences have every right to expect. For whatever reason, the sequence never realizes its potential. Mr. Snipes's architect is, as written, the least interesting character in the film. He's a function of the plot, both too pallid and too idealized to be true or interesting. He is a small hole in the movie. It's possible to fault "Jungle Fever" on these two lapses, though they are insignificant compared to the film's manifold accomplishments. "Barton Fink" was apparently something of a life-saver to the jury members. It was a film that they all could agree upon. It is genuinely funny, written with terrific verve and directed from beginning to end with strict attention to what serves the overall work. Nothing is superfluous or fancified, as has sometimes been the case in the earlier Coen collaborations, particularly "Miller's Crossing." Further, the film is both very enjoyable in the manner favored by Mr. Polanski, and (to use a word favored here) ambiguous. Its final 15 minutes are going to cause a lot of puzzlement. "Barton Fink" could almost be called a crossover film. A word about Mr. Turturro: The Cannes best-actor award does not automatically make the recipient a star, especially in the United States. Yet Mr. Turturro's performance in "Barton Fink" is of a caliber to suggest that he may one day show himself to be the equal of Dustin Hoffman. Mr. Turturro is no Kevin Costner. There's little chance he'll be dancing with wolves or playing Robin Hood very soon. But as he demonstrates in "Jungle Fever" as well as in "Barton Fink," he is a character actor with potential to play leading roles. Possibly the most intrusive publicity maneuver at this festival was sponsored by Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the producers of one of the two movies now being planned about the life, times, epiphanies, romances and heartbreaks of Christopher Columbus. Each day during the long lunch break, the Salkinds, the producers who gave us "Santa Claus: The Movie," hired 26 very noisy airplanes to go flying over the beach, trailing 26 banners carrying information about their film. The joke on the beach was that, with a couple of more planes, the Salkinds might have spelled out the entire Mario Puzo screenplay. More Like This 'Barton Fink' Wins the Top Prize And 2 Others at Cannes... Europeans Dominate the Awards, Sometimes Unexpectedly, as... Swedish Film Is No. 1 at Cannes; Tim Robbins Wins Acting... Find More Stories Barton Fink Palme D'or Home Times topics Member Center Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Index by Keyword The Americanization of Video Europe - New York Times Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular Times Topics Most Recent Help Register Now Login Search All NYTimes.com Business Day COLLECTIONS > TELEVISION The Americanization of Video Europe Published: February 27, 1994 Sign In to E-Mail Print To the Editor: The report by Richard W. Stevenson ("Lights! Camera! Europe!," Feb. 6) tells of the rapid invasion of the European television industry by American entertainment interests as Europe moves away from "state ownership and boring programming to an age of commercial television." The early developers of radio and television saw them as a means of education that would lead to a more enlightened society. Some European nations have tried to hold to that vision, while the United States has seen these media converted almost entirely to entertainment, serving a marketing objective. But education can scarcely compete with entertainment in attracting viewers, so it is relegated to a minor role. Apparently nothing satisfies a mass audience as much as sex and violence. Since these are gradually becoming the dominant themes in European television, it may not be long before Europe catches up with the United States in its rate of violent crime. That's real progress. EDWIN W. FELLOWS Zephyrhills, Fla., Feb. 13 The writer is a retired personnel manager for the state of Ohio. More Like This Television; An Old Hand's View of TV News: Not Good Fine TV Can Educate, but Terrible TV Doesn't MEDIA; Revisiting Wasserman's Vision Find More Stories Television Entertainment Home Times topics Member Center Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Index by Keyword Americanization Of a Film Festival - New York Times Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular Times Topics Most Recent Help Register Now Login Search All NYTimes.com Movies COLLECTIONS > CHINESE FILMS Americanization Of a Film Festival By JOHN TAGLIABUE Published: September 06, 1995 Sign In to E-Mail Print Time was, Venice was the poor relation of the film world. Its Golden Lion, the top award of the annual Venice Film Festival, could never match the clout that the Oscar wielded in the bellwether American film market. Nor did this city ever claim to compete with the Cannes International Film Festival when it came to influencing the buying and selling of movies. That back-seat approach had its advantages, notably the lack of frenetic commercial activity, which meant that serious films really were the center of the showcase. The decision to open the 52d Venice Film Festival last Wednesday with Tony Scott's submarine thriller "Crimson Tide" reflects how far Venice has come. As an added touch, Denzel Washington, one of the stars of the film, dropped by for a drink with the crew aboard an Italian Navy submarine anchored in the lagoon. Another sign of change is the growing American presence here. A decade ago or so, the average festival program included one or perhaps two American movies. This year, in addition to "Crimson Tide," the American entries vying for the top prize include Spike Lee's "Clockers," a violent tale of young blacks in the urban drug world, and Sean Penn's "Crossing Guard," about the aftermath of a traffic accident, starring Jack Nicholson. Kevin Costner showed up to plug his hugely expensive "Waterworld" extravaganza, which was shown out of competition along with Woody Allen's "Mighty Aphrodite," the story of a father's hazardous search for the real mother of his son, and "Apollo 13," with Tom Hanks. The Venice festival has become a regular slot for Mr. Allen, whose "Manhattan Murder Mystery" and "Bullets Over Broadway" have also been shown here. Some critics are uncomfortable with the way the festival has changed under the hand of the Italian film director Gillo Pontecorvo, who became its director three years ago. Some wanted the opening film to be Michelangelo Antonioni's "Par Dela des Nuages" ("Beyond the Clouds"), which was directed with the German film maker Wim Wenders and marked a return to film after 14 years for Mr. Antonioni, who is 83. Other critics remarked on the heavy emphasis on American films and noted that Eastern Europe, which produced great winners by Polish, Czech and Russian film makers in the past, is woefully under-represented this year. The Russians are represented by only one film, "Cardiogram," a low-budget documentary by Darezhan Omirbayev, a director from Kazakhstan. Last year the Golden Lion was shared by "Vive l'Amour," by the Chinese director Ts'ai Ming Liang, and "Before the Rain," the Macedonian entry. This year, Chinese films are notably absent. But the festival has its defenders. "There's a school of thought that would like to transform Venice into a laboratory of the avant-garde," wrote Tullio Kezich of the newspaper Corriere Della Sera. "Let's hope it never comes to power, because the festival must remain the institutionalized ecumenical showcase of Gillo Pontecorvo, in which all the realities of film have a place." Mr. Kezich went on to heap praise on two of this year's entries for "intelligent entertainment." The first was Claude Chabrol's "Ceremonie" and the other "In the Bleak Midwinter," the latest film by Kenneth Branagh. The first tells the violent story of two young women, a governess and a prostitute, in the self-satisfied world of provincial France; the second is a black-and-white comedy that chronicles the misadventures of a theatrical troupe attempting to perform "Hamlet," with Joan Collins as a dizzy actors' agent. Mr. Branagh said he turned it out almost as a distraction from work on a serious production of "Hamlet," in which he has the title role and which he has been filming on location in Italy. Meanwhile the festival, which ends with the presentation of the Golden Lion award on Saturday, is having its fill of razzmatazz. In addition to Mr. Washington's submarine stunt, Venice's gondoliers threatened to block key canals to protest the continuing erosion of the waterways by the waves raised by motorized craft. Then a flurry of supermodels, including Naomi Campbell, arrived to plug "Unzipped," the documentary about the fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi. One critic, Mariuccia Ciotta of the leftist newspaper Il Manifesto, sniffed that it probably required greater courage to open the festival with "Crimson Tide" than to fire the nuclear torpedoes aboard the Alabama, the submarine setting of the film. Others lauded the American entries and were captivated by the wild adventures of "Waterworld." Michele Anselmi of L'Unita thought it compared favorably with the romances of Jules Verne. The arrival of American directors and actors was major news in nearly all of Italy's newspapers, and a news conference Tuesday afternoon at which Spike Lee talked about "Clockers" was standing-room-only. Most critics seemed to struggle to find negative things to say about the American movies. Lietta Tornabuoni of La Stampa spoke of Mr. Allen's "intelligent, spirited and self-ironizing magic" in "Mighty Aphrodite." In an interview, the 76-year-old Mr. Pontecorvo depicted Venice as the "world capital of cinematographic auteurs," using the French code word evoking movies as individual works of a director's art. Yet for some, American box-office winners appeared to be the bait with which Mr. Pontecorvo hopes to capture increasingly skeptical young moviegoers for the kind of intellectually complicated films represented by directors like Mr. Antonioni and Mr. Chabrol. Despite Mr. Pontecorvo's concern about youthful apathy, a hallmark of this year's festival was the particular notice drawn by Italian films. Giuseppe Tornatore's "Uomo Delle Stelle" ("Man of Stars") traced the history of a Sicilian con man who sells dreams of a future in the movies. Ettore Scola won some favorable comment for "Diario di un Giovane Povero" ("Diary of a Poor Young Man"). Italian newspapers of all stripes, which cannot resist reopening old murder cases long thought resolved, threw themselves on Marco Tullio Giordana's "Pasolini: Un Delitto Italiano" ("Pasolini: An Italian Crime"), which stirred fresh speculation about the brutal murder in 1975 of Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of Italy's most gifted modern writers and movie directors, by a male lover. With all the attention to water and the oceans drawn by "Waterworld" and "Crimson Tide," it was little wonder that political debate turned often to the French nuclear tests in the Pacific. Thus, a 1993 documentary by a French director, Michel Daeron, "Mururoa, le Grand Secret" ("Mururoa, the Big Secret"), consisting of interviews with South Pacific residents about past French nuclear testing, drew more attention than it might have otherwise. Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire, the French actresses who played the main roles in Mr. Chabrol's film, acidly criticized French Government policy. Mr. Costner added his voice to the debate. "We cannot tell other countries how to behave," he told reporters. "But my advice to a country is that they should blow up a bomb closer to their own home, in their own ocean." More Like This China Fights an Academy Award Nomination As Divided by Dialect as the Homeland Chinese Want More U.S. Films, Valenti Reports Find More Stories Chinese Films Home Times topics Member Center Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Index by Keyword The Americanization Ideal - New York Times Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular Times Topics Most Recent Help Register Now Login Search All NYTimes.com Opinion COLLECTIONS > IMMIGRATION POLICY The Americanization Ideal By Barbara Jordan Published: September 11, 1995 Sign In to E-Mail Print Congress is considering legislation to curb illegal immigration and set priorities for legal admissions. Several Presidential candidates have made immigration a keystone of their campaigns. Newspapers carry immigration-related articles almost daily, in contrast to just a few years ago when hardly any appeared. This attention is not misplaced. Reform is needed in policies that permit the continued entry of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens and blur distinctions between what is legal and beneficial and what is illegal and harmful. The Commission on Immigration Reform issued a report last year on illegal immigration and will release its second report, on legal migrants, tomorrow. These two reports outline a rational set of principles that will restore credibility to our policies while setting priorities for the future. Legitimate concern about weaknesses in our immigration policy should not, however, obfuscate what remains the essential point: the United States has been and should continue to be a nation of immigrants. A well-regulated system of legal immigration is in our national interest. There have always been those who despised the newcomers. The history of American immigration policy is full of racism and ethnic prejudice. The Know-Nothings. The Chinese Exclusion Acts. Even before the Revolution, as eminent a person as Benjamin Franklin feared that Germans coming to Pennsylvania would not become English. Of course, German immigrants to Pennsylvania did not become English, nor did they make Pennsylvanians into Germans. Instead, they became Americans. So did the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans who came, despite prejudice. So do the Mexicans, Cubans and Haitians who come today. The United States has united immigrants and their descendants around a commitment to democratic ideals and constitutional principles. People from an extraordinary range of ethnic and religious backgrounds have embraced these ideals. There is a word for this process: Americanization. That word earned a bad reputation when it was stolen by racists and xenophobes in the 1920's. But it is our word, and we are taking it back. Americanization means becoming a part of the polity -- becoming one of us. But that does not mean conformity. We are more than a melting pot; we are a kaleidoscope, where every turn of history refracts new light on the old promise. Immigration imposes mutual obligations. Those who choose to come here must embrace the common core of American civic culture. We must assist them in learning our common language: American English. We must renew civic education in the teaching of American history for all Americans. We must vigorously enforce the laws against hate crimes and discrimination. We must remind ourselves, as we illustrate for newcomers, what makes us America. Naturalization is a vital step in this process. Interest in naturalization has never been greater; applications for citizenship exceed in number and proportion any previous period in our history. But would-be citizens must wait too long to be processed, as much as two years in some cities. The Immigration and Naturalization Service must make timely naturalization a strategic goal while maintaining rigorous standards. Reforming our immigration policy is the best way to revitalize our commitment to immigration and to immigrants. It is literally a matter of who we are as a nation, and who we become as a people. Barbara Jordan is chairman of the United States Commission on Immigration Reform, a bipartisan Congressional organization. More Like This Legalized Migrants Flock Home for Holidays Immigration Reform Holds Key to Economy Law Failed to Stem Illegal Immigration, Panel Says Find More Stories Immigration Policy Immigration Reform Home Times topics Member Center Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Index by Keyword The Americanization of an Offbeat Player - New York Times Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular Times Topics Most Recent Help Register Now Login Search All NYTimes.com Sports COLLECTIONS > ZIGMUND PALFFY The Americanization of an Offbeat Player By JASON DIAMOS Published: December 10, 1996 Sign In to E-Mail Print Single-Page Four years ago, Zigmund Palffy could barely speak any English at all. Now, he adds to an ever-expanding, if not exactly erudite, vocabulary by listening to Jerky Boys recordings. Offbeat is one way to describe Palffy, the Islanders' 24-year-old right wing whose knack for scoring and setting up goals has made him one of the rising stars of the National Hockey League. Refreshing is another. But perhaps the best description is conspicuously anonymous. With his long, curly hair, sleepy brown eyes and a 5-foot-10-inch, 184-pound body that looks as if it's conditioned by the Czech dumplings he is partial to, Palffy hardly looks like a professional athlete, let alone a franchise player. But on a team with little identity or recent success -- the Islanders had the third-worst record in the N.H.L. last season, and their eight victories this season are tied for the fewest in the league -- Palffy has become the team's most promising talent. In his first full season with the Islanders last year, he had 43 goals and 44 assists. In 27 games this season he has 17 goals, tied for fourth in the league. ''You look at him off the ice, he could be just some Euro-punk walking around New York,'' said Dan Plante, Palffy's roommate on the road. ''He still has a little fat. It's amazing. The guy's got no muscle tone at all. I don't even know what he does for a training regimen in the summer. But when it comes to playing hockey, the guy's unbelievable.'' Goalies marvel at Palffy's cannon shot. As a skater, he is sneaky quick straight ahead. Laterally, with the puck, he has few peers. Mike Milbury, the Islanders' coach and general manager, quotes Mike Emrick, a television announcer for the Devils, on Palffy: ''This guy Emrick said, 'When Ziggy's got the puck, there's a little mystery to the game.' '' said Milbury. ''It's very valid.'' Despite all this, Palffy is not often recognized in public. And at his favorite hangout, the Zlata Praha, a Czech restaurant in the Astoria section of Queens, there is no picture of Palffy, who is Slovakian, on the wall along with the glossy photos of famous and not-so-famous people. Why no photo? he was asked one autumn afternoon as he escorted a visitor to lunch there, along with his teammate and best friend in the United States, 23-year-old Derek Armstrong. ''I don't know,'' Palffy said with a laugh. ''I think they like me here.'' But if he is not very visible, he is rarely forgettable. He has a quick smile, easy laugh, and a ready supply of comical references to whatever has his interest at the moment -- all in free-flowing language couched in a European accent but filled with American slang learned from bad movies and compact disks. In Manhattan, all that might suggest a tourist, or a foreign exchange student. Or, with that zany sense of humor, perhaps one of those wild and crazy guys from the old ''Saturday Night Live'' skits. But a world-class athlete? As exciting a hockey player as you can get? Never. Not with that body. Palffy's not fat. Far from it. He's just not cut. ''He's really not sculpted by any sense of the imagination,'' said Milbury, who recalled a training session two summers ago when Palffy started a two-mile drill like a road runner but finished like a tortoise. ''If you saw him on the street, the first thing that would strike you is that he would seem small, not sculpted.'' ''Look at Wayne Gretzky,'' Palffy said, a little insulted when it was suggested to him that maybe he did not look like an athlete. ''Look at other players who are small like Theo Fleury. You don't have to be strong, tall. A lot of the smaller guys are among the best players in the league.'' Sometimes, though, it seems as if even Palffy has a hard time believing it himself. 1 2 NEXT PAGE > More Like This HOCKEY; Islanders Still Struggle To Fill In the Blanks Two Goals For Palffy Yet Again HOCKEY;Jonsson's Star Power Gives Isles Hope for a Bright... Find More Stories Zigmund Palffy Mike Milbury Home Times topics Member Center Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Index by Keyword Foreign Affairs; Angry, Wired and Deadly - New York Times Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular Times Topics Most Recent Help Register Now Login Search All NYTimes.com Opinion COLLECTIONS > RAMZI YOUSEF Foreign Affairs; Angry, Wired and Deadly By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: August 22, 1998 Sign In to E-Mail Print Single-Page President Clinton called Osama bin Laden's terrorist group ''a network not sponsored by any state, but as dangerous as any we face.'' Nothing better summarizes the most immediate threat to America today. It is not from another hostile superpower. There is none -- for the moment. It is from super-empowered individuals, super-empowered angry men. The super-empowered angry men have no specific ideological program or demands. Rather, they are driven by a generalized hatred of the U.S., Israel and other supposed enemies of Islam. Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, was a super-empowered angry man. Osama bin Laden is another. Globalization gives them both the added incentive to hate America and the added power to do something about it. That is, globalization is in so many ways Americanization: globalization wears Mickey Mouse ears, it drinks Pepsi and Coke, eats Big Macs, does its computing on an I.B.M. laptop with Windows 98. Many societies around the world can't get enough of it, but others see it as a fundamental threat. As the historian Ronald Steel has pointed out, Americans think of themselves as having a conservative society. The Russians and Chinese were supposed to be the ''revolutionaries.'' But America today is actually the most revolutionary society in the world, notes Mr. Steel. For the rest of the world, we are wild, crazy revolutionaries, with rings in our noses and paint on our toes, overturning cultures and traditions wherever we go. ''We believe that our institutions must confine all others to the ash heap of history,'' says Mr. Steel. ''We lead an economic system that has effectively buried every other form of production and distribution -- leaving great wealth and sometimes great ruin in its wake. The cultural messages we transmit through Hollywood and McDonald's go out across the world to capture and also undermine other societies. We are the apostles of globalization, the enemies of tradition and hierarchy.'' The American message particularly tells young people around the world that we have a better way than their fathers. This is why the Osama bin Ladens constantly speak of ''American arrogance'' and how America is ''emasculating'' the Muslims. That's why they just want to kill America. And globalization, through its rapid spread of technologies, also super-empowers them to do just that. It makes it much easier to travel, move money or communicate by satellite phones or Internet. Ramzi Yousef kept track of all his plots on a Toshiba laptop. Osama bin Laden was running a multinational JOL, Jihad Online. So what to do? There is much debate on this question, notes the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen: ''Some argue that what we need to do is just boycott Iran, condemn Egypt for not treating its Christians right, bomb Iraq, treat Yasir Arafat as no better than Hamas, treat the Saudis the same as the Afghans. In other words, make this a war of civilization and treat the Muslims as the successors to the Communists. But that is not how you deal with this problem. It is how you make it worse.'' The key to making the problem better is by a three-pronged policy: mercilessly attacking anyone, anywhere, who attacks our citizens or diplomats, embracing those who would be friends by constantly trying to build a moderate political center, particularly in the Muslim-Arab world, and always showing a road map to a better future for those who waver in between. 1 2 NEXT PAGE > More Like This The Nation; Even for $25 Million, Still No Osama bin Laden TELEVISION REVIEW; Inside the World of Osama bin Laden BOOKS OF THE TIMES; How Osama bin Laden Became a Global... Find More Stories Ramzi Yousef Home Times topics Member Center Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Index by Keyword Thinking Ahead / Commentary - 'Americanization' Has Its Limits - NYTimes.com Log In Register Now Help Home Page Today's Paper Video Most Popular Edition: U.S. / Global Search All NYTimes.com Business Day Worldbusiness World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Autos Global DealBook Markets Economy Energy Media Personal Tech Small Business Your Money Thinking Ahead / Commentary : 'Americanization' Has Its Limits By Reginald Dale Published: January 25, 2000 WASHINGTON— One of the most frequent complaints about globalization is that it is equivalent to Americanization. There are widespread fears that in today's borderless, high-tech world, national differences will be overwhelmed by American economic and cultural domination, underpinned by the ever-extending reach of the English language. So it might seem unusual, to say the least, for a major country to choose to abandon the traditional foundations on which its society is based in order to become more American. That, however, is precisely what is being proposed in Japan by a special commission on the country's goals for the 21st century, appointed by Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi. The commission, in a report issued last week, called for what amounts to a fundamental shift away from traditional Japanese conformity and love of consensus toward American-style individualism, self-reliance and multiculturalism. It said that Japan should ultimately consider adopting English as an official second language. If Japan is to compete internationally in the coming century, the commission said, it will need a kind of "global literacy" — an understanding of English, computers and the Internet — that it currently lacks. In many ways, that conclusion is right. America's success in leading-edge information and communications technology is partly explained by the creativeness of its individualistic and innovative society. Pragmatic, flexible English is the language of business, economics, air traffic control and the Internet. The current dominant economic philosophy of free markets in a rule-based system is rooted in Anglo-Saxon thinking and British commercial traditions. All around the world, governments are moving closer to Anglo-Saxon practices and promoting the use of English to plug into the global economy. Even in France, the country that has probably taken the strongest stand against Americanization, many major multinational companies use English as a working language. At the same time, many people in France and elsewhere fear that huge American corporations such as the new giant, AOL Time Warner, will suppress their native cultures and their languages by controlling the content of the Internet. But that is by no means a foregone conclusion. The demise of other cultures and languages is far from inevitable. As more and more people in other countries join the Internet economy, the use of languages other than English, such as Chinese and Spanish, will almost certainly increase. The Internet is more likely to widen choice than to narrow it. The Web site of CNN, a major purveyor of the new global culture, offers several languages, including Japanese, Portuguese and Danish. Half of the "hits" on the Internet site of the French newspaper Liberation, which has no foreign circulation, come from outside France, suggesting that the Internet is enabling large numbers of people who could not do so before to keep in touch with French news and cultural developments. Breakthroughs in computerized translation will soon allow Internet users to send messages in, say, Spanish, and have them received in Chinese, or practically any other language. Such technologies will also make it far more easy, for example, for an enlarged European Union to preserve all the native tongues of its members as official languages. People will demand choice. When large, dominant breweries tried to force a tasteless, uniform kind of beer on the English market some years ago, consumers rebelled and precipitated a renaissance of traditional "real ale." One of the prime symbols of Americanization, Coca-Cola Co., according to reports last week, is planning to decentralize its international marketing to give local tastes and local brands a larger role. A French entrepreneur who used to complain of the Americanization of France now gleefully cites evidence of the "Latinization" of the United States. In all the talk of the spread of American culture, it is often forgotten that America itself is changing, too. Because of the increasing diversity of American society, Americanization today does not mean the same as it would have, say, just after World War II. Immigration into the United States is helping to make globalization a two-way street. As one of the members of the Japanese commission suggested, if Japan plays its cards right, it can absorb many of the advantages of the American way of doing things and remain distinctly Japanese as well. E-mail address: thinkahead@iht.com House hunting in ... 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By Hanna Raskin Features Kau Kau Founder Wai Chow Eng, R.I.P. By Hanna Raskin Features Joule Pulls Up Steaks By Hanna Raskin Features Greenwood's Beaver Is Angry at the NHL By Sara Billups Slideshows A Survey of Soups in Seattle By Naomi Bishop Features Seattle Juicers Press Forward By Hanna Raskin   Pin It TASTE Shows Visitors the Way to a Man's Heart Hint: It has to do with food. Comments ( 0 ) By Hanna Raskin Wednesday, Nov 7 2012 Click|keyword[Seattle+Art+Museum]" >Seattle Art Museum 's current exhibit—Elles: Women Artists From the Click|keyword[Pompidou+Centre]" >Centre Pompidou —is a boisterous celebration of female painters, photographers, sculptors, and installation artists. But downstairs at TASTE, the museum's restaurant, a woman representing a folksier strain of female creativity is getting disappointingly short shrift. Location Info Map TASTE Restaurant 1300 First Ave. Seattle , WA 98101 Category: Restaurant > American Region: Downtown Photos 1 user reviews Write A Review Save to foursquare Related Content The Woman Whom TASTE Restaurant Forgot October 31, 2012 Fall Arts: Our Calendar of Events September 19, 2012 Field Report's Chris Porterfield Talks About The Passing Of His Friend On "Chico The American" October 4, 2012 Tater Tots: the John Oates of Sides or Just Gross? August 8, 2012 SAM's Elles Overload October 24, 2012 More About Simon Kander Craig Hetherington Milwaukee Food and Cooking Cookbooks Check for tables tonight at this restaurant In conjunction with the show, executive chef Click|keyword[Craig+Hetherington]" >Craig Hetherington has created a menu based on Lizzie Black Kander's 1903 The Way to a Man's Heart , a cookbook first issued for immigrant clients of the Click|keyword[Milwaukee]" >Milwaukee Settlement House (SAM press materials identify the author only by her byline of Click|keyword[Simon+Kander]" >Mrs. Simon Kander ). "I knew using some of these 'man-serving' recipes would be a cool contrast to the strong women artists featured in the show," Hetherington is quoted as saying in a release, which claims his versions of braised short ribs and grilled lamb "subvert the cookbook's subservient ethos from a more repressed time." The Way to a Man's Heart , renamed The Settlement Cook Book in later printings, wasn't a radical feminist document. An early edition included ads for corsets and high-heeled shoes, neither of which were likely compatible with the fire-building, dusting, and dishwashing outlined in the book's first chapter. But to offer Kander as the antithesis of "strong women" is unfair. In 1878, 42 years before women won the right to vote, Kander's valedictory address at Milwaukee's Click|keyword[East+Side+High+School]" >East Side High School graduation was entitled "When I Become President." The daughter of a dry-goods shopkeeper and a talented home cook, Kander joined an immigrant-aid society soon after graduation. Her position took her into the city's meanest slums, where she urged newly arrived Russian Jews to "Americanize" and keep their small homes clean. Her commitment to cleanliness—a preoccupation of the Progressive movement, forged alongside a growing acceptance of germ theory—led her to establish a bathhouse attached to the Schlitz Brewery, with water piped in from the bottle-sanitizing room. In 1900, Kander helped establish the Settlement House, where she taught cooking classes. The cookbook was conceived as a way to underwrite the House's operation costs—and sales kept it afloat for nine years. "Although considered one of the most successful fundraising cookbooks in American history, The Settlement Cook Book emanated from Kander's efforts to Americanize Russian immigrant women through cooking classes," Click|keyword[Angela+Fritz]" >Angela Fritz wrote in a 2004 article for Wisconsin Magazine of History . To Kander, Americanization meant eating more red meat than fish, using brand-name processed foods, giving up Jewish dietary laws, garnishing plates with lettuce leaves and carved tomatoes, measuring ingredients in a scientific manner, and keeping an orderly kitchen. It also called for cocktails and truffles. " The Settlement Cook Book tried to bring elegance and decorum to the Jewish home through haute cuisine," Fritz writes. "[It] served as a manual for the dramatization of middle-class values at the Jewish table with the inclusion of cocktails such as Manhattans, Mint Juleps, and Champagne Punch. Kander had been greatly influenced by French cuisine, including recipes for Delmonico Salad Dressing with chopped truffles, Water Lily Salad, and pate de foie gras." Although many of the dishes Kander promoted may have seemed frivolous in a tenement context, she firmly believed the kitchen was the entryway to successful society. And her recipes were good: "If I consult a cookbook at all, it is likely to be by one of these sensible, flat-heeled authors like the famous Mrs. Kander," Click|keyword[James+Beard]" >James Beard told The New Yorker when asked to name his favorite cookbook (which later became the first inductee into the Click|keyword[Beard+Foundation]" >Beard Foundation 's Cookbook Hall of Fame). Despite The Settlement Cook Book 's original title, pleasing men was never chief among Kander's aims: The word "husband" doesn't appear once in her text. Kander's full-throated defense of assimilation seems less heroic today, when diversity and individualism are conventionally prized. Her transformation of her pupils' beloved gefilte fish into an elegant "herring salad" would likely strike many contemporary cooks as disrespectful and misguided. But a philosophical shift doesn't retroactively weaken Kander's leadership or culinary sense. Like many of the women showcased in SAM's galleries, she was subservient only to her values and vision. hraskin@seattleweekly.com Related Content Email to Friend Write to Editor Print Article 0 comments   Get Livefyre FAQ Sign in + Follow Post comment Link Sort: Newest | Oldest Powered by Livefyre Now Trending Chickens and Judges Get Fried at Tom's House Is the ReviewerCard the Scourge of Restaurants? 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Businesses Home News Sports Business Entertainment Food Living Travel Columns Shopping Index ▼ Cars Jobs Real Estate Close [X] Quick links to other pages on this site | Still can't find it? see Site Index Don't Miss: 'Charlie Brown' stalker Poggio chef leaving Subway footlong suit Bay Area rain Therapist as matchmaker Super Bowl tickets Bay Area & State Nation World Politics Crime Tech Obituaries Opinion Green Science Health Education Weird 49ers Raiders Giants A's Warriors Sharks Quakes NFL MLB NBA NHL College Preps Golf Outdoors Other On TV Tickets Shop Technology Markets Real Estate Mortgage Rates Home Guides Public Notices Press Releases Sponsored Content Movies Music & Nightlife Performance Art Events Books TV & Radio Horoscope Comics Games Things To Do Restaurants Recipes Wine Top 100 Restaurants Top 100 Wines Bargain Bites Reservations Inside Scoop SF Healthy Eating Home & Garden Style Outdoors Ski & Snow Health Green LGBT Houzz Dating Magazine Moms Pets Sponsored Content Weekend Getaways SF Guide Neighborhoods Wine Country Monterey-Carmel Reno-Tahoe Hawaii Mexico Travel Features Dealers Click and Clack Car Blog My Ride Car Galleries Sell Your Car Career Advice Be Your Own Boss Job Events Monster Match Advertise Salary Wizard New Homes Open Homes Luxury Rentals Mortgage Rates Commercial Land Place an ad Home Guides Homesales Foreclosures « Back to Article AOC Solutions, Inc. Shows Community Support with Donation to Scott’s Run Settlement House Program Published 8:01 am, Friday, November 9, 2012 Photo: PRWeb Tweet Comments ( 0 ) Larger | Smaller Printable Version Email This Georgia (default) Verdana Times New Roman Arial Font Page 1 of 1 Allen and Aaron Cage presented a check for $8,000 for Scott’s Run Settlement House ’s Backpack Snack Program Chantilly, Virginia (PRWEB) November 09, 2012 As part of their ongoing commitment to the community, AOC Solutions , Inc. presented a check in the amount of $8,000 to the Scott’s Run Settlement House for their newest initiative, the Backpack Snack program. Allen O. Cage, Jr. founder and CEO of AOC Solutions, Inc. has supported the community through his military service and various charitable endeavors and encourages the AOC family to volunteer in their communities. “Our Call Center is located in Morgantown, West Virginia, which is the area that the Settlement House serves. When my brother, Aaron, and I heard about the Backpack Snack program, we wanted help, “said Allen. “Children are our most important resource, and I believe we should do everything that we can to give them a good start in life.” The Backpack Snack program provides school age children in Monongalia County, West Virginia, who qualify for free or reduced lunches, with food packages to take home for the weekend. “The need is great in this area,” said Julie A. Harris , Executive Director, “Of the 11 schools in the county; seven have between 40 and 55 percent of their students who qualify for Federal Free Meal Programs, which puts them at risk for going hungry in the evenings and over the weekend.” Through volunteer efforts, donations and partial United Way funding, Scott’s Run Settlement House is currently providing 517 packages each weekend to qualifying students. They partner with three elementary schools; Mylan Park, Mason-Dixon and Brookhaven, and plan to add another school in January. Unfortunately the program doesn’t have the means at this time to help all of the children in their county who need it. If you would like to volunteer your time or make a donation, please visit the Scott’s Run Settlement House website or contact Julie A. Harris by email or phone at (304) 599-5020. About AOC Solutions, Inc. AOC Solutions, Inc., established in 1996, offers best-in-class financial management products, program management, data management, e-commerce, and call center operations services that help financial institutions and public and private organizations become more successful by creating and implementing solutions that significantly reduce costs while increasing revenues. AOC headquarters is located in Chantilly, Virginia with offices in Georgia, West Virginia, Florida, and satellite offices throughout the United States. About Scott’s Run Settlement House Founded in 1923 by the Women’s Home Missionary Society of the Wesley Methodist Church in Morgantown, began by helping with the “Americanization" of newly arrived immigrants by promoting English literacy, citizenship, hygiene and other basic life skills. Services have evolved over the past 90 years and now include senior programs, a food pantry, a baby pantry and backpack feeding program. Many volunteer programs are available to high school and West Virginia University students as well as members of the community at large. Scott’s Run Settlement House strives to meet the needs of those most in need in Monongalia County through collaboration and partnership with other agencies and by working closely with those they serve. For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/11/prweb10112517.htm Printable Version Email This Tweet Subscribe to the San Francisco Chronicle and receive access to the Chronicle for iPad App and a gift: Sunday + a $15 gift card Fri-Sun + a $15 gift card Mon-Sun + a $25 gift card AOC Solutions, Inc. Shows Community Support with Donation to Scott’s Run Settlement House Program Cage, Jr. founder and CEO of AOC Solutions, Inc. has supported the community through his military service and various charitable endeavors and encourages the AOC family to volunteer in their communities. The Backpack Snack program provides school age children in Monongalia County, West Virginia,... Inside SFGate Van Patten's soaring S.F. Ballet career Highly touted 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' show arrives Gianni's Italian Bistro in San Ramon Defiant Clinton takes on lawmakers over Libya Crabtree rape allegation not holding up Bay Area films get shot at Sundance Asian Americans struggle with suicide Hollywood hideaways on the Central Coast Morford: Four more years, oh thank God Uproar as grandma sentenced to death J.R. missed already on 'Dallas' Lance Armstrong, twisting on a rope Ads by Yahoo! Photo Galleries Gavin Newsom in 1992 Berkeley opens new animal shelter Warriors 104, Thunder 99 Nation in Focus World in Focus 2013 Oscar nominees: Where they started Assault weapons Top states for green buildings NFC Championship Day in Pictures, Jan. 23, 2013 It's super cold from the Midwest to New York 'Dazed and Confused' stars: 20 years later The Forge State Department travel warnings: See where the risks lie Secretary Clinton testifies on Benghazi attack Flashback! 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International Expeditions Offers $500 Air Credit on All 2013 Panama Tours - SFGate ( skip this header ) Thursday Jan 24, 2013 8:01 AM PT ° ( change ) Today / / Traffic (change your city) San Francisco Santa Rosa Napa Concord Oakland Livermore Hayward San Carlos Palo Alto San Jose Fairfield Mountain View Monterey sfgate.com Web Search by YAHOO! Businesses Home News Sports Business Entertainment Food Living Travel Columns Shopping Index ▼ Cars Jobs Real Estate Close [X] Quick links to other pages on this site | Still can't find it? see Site Index Don't Miss: 'Charlie Brown' stalker Poggio chef leaving Subway footlong suit Bay Area rain Therapist as matchmaker Super Bowl tickets Bay Area & State Nation World Politics Crime Tech Obituaries Opinion Green Science Health Education Weird 49ers Raiders Giants A's Warriors Sharks Quakes NFL MLB NBA NHL College Preps Golf Outdoors Other On TV Tickets Shop Technology Markets Real Estate Mortgage Rates Home Guides Public Notices Press Releases Sponsored Content Movies Music & Nightlife Performance Art Events Books TV & Radio Horoscope Comics Games Things To Do Restaurants Recipes Wine Top 100 Restaurants Top 100 Wines Bargain Bites Reservations Inside Scoop SF Healthy Eating Home & Garden Style Outdoors Ski & Snow Health Green LGBT Houzz Dating Magazine Moms Pets Sponsored Content Weekend Getaways SF Guide Neighborhoods Wine Country Monterey-Carmel Reno-Tahoe Hawaii Mexico Travel Features Dealers Click and Clack Car Blog My Ride Car Galleries Sell Your Car Career Advice Be Your Own Boss Job Events Monster Match Advertise Salary Wizard New Homes Open Homes Luxury Rentals Mortgage Rates Commercial Land Place an ad Home Guides Homesales Foreclosures « Back to Article International Expeditions Offers $500 Air Credit on All 2013 Panama Tours Published 2:00 pm, Tuesday, November 20, 2012 Photo: PRWeb Tweet Comments ( 0 ) Larger | Smaller Printable Version Email This Georgia (default) Verdana Times New Roman Arial Font Page 1 of 1 Modern explorers can take advantage of a $500 per couple air credit on all 2013 Panama tour departures offered by nature travel expert International Expeditions, a pioneer of authentic and engaging ecotourism. HELENA, Ala. (PRWEB) November 20, 2012 Modern explorers can walk stone paths once used by infamous pirates and hike through jungles populated by a wealth of birdlife all while taking advantage of a $500 per couple air credit on 2013 Panama tour departures offered by International Expeditions, a pioneer of authentic and engaging ecotourism. Panama offers travelers a distinct blend of wildlife, indigenous culture, colonial occupation and pirate history with a dash of “Americanization” which makes the country extremely traveler-friendly. International Expeditions’ new nine-day Panama adventure combines wildlife, local culture and cuisine during hikes and water excursions through this country’s verdant jungles. Under the guidance of accomplished local guides, IE guests enjoy an immersive look not only at the abundant wildlife but also at the inner-workings of the famed Panama Canal . Highlighting IE’s journey is a partial passage through the Panama Canal’s “Culebra” Cut, an eight-mile channel through solid rock, along with a behind-the-scenes look at the Canal’s operation. With a privileged location between two vast continents and oceans, Panama funnels millions of birds along their migratory path each year and plays host to jewel-like frogs and primates. Nature enthusiasts can search the rainforests of Soberanía National Park, the Chagres River and the Smithsonian’s Barro Colorado Island and Galeta Laboratory for such species as the endemic red-naped or Geoffrey’s tamarins, howler monkeys, tanagers and more. Other Panama tour highlights include traveling on the Panama Railroad, which dates back to 1850, visiting an Embera village and a walking tour of Casco Viejo, the first European settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas. Plus, traveling “foodies” will savor an exclusive sunset meal at the International Miraflores Restaurant overlooking the Miraflores Locks — a Fodor’s Top 5 Panama dining experience. Guests may use their $500 per couple air credit on small-group Panama tours departing January 12, February 9, March 9 and December 21, 2013. Prices start at $3,998, and include accommodations, excursions, most meals, naturalist guides, all transfers, and tips to drivers, porters and waiters for included meals. For more information or a brochure on 2013 journeys, call International Expeditions at 1-800-234-9620 or visit http://www.IEtravel.com . Celebrating 33 years of nature travel, International Expeditions specializes in small-group journeys to Earth’s most exhilarating destinations. A pioneer of environmentally responsible travel, IE is committed to preserving natural habitats and improving the welfare of the people and communities it visits. International Expeditions has been named to Travel + Leisure’s list of “World’s Best” tour operators & safari outfitters for seven years and to National Geographic ADVENTURE magazine ’s list of “ Best Adventure Travel Companies on Earth.” For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/11/prweb10152577.htm Printable Version Email This Tweet Subscribe to the San Francisco Chronicle and receive access to the Chronicle for iPad App and a gift: Sunday + a $15 gift card Fri-Sun + a $15 gift card Mon-Sun + a $25 gift card International Expeditions Offers $500 Air Credit on All 2013 Panama Tours Modern explorers can take advantage of a $500 per couple air credit on all 2013 Panama tour departures offered by nature travel expert International Expeditions, a pioneer of authentic and engaging ecotourism. Modern explorers can walk stone paths once used by infamous pirates and hike through... Inside SFGate Van Patten's soaring S.F. Ballet career Highly touted 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' show arrives Gianni's Italian Bistro in San Ramon Defiant Clinton takes on lawmakers over Libya Crabtree rape allegation not holding up Bay Area films get shot at Sundance Asian Americans struggle with suicide Hollywood hideaways on the Central Coast Morford: Four more years, oh thank God Uproar as grandma sentenced to death J.R. missed already on 'Dallas' Lance Armstrong, twisting on a rope Ads by Yahoo! Photo Galleries Gavin Newsom in 1992 Berkeley opens new animal shelter Warriors 104, Thunder 99 Nation in Focus World in Focus 2013 Oscar nominees: Where they started Assault weapons Top states for green buildings NFC Championship Day in Pictures, Jan. 23, 2013 It's super cold from the Midwest to New York 'Dazed and Confused' stars: 20 years later The Forge State Department travel warnings: See where the risks lie Secretary Clinton testifies on Benghazi attack Flashback! Last Week’s Concert Photos 01/22/13 Nation in Focus SFJazz Center opens with a joyful noise World in Focus Sundance 2013: Portraits Scenes from the 2013 Fancy Food Show Prince Harry at war in Afghanistan Day in Pictures, Jan. 22, 2013 National Prayer Service Toymakers show off at the London Toy Fair Baltimore vs. San Francisco Hip in the Mission Hip in Willow Glen Hip in Livermore Warriors beat Clippers for 3rd time Obama's second inauguration World in Focus Nation in Focus Inaugural Ball Edwardian Ball Star-studded line-up at the 2013 Presidential Inauguration President Barack Obama's inaugural parade 33rd London Critics Circle Film Awards The Sea by Alexander's Steakhouse Day in Pictures, Jan. 21, 2013 Most Read | Most Commented | Most Emailed LA teacher suspected of sex abuse of 20 kids Paved-over S.F. yards raise concerns 49ers' Smith is a Kaepernick booster Hidden Camera Found in Papa Murphy’s Restroom – Store Manager Arrested Oscar nominees: Where they started Harbaugh road-tested Kaepernick in 2011 John Mackey book tour something to chew on Clinton: Nobody more committed to security Oakland council ponders police contract Four more years, oh thank God %u2018Princess Bride%u2019 shirt frightens passengers on flight AP sources: Panetta opens combat roles to women Crabtree rape allegation not holding up Jerry Brown reigns in political arena Paved-over S.F. yards raise concerns John Mackey book tour something to chew on Harbaugh road-tested Kaepernick in 2011 49ers' Smith is a Kaepernick booster Plan to raze Concourse Exhibition Center HSAs force health providers to compete Trader Joe's raises price of 'Two-Buck Chuck' loading... 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" /> SoMdNews.com: How new eyes see it 19667,19702,19724,19796,19815,19866, | Weather | Traffic | Subscribe to the newspapers | Get free email updates | Mobile | Follow us: Independent The Enterprise The Recorder Sports Independent The Enterprise The Recorder Business Weekend Opinions JOBS CARS REAL ESTATE Obituaries Independent The Enterprise The Recorder Community Independent The Enterprise The Recorder Classifieds Directories Merchandise Legal Apartments Announcements All Categories Advertising Special Publications Contact Us ADVANCED SEARCH>> ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT TOP JOBS See all> Family Day Care Association elects officers, holds training 1. Hallmark store has been ‘a good adventure’ for owner 2. Juvenile jail will not be in Waldorf 3. County selected as partner in cancer society study 4. outsourceIT appoints new chief operating officer 5. Sheriff’s office investigating single-vehicle accident 6. Dameron man awaits sentence for raping girl 7. Man killed in single-vehicle crash 8. Man breaks into home, eats cake 9. CSM honors graduates, passes 20,000 milestone 10. MOST READ Family Day Care Association elects officers, holds training 1. Hallmark store has been ‘a good adventure’ for owner 2. Juvenile jail will not be in Waldorf 3. County selected as partner in cancer society study 4. outsourceIT appoints new chief operating officer 5. Sheriff’s office investigating single-vehicle accident 6. Dameron man awaits sentence for raping girl 7. Man killed in single-vehicle crash 8. Man breaks into home, eats cake 9. CSM honors graduates, passes 20,000 milestone 10. Friday, Nov. 23, 2012 Share E-mail Print How new eyes see it Recent immigrants share first impressions 417904 China_e112312 Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN Annie Chen stands with her father, Ke Qi Chen, a recent immigrant from China, at the family’s restaurant, the Hot Pot in Mechanicsville. More News Legislators want region’s voice among utility regulators MTA updates So. Md. delegation on commuter bus plans CSM honors graduates, passes 20,000 milestone Nursing center highlights ‘bright future’ Dameron man awaits sentence for raping girl advertisement By SUSAN CRATON Staff writer Other residents may still be in recovery from the election — the incessant, nasty ads; the debates; the constant publicity about everything that is wrong. Some may be feeling that the United States has lost its footing, that the country is in decline and that it needs to keep its eye on the growing economic power of other countries, like China. But the Chens of Mechanicsville see it differently. To them, the United States is still a destination full of promise. Over the last dozen years, one by one, members of the Chen family have pulled up their roots in Southern China and have moved to the United States. Jackie Chen moved first in 2000. His sister, Annie, followed him in 2001. The two worked in the restaurant business in New York City, raising funds to start their own business and in the hopes of bringing their parents over also. “Some people say the American dream. Some people say America is like heaven,” Annie said, explaining why they left their homeland. Annie told the family’s story as she sat in the family’s restaurant, the Hot Pot in Mechanicsville, last Friday afternoon. On Sept. 19, much of the family was finally reunited when Jackie’s and Annie’s parents moved to Mechanicsville. Ke Qi Chen, the father, will work in the restaurant and the plan is for Jin Hua Wu, their mother, to help with grandchildren. Annie and Jackie are now U.S. citizens and they are sponsoring their parents, who have green cards. The couple knows no English at this point, and Annie translates for them, though even she sometimes struggles to find just the right words to express herself in English still. “People in America, they are very patient and give us a chance to learn more English,” Annie said. She said they were exposed to English in school while growing up in China, but British English was taught rather than American English. Annie worked on the new language by taking ESL classes in Manhattan. Ke Qi Chen, 57, stepped out of the kitchen and shared his first impressions of his new country. While his daughter translated, he talked with a smile about the fresh air here. There is a lot of pollution in China, Annie explained. He said that people here are very nice and very helpful. “Here, there are a lot of trees,” she said for her father. Both her father and mother have noted that technology is more apparent here than in China. The family had lived in a town in China. The new arrivals have already identified some aspects of their new home that will be a challenge. “Here, you have to know how to drive,” Annie said her mother noted. “You need a car to go anywhere ... in China, they could just walk.” The couple is also somewhat isolated in their new home. Not only do the Chens work long hours — the restaurant is open seven days a week. “We open at 11 a.m. and go to 10 p.m.,” Annie said. But there is a language barrier to overcome for the new arrivals, as well as the spread-out nature of development in Southern Maryland. It makes it harder to make friends. “In China, everything is very close,” Annie said. “They can play together and talk, just sitting in front of the house. They play cards. Here, they are so far apart.” Annie said her mother tells her, “See the house. You don’t see people in front of the house to talk to her.” Annie said she was confident her parents would adjust to these challenges. “My parents are hard working. My father, he was a farmer before. “I wanted the whole family to stay together. That’s what I wanted.” But the Chens are not all together yet. Annie married while in New York and they had two children. Now, 7 and 5, her two children are being cared for by her in-laws while the family works to get the Hot Pot thriving. “We are working hard to let the business get successful,” Annie said, saying that the goal is to reunite the entire family in St. Mary’s County. And her grandmother, her father’s mother who is 87, is still back in China and is not expected to come over. In addition, there is a younger sister whom Annie and Jackie hardly know still back in Asia. The government forced the family to give her up when she was very young. “We have one sister still in China,” Annie said. “You are not allowed to have too many kids. We have to send my sister to another place ... That’s like a nightmare.” So their younger sister grew up with a different family in a different town and Annie and Jackie didn’t know her as they grew up. About 10 years ago, the adopted father sent the family a letter letting them know that the sister is OK. “We still talk to her on the phone,” Annie said. “We are missing her. “The Chinese government wants to control the population. America ... They treat the people like human beings. In China, the government controls everything,” she said. The Chens see that they can also contribute to their new country. They learned the ropes of the restaurant business in New York City and now they hope to introduce more true Chinese cooking to visitors to the Hot Pot. They understand the Americanization of much of the Chinese restaurant food in the United States, but they hope to serve more real Chinese cuisine to local diners. “We want to focus on clean, fresh and tasty and healthy,” Annie said. Much of the Chinese food served in America is doused with premade sauces,” she explained. “It’s fast.” But in real Chinese cooking, “the cook has to create the sauce. But it is more tasty,” she said. scraton@somdnews.com Copyright © Southern Maryland Newspapers - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Privacy Statement Maryland Independent | 7 Industrial Park Drive, Waldorf, MD 20602 | 301-764-2800 - The Enterprise | P.O. Box 700, Lexington Park, MD 20653 | 301-862-2111 The Calvert Recorder | P.O. Box 485, Prince Frederick, MD 20678 | 301-855-1029/410-535-1214 - The Enquirer Gazette | 7 Industrial Park Drive, Waldorf, MD 20602 | 301-764-2800 Editorial: Thanksgiving a good time to examine immigration policies : Stltoday FEAST LADUE NEWS ST. LOUIS' BEST BRIDAL SUBURBAN JOURNALS Not logged in Log In Register Subscribe My Account Edit Profile Logout stltoday.com ST. LOUIS' #1 SOURCE FOR NEWS PRINT EDITION E EDITION APPS St. Louis Post-Dispatch Home News Topics OBITS OPINION ILLINOIS ST. 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Who and what is coming into this great nation with impunity? Legal entrance, yes! Il… Read more If there’s a Butterball or some other mass-market turkey on your groaning board today, take a moment to think about Encarnación Bail Romero. The Guatemalan immigrant, who lives in southwest Missouri, until a few weeks ago worked at one of the turkey plants that helped this nation’s poultry industry produce about 248 million turkeys in 2011. Of those, 17.5 million came from plants in Missouri, making it the fourth-biggest turkey-producing state in the nation. Some of those turkeys made it to the market because Ms. Bail, and other workers like her, put in long hours of grim, stomach-churning work for little pay, all the while facing the threat of deportation. Ms. Bail is an undocumented immigrant. Her American-born son, Carlos, is a 6-year-old U.S. citizen. She hasn’t seen Carlos since the day in May 2007 when the Barry County chicken plant that employed Ms. Bail was raided by agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Mother and son have never spent a Thanksgiving together. These days , Ms. Bail is allowed legally to stay in the U.S. as her appeal to regain custody of her son continues winding through the Missouri courts. It’s been a long battle with little hope. Carlos lives with another southwest Missouri family that adopted him while Ms. Bail was awaiting deportation to her home country. The Missouri Supreme Court was faced with the ultimate in judicial challenges when the case came before the court in 2010. There is no doubt Ms. Bail’s rights were denied when she was stuck in jail and a perhaps well-meaning conspiracy sought to provide Carlos a family by ending his mother’s parental rights. She didn’t speak English. She didn’t know what was happening to her. But by the time justice was sought, the judges were faced with taking the boy away from the family that had raised him for most of his life or returning him to a mother who spoke a different language and would take her son home to Guatemala. The court kicked the case back to the trial court, which this summer kept Carlos with his adoptive parents. Last week, lawyers for Ms. Bail asked the Missouri Supreme Court to take the case again. Today, all over this country, we offer thanks for the food on our tables and the families around us. We should pause, too, to consider the anguish wrought on other families by a broken immigration system. Ms. Bail is hardly alone. Thanksgiving is the ultimate immigration story. Most of what we know — or at least what we think we know — of the so-called first Thanksgiving we learned from a letter Edward Winslow wrote in December 1621 about a gathering between Pilgrims and about 90 members of the Wampanoag native tribe. The Pilgrims had endured some tough times, and the fall harvest that year was plentiful, so they celebrated. The Pilgrims, of course, were immigrants to a land where they were vastly outnumbered by people who had been here for centuries. In the mythological version of Thanksgiving we’ve devised today, built around turkey and pumpkin pie, those details get glossed over. “The Wampanoag, we sometimes forget, were the majority population,” Nancy Brennan, former director of the Plimoth Plantation museum, told The Christian Science Monitor in 2002. “In the 19th and 20th centuries, Thanksgiving was really a tool for Americanization amid the great influx of immigration. It was supposed to bind this diverse population into one union.” The nation’s most recent presidential election, which was quite divided along racial lines, suggests our union could use some more binding. Whether or notEncarnación Bail Romero ever sees her son again, she and Carlos are an example of everything that has gone wrong with U.S. immigration policy. The poultry industry is a more than $16 billion a year business, so when the huge corporations that dominate the field need workers, the government usually is willing to look the other way while those companies ignore the law to keep wages low. The 2007 raid on the Barry County plant took place in the walk-up to the 2008 presidential election. Then members of both parties were busy trying to demonstrate their tough anti-immigrant bona fides by screaming “build the border fence.” Raids like the one that ensnared Ms. Bail were common. Families were torn apart as parents were deported and their American-born children stayed behind. Companies, for the most part, got a pass. This Thanksgiving, the trend is the opposite direction. On June 15, in one of the most important acts in his first term, President Barack Obama signed an executive order allowing children of undocumented workers, who were brought to the country through no fault of their own, to delay their deportation. It mirrored the DREAM Act, which Congress refused to pass. It allowed those young people, most of whom have been educated in American schools, to continue to contribute to the only country they’ve ever called home. Since the president signed that order, more than 53,000 young immigrants have been able to put off deportation. Hundreds of thousands of others are in the pipeline, beginning the process to eventual citizenship. Republicans, reeling from Mr. Obama’s re-election, and his overwhelming popularity with Hispanic voters, are questioning their previous, harsh stances on issues of immigration. Their conversion should be a quick one. Which policy is more likely to rekindle thoughts of that first Thanksgiving: The one that divides families, and the nation, or the one that keeps parents and children at the same dinner table? America needs a bigger table. It needs to rekindle that simple spirit expressed in the Latin phrase that appears on the official Seal of the United States: E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. Tags Thanksgiving , Encarnacion Bail Romero , Pilgrim , Missouri , Wampanoag People , Illegal Immigration , Plymouth Colony , Missouri Supreme Court , Immigration And Naturalization Service , Dream Act , Guatemala , Barack Obama , Edward Winslow View Comments More The Platform stories George Will: Sign code as a weapon Make it in the USA, especially Missouri Refer: Abortion-rights advocates ignore reality E.J. Dionne: Reagan is Obama's touchstone Recommendations Sponsored Links Copyright 2013 stltoday.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. 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Email: Password: Remember me on this computer Forgot Password Please Wait… Login The Atlantic | June 1958 | Is France Being Americanized? | Emmanuel More on politics and society from The Atlantic Monthly. The Atlantic Monthly | June 1958 Is France Being Americanized? by Pierre Emmanuel ..... VERYONE remembers the Great Anti-Coke War, desperately fought in French cafés a few years ago. Like most crusades, its purest motive—the defense of French wine, apéritifs, and Eau de Vichy—was mixed with more dubious interests, and was used as a trump card by unscrupulous neutralists. Thus a most noble fight ended in confusion. Without becoming a national drink, Coca-Cola was tolerated as a so-called beverage, especially on hot days. The great cause of the French way of life suffered a blow whose results, according to the pessimists—the core of the nation—ought to prove far-reaching. Yet the future did not turn to the worst. Chewing gum and bubble gum, introduced by the American Army, were doubtless a social nuisance for a couple of years: they stuck to armchairs, shoes, professors' pants, and conversations. Children, and half-baked adults, were in danger of becoming ruminants. Their rhythm of thought had slowed down, and to keep up with the pace of time, they attended in increasing numbers American motion pictures, preferably those full of blood, car races, and revolver shots. "What will happen?" moaned the pessimists. Nothing; juvenile delinquency did not climb the statistical scale, though blue jeans, at first sold in stores dealing in American surplus and later manufactured in France, are now on sale in every open-air market. We were entering the second part of the century: high time to become philosophical, as centuries in their fifties start to be. Vastly prejudiced essayists—they are the best in any case—began to analyze the concept of "Americanization." It turned out to be a very unpleasant monster, hardly recognizable for anyone who had lived a normal and decent life in the U.S.A. Americanization, like a creeping disease, would endanger the deepest roots of the Western soul; within a couple of decades, without noticing the imperceptible process, the French would become neo-Americans. For the sake of our national pride, we accepted a minor reservation: Americanization, though inescapable, would proceed more slowly in France than in Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, England, and generally all Western European countries. Yet the prospect was ghastly enough, for what is an American? A human robot; a worshiper of machines, brainwashed by the movies, advertising, and television, devoid of tradition, of family life, of self-intimacy; a money-maker for whom the dollar is the only universal value; a super-hygienic food washer who cleans vegetables with chlorine, totally depersonalized, conditioned to live in a spiritual vacuum: in short, a science fiction nightmare and a bore. Where did that mythical caricature come from, and why did we call it American? France has not yet fully recovered from the aftermath of war; we in France have not yet consented to re-evaluate our position in the world today, and we suffer both from a wounded pride and a lack of confidence in ourselves. We had been " la grande nation ," and we used to think of France as the universal teacher of spiritual values. Our defeat tore us apart in a world of conflicting ideologies, none of which was a product of our national spirit. Besides, the world was changing too fast for us; we felt that we had been left behind, twenty years behind the times, and did not want to admit it. We looked for a scapegoat on which to vent our anxiety and our resentment. We resented America as the real victor in the war, in our part of the world at least; as the land of technical success whose example was contagious for our neighbors in Europe, big and small. America was loudly advertising its way of life; at the same time, it was critically sensitive to its spiritual lacks; thus it gave us the scapegoat we needed, and material for prosecuting that scapegoat. We had but to emphasize, by isolating them from their natural environment, the very defects which the Americans themselves were more and more aware of, and were openly discussing. HE French are the most conservative people on earth. The last war relatively spared their land and did not force them to start from nothing, as it did Germany. Our national economy a few years after the war was pretty much the same as it was in 1939. The more we delayed its adaptation to the times, the more upsetting for our fixed habits such a change was bound to be. Those habits are deeply grounded, and some of them correspond to much-treasured values. The French believe, rightly enough, that they have reached a level of civilization, an intellectual refinement, whose influence has pervaded even their daily lives; to lose it would be like losing one's identity. They feel also—though refusing to confess it—that they must change or perish. The survival of France is conditioned by external forces, especially in the economic field, but pride and prejudice make it hard for us to adopt a way of life foreign to our traditional tempo. We are, if I may say so, the Southerners of the West. For complex reasons, some good, some bad, we have tried until recently to resist the full process of mechanization. It does not mean that we do not change: our achievements in many fields deserve attention, but we are the last to value them seriously, and we do not derive from them the self-confidence we should. We lack unity of purpose, for we hesitate to sacrifice anything of the past; we have not yet decided what is essential in it and therefore must be preserved. Nonetheless, we are driven away from it, and pushed forward in spite of ourselves without enjoying our motion as we would if it came from our own free will. Yet we cannot resist the forces at work in the world and in ourselves. Our virtue—and our vice—is to speculate about the state of the universe. We try to understand the way it is going, but in order to understand it better, we would like to stop its process. We find it extremely difficult to think and move at the same time, which explains our present historical neurosis: we are not able to control our own change, and we suffer intensely from it. In recent years we have been entering a new phase, without being aware of it. Details in our daily lives have been modified, and new habits are imperceptibly shaping themselves in the man in the street. Our mental resistance to a world whose idea we cannot grasp beforehand may yield by degrees to practical modifications in our familiar gestures and our close environment. We have adopted some of the American ways of life, without saying too loudly that we are imitating the Americans. Partly for that reason, the resentment against America has diminished and expresses itself, for the time being, through more or less stale jokes rather than in bitterness. We have thus opened the first breach in our standoffishness. And what a breach! We have desecrated food. Returning travelers used to say ironically, five or six years ago: "Zurich is quite Americanized" or "Essen is a Middle-Western city." But, thank God, there were no snack bars in France, for "snacks would be the beginning of the end." Now there are snacks everywhere, and self-service too. In Lyon, the capital of French gastronomy, the famous Buffet de la Gare has been turned into a self-service establishment; it looks exactly like any Horn and Hardart branch (unpaid advertisement). The sacred French two-hour break for lunch will soon be but a nostalgic memory; for where in France if not in Lyon was the respect for food more of a religious and family cult? Foreigners complain that one does not eat so well in France as one used to. True: but the cooking and enjoyment of good food takes time, which very few people can still afford; it also takes fresh vegetables, herbs, and meats, which deep freezes superbly ignore. Ten years from now, we shall eat sandwiches at twelve, leave our offices at five, rush for a train or to a parking lot, and travel forty miles to return home to a cold supper and television. The paradox in France is that we are both slow to move and rapidly moving. We have the fastest trains in the world, the best international railway and plane connections, one of the highest percentages of cars, a remarkable birth rate, a surprisingly promising economy; but these new energies have come after half a century of relative standstill, if we compare our own development with England's or Germany's. We are now compelled to adjust ourselves, as quickly as possible, to new forces and an expanding nation. The same paradox is illustrated demographically: France is a very old and very young nation. Most of our political leaders have been reared in a nineteenth-century tradition, and the gap between them and our industrial leaders—between politics and economy—is becoming a deep chasm. A young generation is ready to take over everywhere, and the young bosses have their counterparts on the intermediary rungs of our civil service. But though they are most competent and full of initiative in their field, they do not control the whole; they have not succeeded in changing the obsolete part of the existing French structures. The word "technocrats" has been applied to them in a disparaging way. The mistrust of technicians and specialists is part of our national prejudice; whenever political matters are involved, technicians have to take a back seat. They resent it more and more, for they feel that they are, at least for the time being, the true makers of the nation. But they tend to value their action in economic terms only, so that French life goes on along two separate lines, in spite of the efforts of men like Mendès-France who are trying to make the economy the axis of politics. For such people, to whom American methods are well known and who admire the way American specialists are integrated into political life, Americanization means first of all simplification. Young technicians—future engineers or civil servants—travel a good deal nowadays. For the last ten years, a number of them have stayed in the United States long enough to study the techniques of modern efficiency, which they want to bring back home. I personally know a few of them who were given scholarships or went to the United States without definite purpose, through organizations like the Harvard International Seminar. They left France with the customary false notions about America, and after a few weeks in the United States they made some discoveries: first, naïve as it may seem, they found that life was quite human in the U.S.A. and far more diversified than a stereotyped image had led them to expect. Second, American life had a charm for enterprising young people whose initiative had been stymied at home and who wanted to escape sterile discussions and to get a broader view of real problems. That they should be impressed on the scientific and technical level was natural, but they were struck also with the quality of thought among the American intellectuals and scholars. They realized that America had become a field of universal culture. A thirty-five-year-old philosopher told me, after a three-month stay in the United States: "To make life simpler in an increasingly complicated world is an American art, from which we may start to make life deeper and more significant." HE battlefield of modernization is found primarily in French education, the structure of which is obsolete. The American system has influenced our reformers, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Without saying it openly, we are trying to reorganize French universities upon the American pattern. More and more, on the graduate or specialized levels, they will become groups of institutes. Teamwork in research is also steadily growing. The National Center of Scientific Research is the promoter of that reform, which breaks with our individualistic approach to learning. Our competitive system that has built up a society of mandarins (a caste whose privileges are traditional in the nation) resists a change which would endanger its taboos of selection. On the other hand, the reformers are inclined to go too fast, especially in the changes they want to introduce into secondary education. While the best minds in the United States are underlining the defects of the American secondary schools, there is a tendency in France to adopt the equalitarian ideas which have weakened American high school education. The whole question turns on the necessity to build up, as quickly as possible, an intermediate class of technicians with practical qualifications; classical studies tend to be overlooked for the sake of basic scientific requirements. Genuine admiration for American achievements on a higher level led the French to accept uncritically a deterioration of culture during the formative years—a contradiction which we would have escaped if we had paid more attention to the educational systems in countries other than America. Yet there is a logic in American influence: whether we like it or not, we are part of an Atlantic world where the American economy is predominant. America's help is not accepted without protest and more or less boastful attempts are made to reject it, but United States economic supremacy is a fact that we may have to live with for a long time. Western Europe does not yet exist as a world force. Until its time comes—if it ever does—to play an influential part in international affairs, France's fate and America's are linked together, as long as we resist Communism. During the dark days of Budapest, the bulk of French public opinion woke up to that unity of purpose. Since then, anti-Americanism has quieted down, though it still exists potentially—as a symbol of ultranationalism. Whether the last American loan had political implications, we cannot say, but most people cannot dismiss the feeling that it comes with strings attached, and they resent what they consider a sort of control, though it may be unavoidable. Another example of French ambiguous reaction toward America can be found in our attitude toward Robert Murphy's "good offices" mission and toward his very person, symbolic as they are of certain methods which in the past were considered intrusive. In spite of Mr. Murphy's diplomatic discretion, the French remain vigilant. Thus American influence, though increasing in our daily life and helping us to modify many of our ways of thought and techniques, is counteracted by a feeling of dependence which rankles in most Western European countries but nowhere more virulently than here. Is such a feeling totally unhealthy? I think not. Were it limited to narrow resentment and a blind refusal to partake of common responsibilities and interests, it would lead to a major crisis in France and perhaps to a disruption of the whole Western world. But if it represents a state of transition, expressing the need for a new balance of power between free nations cherishing the same values, it may bring about a greater sense of autonomy within a wider system of interdependence. We do not mind motels springing up along the French highways; we are not averse to French hot dogs, though they taste better in the United States. But we would mind American supremacy. America is the first to know it, and its policy takes our reactions into account—at least we hope so. In spite of temporary drawbacks, a common psychology is progressively shaping the Western mind: Europe has imported American pragmatism, while America, especially for the last ten years, has undergone a spiritual change which makes it sensitive to patterns of thought and philosophies foreign to its pre-war traditions. During my last visits in the United States, I was struck by the growing number of inexpensive paperback collections that bring to the public the last two centuries of European culture from Hegel and Kierkegaard to Existentialist philosophy. Thus the process of identification works both ways. The typical French reaction against the dangers of a mechanical age would easily find an echo even in the minds of American scientists. But it would be futile simply to go on denouncing a world whose motion we cannot stop. We have to work out together a practical and spiritual problem: How can our age of machines become truly human? From what I know of the United States today, it is no great prophecy to expect that American experience will be essential to our modern re-evaluation of man. We may regret that French papers have been invaded by Opera Mundi comics—which lose most of their flavor, by the way, when dubbed in French; yet such facts are but symptoms of American prestige, and they are absorbed without being adapted; they remain exotic and are liked as such. The James Dean craze that swept so many European countries did not make French youth hysterical. Young people were interested because it made them think: they found in Dean's pictures a spirit of rebellion which they do not ignore but which they are stable enough to keep in check. Excessive romanticism does not appeal to them. By contrast, it is significant that for the Polish or Hungarian youth James Dean has become a mythical figure of the times. (A Yugoslav writer told me that Russian film critics had made the trip to Belgrade especially to see one of Dean's pictures.) In France, at least for the time being, no such big emotional wave is to be feared. The French owe their stability to various factors: first, to a long tradition of cosmopolitan culture; second, to the capricious tyranny of fashion, which though it seems to take no interest in fundamental values, does in fact preserve them. A third reason is French provincialism: Paris and Mantes (thirty miles away) are farther apart than New York and San Francisco. These three reasons are not contradictory; they are deeply interwoven. Their common result is the power of slow but serious assimilation which adds to our cultural treasure without upsetting it. Even the pains of assimilation—those we suffer now, for instance—increase our spiritual activity. The French may not be the present makers of the world, but we are among those who will give it a human shape, for no matter how uncertain and foolish we may sometimes seem to other nations, we will not take that world for granted until it fulfills some universal and basic human demands. We still live by a great attribute of man, which has become one of our sacred words: la raison . It may prevent us from falling into the various heresies of progress, and make progress itself a firm ground for further human achievements of a more spiritual nature. What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte . Author of numerous volumes of prose and verse, Pierre Emmanuel is in charge of the English language broadcasts of the French government radio station, Radio-Diffusion Française. Before the war he taught at a French lycée and in 1948 he lectured in universities and colleges in the United States. For several years he has taught at Harvard University's Summer School. Copyright © 1958 by Pierre Emmanuel. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly ; June 1958; Is France Being Americanized?; Volume 201, No. 6; page 35. We Need a Path to Citizenship for All Americans, Not Just Immigrants - Eric Liu - The Atlantic Skip Navigation The New Ways People Sicken and Die Do Not Strap a Jet Pack to Your Cat A Father Caring for His Offspring? Give the Man a Medal! 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Conor Friedersdorf Eric Liu - Eric Liu is co-author of The Gardens of Democracy and creator of the Citizen University , a conference on creative citizenship. He was a speechwriter and deputy domestic policy adviser for President Bill Clinton. All Posts Share « Previous Politics | Next Politics » Email Print Close We Need a Path to Citizenship for All Americans, Not Just Immigrants By Eric Liu Tweet Dec 14 2012, 7:45 AM ET Comment Comprehensive immigration reform is on the agenda for 2013, but it should be coupled with revamped civics education, national service, and more. New U.S. citizens take the Oath of Allegiance. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters) "A path to citizenship." Get used to that phrase: We're going to be hearing it a lot in 2013. Since the Republican Party got hard electoral evidence of its problem with Latino voters (and Asian voters , and basically voters of color and immigrants in general), some GOP leaders have become highly motivated to negotiate a deal for comprehensive immigration reform. A key part of any such deal will be whether and how undocumented immigrants can step out of the shadows and onto a much-discussed but ill-defined path to citizenship . The DREAMers -- young undocumented immigrants who, under the long-stalled DREAM Act would've been able to earn citizenship by going to the military or to college -- are the hopeful face and voice of reform advocacy. And because they embody an appealing case for reform, they may be able to lead a push that normalizes life for millions of other immigrants, documented or not. That would be great, for them and ultimately for the entire country. But for all the attention being paid to the creation of a path, we're neglecting the destination: citizenship itself. What is this thing that needs to be earned? What, besides a bundle of rights, does the status entail and require? What do longstanding citizens take for granted and what is asked of brand-new Americans? These kinds of questions aren't just for immigrants. Which is why we need to couple immigration reform with a citizenship agenda -- one that revitalizes the content and meaning of citizenship for everyone, and that connects the process of becoming American with the work of being American. A robust citizenship agenda should have several core components. First, fixing the franchise. Inconsistent registration standards, unclear processes for voting, epically long lines at the ballot -- the stories are still fresh, and with the election behind us there's a narrow window for a national push to reform registration and voting procedures and to rationalize the rules of democratic participation. Second, redoubled support for civic education. The rationale for having compulsory public schooling at all, as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor often points out, is to make citizens. But today, in an age of reading and math testing, civics courses have atrophied or disappeared altogether in many of our schools. Civic education needs more funding, more teachers, more creativity in the curriculum, and more champions in national politics. Third, a redoubled emphasis on the importance of Americanization. Yes, that word conjures up images of 19th-century busybodies trying to Anglicize Italians, Jews, and other non-WASPs. But properly understood, Americanization  -- ensuring that a diverse new generation buys into the content of our national creed  -- remains a vital, necessary endeavor. We need to recommit to it in an inclusive 21st-century way -- in classrooms and communities, and through new civic rituals that make something from our diversity. Fourth, a revitalized national-service movement that amplifies existing programs for young people like AmeriCorps but also does much more to activate Americans of every age to serve. The Aspen Institute has launched the Franklin Project to push national service onto the elite political and cultural agenda. What's needed is a deeply local counterpart. Returning veterans can be a particular focus: Plugging them into the civic life of their hometowns is a win-win. And fifth, using government in savvy and catalytic ways to foster orders of magnitude more citizen-driven social innovation. The Obama Administration has already started doing this, as have some congressional Republicans . One approach could be to seed a public-private "C Prize" in the spirit of the X Prize: a set of sizable challenge awards that stimulate creative forms of citizen problem-solving at the local level. Meanwhile, there is now a generation of social entrepreneurs whose nonprofit ventures like City Year or the Harlem Children's Zone have made positive civic impact. Let's disseminate that know-how to more people by creating a network of civic "extension agents" akin to those in agricultural states who spread effective methods of planting and farming. A great citizenship agenda, like an optimal immigration-reform deal, should appeal to both right and left. Because such an agenda will encourage people to govern themselves more actively rather than relying on the state as the solution of first resort, conservatives will appreciate it. Because it connects the challenges and experiences of immigrant communities to the core of national life, progressives will value it. Moreover, when the so-called fiscal cliff and debt-ceiling fights have finally ended, either we will need a period of serious reconciliation or we will be on a collective high about a new politics of compromise. Either way, the time will be right to promote a common citizenship agenda. The time is right in a bigger sense too. The face and voice of America are changing more rapidly than our national self-story and institutions. Globalization, migration, technology, and the speed of media -- these forces are centrifugal. We need a new American centripetal force, a movement of politics and culture and civic religion. Citizenship in a democracy can't be just a matter of law; it has to be way of life. So yes, let's get more immigrants on the path to citizenship -- then let's make sure the destination is more than an afterthought. 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As Asian Economies Grow, American Influence Shrinks The Fiscal Times Columns As Asian Economies Grow, American Influence Shrinks Photo: www.eastasiaforum.org/ Type Size: By PATRICK SMITH , The Fiscal Times November 5, 2012 INCHEON, South Korea—Whoever wins the presidential election this week will have to acknowledge that the Asia we forgot about when we started our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq a decade ago is no longer there. The Asia we now purport to lead in our new “Pacific century” is far, far along in a process of regional integration that leaves a much-reduced place for America. It would be hard to exaggerate this historic shift—or its likely impact on trade, investment, security, defense strategies, and so on. Back in the day, Asia was overwhelmingly dependent on U.S. markets and U.S. investment to fuel its export-led growth. When America sneezes, Asia catches cold—you heard this all the time at the far end of the Pacific. By way of sheer size, the U.S. economy overshadowed every nation in the region, including China.  Now, some 53 percent of Asia’s trade is currently within the region, according to an analysis just published in Foreign Policy, and this proportion is set to grow every year as Asia becomes self-propelling consumer economy -- one that is currently worth $19 trillion a year. Nations that so recently fed off of others have made themselves a global growth engine. “Our trade and investment in Asia continues to grow in absolute terms. That’s not the problem,” says Robert A. Manning, co-author with Evan A. Feigenbaum of the Foreign Policy analysis. “But it’s getting smaller as a proportion of Asia’s total trade—including intra-Asian trade. And that’s not a problem so much as an inevitability.” More than all the numbers, what is striking when one travels in the region is how consciously Asians are building their own institutions to reflect an Asian identity. A conference here this week, the Asia Economic Community Forum, is considered the “Asian Davos.” There are few Americans present—and no U.S. officials. (Full disclosure: I am one of two American speakers.) The theme of the gathering is exactly what you would expect: forming a single economic unit to draw together dozens of disparate nations to speak as one. The Fiscal Times FREE Newsletter Here is a curious sign of the times. On November 18–20 the annual East Asia Summit will convene in Cambodia. U.S. presidents routinely attend this event, but this year there is a twist. The summit is expected to launch a Regional  Comprehensive Economic Partnership,  the U.S. and other  developed countries are not invited . As the RCEP holds its inaugural meeting, the next American president, whoever it may be, will be asked to wait in the corridor along with Russian President Vladimir Putin.  That tells you what you need to know about America’s place in 21st century Asia. Are we going to get squeezed out of the region’s economic dynamism? No, but the rules governing trade will no longer be exclusively ours. Are we going to forfeit our role as keeper of the peace in the Pacific? Probably, and this we should welcome. The only reason Asians would need American force in the western Pacific is to counter an aggressive China, and no one wants an aggressive China. (We are, in addition, unlikely to see one.) It is now exactly a year since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in another Foreign Policy essay, declared “America’s Pacific Century.” Shortly thereafter came the now-familiar notion of Washington’s “pivot” from the Middle East to Asia—Asia from India to Japan. A LAST CENTURY MODEL On the security side, Washington is hopelessly lost in the past—fighting the last war, the Cold one. As it not so subtly seeks to surround the mainland, its security policy implicitly assumes a dangerous China. In time Washington’s antagonism will produce the very China the U.S. and the rest of Asia want to avoid. When Mrs. Clinton traveled to Beijing in September, she stressed that “after all, the Pacific is big enough for all of us.” What did the Chinese do? They extended a cordial official welcome and then let Xinhua, the state news agency, scold Washington to “stop its role as a sneaky troublemaker” between China and its neighbors. It is true that Asia is currently beset with territorial disputes that have a nasty edge: China and Japan are arguing the Senkaku Islands (the Diaoyus in Chinese); Japan and South Korea both claim the Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo in Korean, Takeshima in Japanese). Further south lie the disputed Paracels and Spratleys. All of these are worthless bits of stone but for the resources that may lie under them and the national pride that attaches to them. When the tries to referee these wrangles, our pronouncements always sound lame and beside-the-point—underscoring nothing so much as the limits of our influence in the emerging Asia. These disputes are reenactments of centuries of history , occupation, war, and cruelty. In a word they are Asian, and Washington cannot hope to play a significant role in finding resolutions. This is one reason Asians attach some urgency to the establishment of new Asian institutions—supra-national in scope, like the European Union. Washington is falling down on trade, too. Its principal policy instrument is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TTP, and it is intended to function as a basic building block in the making of a regional economic and trade architecture. It is not unlike a NAFTA on steroids, though it reflects all the complexities of any pact including so many signatories. The problem is that it is hard to find any friends of the TTP on this end of the Pacific. The Chinese, of course, are certain that Washington is trying to encircle them economically—a trade and investment echo of U.S. security policy. The Japanese see it as leading to “the Americanization of their economy,” as a commentator recently put it. Most other Asians think similarly: The TTP, they argue, is intended to impose American-style neoliberalism on a region that does not necessarily buy into it. There are any number of conventions, forums, summits, and conferences concerned with Asian unity these days. It is probably how it was in Europe during the late–1940s and 1950s, when what is now the EU was taking shape. It is unclear which will prove important in advancing the pan–Asian cause. What we can count on is the eclipse of the old Asia, wherein the U.S. enjoyed unchallenged primacy. “The fundamental reality is that we’re a Pacific power, not an Asian power,” says Manning, who is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington. “People here tend to confuse these two. And we can’t afford this mistake any longer.” INCHEON, South Korea—Whoever wins the presidential election this week will have to acknowledge that the Asia we forgot about when we started our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq a decade ago is no longer there. The Asia we now purport to lead in our new “Pacific century” is far, far along in a process of regional integration that leaves a much-reduced place for America. It would be hard to exaggerate this historic shift—or its likely impact on trade, investment, security, defense strategies, and so on. Back in the day, Asia was overwhelmingly dependent on U.S. markets and U.S. investment to fuel its export-led growth. When America sneezes, Asia catches cold—you heard this all the time at the far end of the Pacific. By way of sheer size, the U.S. economy overshadowed every nation in the region, including China.  Now, some 53 percent of Asia’s trade is currently within the region, according to an analysis just published in Foreign Policy, and this proportion is set to grow every year as Asia becomes self-propelling consumer economy -- one that is currently worth $19 trillion a year. Nations that so recently fed off of others have made themselves a global growth engine. “Our trade and investment in Asia continues to grow in absolute terms. That’s not the problem,” says Robert A. Manning, co-author with Evan A. Feigenbaum of the Foreign Policy analysis. “But it’s getting smaller as a proportion of Asia’s total trade—including intra-Asian trade. And that’s not a problem so much as an inevitability.” More than all the numbers, what is striking when one travels in the region is how consciously Asians are building their own institutions to reflect an Asian identity. A conference here this week, the Asia Economic Community Forum, is considered the “Asian Davos.” There are few Americans present—and no U.S. officials. (Full disclosure: I am one of two American speakers.) The theme of the gathering is exactly what you would expect: forming a single economic unit to draw together dozens of disparate nations to speak as one. The Fiscal Times FREE Newsletter Here is a curious sign of the times. On November 18–20 the annual East Asia Summit will convene in Cambodia. U.S. presidents routinely attend this event, but this year there is a twist. The summit is expected to launch a Regional  Comprehensive Economic Partnership,  the U.S. and other  developed countries are not invited . As the RCEP holds its inaugural meeting, the next American president, whoever it may be, will be asked to wait in the corridor along with Russian President Vladimir Putin.  That tells you what you need to know about America’s place in 21st century Asia. Are we going to get squeezed out of the region’s economic dynamism? No, but the rules governing trade will no longer be exclusively ours. Are we going to forfeit our role as keeper of the peace in the Pacific? Probably, and this we should welcome. The only reason Asians would need American force in the western Pacific is to counter an aggressive China, and no one wants an aggressive China. (We are, in addition, unlikely to see one.) It is now exactly a year since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in another Foreign Policy essay, declared “America’s Pacific Century.” Shortly thereafter came the now-familiar notion of Washington’s “pivot” from the Middle East to Asia—Asia from India to Japan. A LAST CENTURY MODEL On the security side, Washington is hopelessly lost in the past—fighting the last war, the Cold one. As it not so subtly seeks to surround the mainland, its security policy implicitly assumes a dangerous China. In time Washington’s antagonism will produce the very China the U.S. and the rest of Asia want to avoid. When Mrs. Clinton traveled to Beijing in September, she stressed that “after all, the Pacific is big enough for all of us.” What did the Chinese do? They extended a cordial official welcome and then let Xinhua, the state news agency, scold Washington to “stop its role as a sneaky troublemaker” between China and its neighbors. It is true that Asia is currently beset with territorial disputes that have a nasty edge: China and Japan are arguing the Senkaku Islands (the Diaoyus in Chinese); Japan and South Korea both claim the Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo in Korean, Takeshima in Japanese). Further south lie the disputed Paracels and Spratleys. All of these are worthless bits of stone but for the resources that may lie under them and the national pride that attaches to them. When the tries to referee these wrangles, our pronouncements always sound lame and beside-the-point—underscoring nothing so much as the limits of our influence in the emerging Asia. These disputes are reenactments of centuries of history , occupation, war, and cruelty. In a word they are Asian, and Washington cannot hope to play a significant role in finding resolutions. This is one reason Asians attach some urgency to the establishment of new Asian institutions—supra-national in scope, like the European Union. Washington is falling down on trade, too. Its principal policy instrument is called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TTP, and it is intended to function as a basic building block in the making of a regional economic and trade architecture. It is not unlike a NAFTA on steroids, though it reflects all the complexities of any pact including so many signatories. The problem is that it is hard to find any friends of the TTP on this end of the Pacific. The Chinese, of course, are certain that Washington is trying to encircle them economically—a trade and investment echo of U.S. security policy. The Japanese see it as leading to “the Americanization of their economy,” as a commentator recently put it. Most other Asians think similarly: The TTP, they argue, is intended to impose American-style neoliberalism on a region that does not necessarily buy into it. There are any number of conventions, forums, summits, and conferences concerned with Asian unity these days. It is probably how it was in Europe during the late–1940s and 1950s, when what is now the EU was taking shape. It is unclear which will prove important in advancing the pan–Asian cause. What we can count on is the eclipse of the old Asia, wherein the U.S. enjoyed unchallenged primacy. “The fundamental reality is that we’re a Pacific power, not an Asian power,” says Manning, who is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington. “People here tend to confuse these two. And we can’t afford this mistake any longer.” Previous Next Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. blog comments powered by Disqus The Fiscal Times FREE Newsletter More The 10 Best Cities to Lose Weight Click to View Slideshow Powered by Disqus More Presidential Pets Click to View Connect with The Fiscal Times On Our Radar Obama’s To-Do List Only a Magician Could Master Read More Why Wall Street’s Bonus Babies Will be Crying Read More The Powerful Women Who Wear Bangs Read More Why Americans Still Don’t Drive Electric Cars Read More Sign up to get our Free Newsletters! Sign Up to Get the Fiscal Times & Our News Alerts. 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Guy Fawkes | UVU Review Stay Connected Socialize Home News Sports Life Opinions Hex Aqui y Ahora Media Podcast Special Issues Graduation 2012 Spring Fashion 2012 Wedding Issue Great West Tournament Elections Valentines Issue Holiday Issue Halloween Issue Fashion Issue Calendar Classifieds Jobs /Help Wanted Misc Advertising Staff Application Letter to the Editor Contact Us Dean’s List Fall 2011 Print Version Guy Fawkes G uy Fawkes’ has claimed international fame as a symbol of anarchy. The renowned “Anony- mous,” a powerful group of internet hackers, post their videos wearing the famous Guy Fawkes’ mask, popularized by the dystopian film, “V for Vendetta.” Most recently and disturbingly, a series of attacks throughout the Middle East, spe- cifically anti-American in nature, were perpetrat- ed by groups of people wearing the same mask. Traditionally, Americans tend to see rejection of authority and anti-establishment in a positive light; ideas like “rebel without a cause” are romanticized and youth are drawn to anarchy’s promise of no rules, no restrictions. As the dystopian film brought the mask into popular- ity, it raised some questions for Americans. We began to associate Guy Fawkes’ once again with this heroic sense of rebellion, perhaps forgetting that the act that made him famous was an attempt to blow up the whole of parliament, inspired by Catholic pride. The time period was wrought with religious turmoil, as Protestants and Catholics struggled to establish power. As an act of murder and an act of symbolic destruction of the British political system, no self-respecting Brit, Catholic or otherwise, would admire that. That is the common refrain one might receive if they spoke to someone over the age of say, 50. Speak to any young adult, however, and the responses are far more varied. Quite a few were even unsure of who Guy Fawkes’ was until prompted by the infamous words, ‘Remember, re- member, the fifth of November.’ Familiarity with the holiday, more often referred to as ‘Bonfire Night,’ is common, but the historical and political significance of it is sometimes lost. And it is hard to blame them for that; the event occurred over 400 years ago, in 1605. Commemoration has evolved throughout the decades as well. Origi- nally, an effigy of the pope was the fodder for the massive bonfire stoked, but the clear religious offense of that eventually stopped the practice, replacing it with an effigy of Guy Fawkes’ him- self. Even now, Catholics spokespersons tend to blanch at the holiday, claiming its roots are based on religious intolerance. The holiday lost its significance entirely for some time, overwhelmed by Americanization. As Halloween took off and became a more wide- spread practice throughout the U.K., it is now far easier to find costumes and garish makeup than it was to find fireworks. The Fifth of November is not the same holiday it once was, similar to public perception of Guy Fawkes. Once vilified as a violent madman, the popular view tends to be leaning towards a sense of admiration at his bold scramble to dethrone a theocracy that oppressed him and his people. Ignoring his own religious motivation and his desire to return the British throne to Catholic royalty, he has been praised by some as a promoter of democracy and the people’s rights. Jack Saynor, 20-year-old from West Sussex, said, “You get told about him when’re ten, about treason.” Harry Mitchell, 19, also from West Sussex, chipped in, “But he’s made out like a hero… it’s really just novelty and an excuse to celebrate.” A local man from Surrey laments the loss of the holiday, as it is overrun by what he terms the “rubbish American holiday” of Halloween, con- firming that Americanization is still occurring. The trend seems to be that the tradition is fading in favor of Halloween, making a lot of tradi- tionalists feel regret for the loss of their beloved holiday. Written by Sharece Willcoxon | Posted: November 5, 2012 [Translate] Share This Post Tweet Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. 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Local Newsmakers Inside the Beltway Inside the Ring Pruden on Politics Embassy Row Weather BLOGS: Inside Politics Technology Opinion Editorials Commentary Letters Water Cooler Books Kuhner Nugent Cartoons BLOGS: Guns Water Cooler Video Staff Exclusives Politics Newsmaker Interviews Water Cooler Entertainment Strange and Weird National News Sports Football Baseball Basketball NCAA Olympics Tennis Golf Hockey Soccer Horse Racing Video BLOGS: Capitals Watch From the Sports Editors Nationals Watch Redskins Watch Screen Play United Watch Wizards Watch Life Entertainment Home and Lifestyle Travel Health The List Technology Books Video Media Radio: Andy Parks Photo Galleries Video Specials Presidential Inauguration 2013 A Guide to the 113th Congress Benghazi Attack Under Microscope Superstorm Sandy Health Care Reform Communities Trending: Senate Barack Obama China Pentagon White House Editors' Picks: BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of ‘germ’ warfare raises fear in the Mideast EDITORIAL: Reining in England’s busybodies BIGELOW: Knocking fiscal sense back into government North Korea warns that nuke test may be imminent Union membership at lowest point since 1930s Air Force officials testify about sexual assaults PRIEBUS: Holding Obama to his inauguration promises Deep freeze to keep folks bundled up, chilling out Obama won’t propose carbon tax RNC backs the hard line in debt fight CONNECT: Facebook Twitter RSS Home Unfiled Radio Account Edit My Profile Email Alerts Edit Password Logout Log In E-Mail Alerts Subscribe Classifieds E-Edition Culture Briefs Comment(s) Size: + / - Print By The Washington Times Tuesday, January 8, 2002 Follow Us On Facebook Follow @washtimes Question of the Day Should women be allowed to serve in direct combat? Yes No Undecided Other View results New sex symbol? "Who's the 'star' of this war so far? ... There is, undeniably, an answer: Don Rumsfeld. Yes, Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, TV personality, sex symbol (no kidding), role model, inspiration. As one Washington arbiter puts it, 'Rummy' is the man now. The man to whom the nation turns, the man to whom it listens. Nearly everyone Republican or Democrat sees him as the right guy at the right time in the right job.... "He's a reminder of the Greatest Generation although he's about a half-generation younger than that at a time when the Greatest Generation grit and clarity of purpose are called for. He's not fighting on the battlefield, risking life and limb; but he is representing reflecting those who do, as civilian leaders often must. "You can get too sociological about this, but Rumsfeld is the anti-[Alan] Alda. In a feminized society whose idea of a male sex symbol has been the Brad Pitt-style pretty boy he is a relief, or a rediscovery. He has walked out of 'Father Knows Best' or some WWII flick. "And he's ... the ultimate anti-Clinton. Whereas Clinton was a pain-feeler, Rumsfeld is more a pain-inflicter, at least where the country's enemies are concerned. And he is the most uneuphemistic person alive. He is totally immune, and allergic to 'spin.' Says an old Rumsfeld hand, 'He doesn't like to be spun. He sees it in a second, and you're dead if you try to do it. And he doesn't spin other people.'" Jay Nordlinger, writing on "Rumsfeld Rules," in the Dec. 31 issue of National Review To boldly go "In the shows from the '60s, globalization takes the form of the Americanization of the world. 'Gilligan's Island,' for instance, suggests that you can take a representative group of Americans, drop them anywhere on the planet, and they'll end up recreating an image of the United States. You see all the elements of specifically American self-confidence in 'Star Trek,' too. ... "In the more recent shows, you see the reverse process at work. Now, it's America being globalized. In 'Gilligan' and 'Star Trek,' you see American power being projected outward. In 'The Simpsons' and 'The X-Files,' you see outside forces transforming America. ... "The striking thing about 'The Simpsons' is how an American small town has been changed. The show obviously hearkens back to situation comedies like 'Father Knows Best,' which was also set in a town called Springfield. But you never would have had Apu Nahasapeemapetilon running the grocery store in that Springfield." author Paul Cantor, interviewed by Nick Gillespie in the February issue of Reason No phony bones "The first time I met Joey Ramone was in the early '80s, right after the Ramones covered the Ronettes' 'Baby, I Love You' on [their album] 'End of the Century.' They asked me to come down to the studio where they were shooting a video. The first thing I saw was Joey. He was so tall with that hair and the glasses handsome and adorable. I was really impressed. ... I saw a lot of punk bands, but the Ramones really stood out, so meeting Joey was very exciting. He said, 'I can't believe I'm meeting Ronnie Spector!' I remember saying 'I can't believe I'm meeting Joey Ramone!' We liked each other instantly. ... "Everything was 'wow' with Joey. He was so easygoing and nice and warm. He never came on like he was a big shot. He was just a real guy. No ego, no phoniness. That's why we were friends as long as we were. There was not a phony bone in him." Ronnie Spector, writing on "Joey Ramone," in the Jan. 4 issue of Entertainment Weekly Comments Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. blog comments powered by Disqus You Might Also Like Kansas considers cutting out income tax Navy cracking down on drunk sailors D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges Celebrities In The News Adele: British singer to perform Bond theme ‘Skyfall’ at Oscars Shakira: Congrats flood in for singer’s new baby boy Justin Timberlake: Singer to perform at pre-Super Bowl party Commentary MONAHAN: Gaining ground in a 40-year march on abortion By Jeanne Monahan An anniversary marks a historic moment BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of 'germ' warfare raises fear in the Mideast TYRRELL: A penalty for Harry MILLER: Spreading gun hysteria EDITORIAL: Strike versus stumble Business Directory Popular Searches   Apartments in Washington   Attorneys in Washington   Auto Dealers in Washington   Auto Parts in Washington   Auto Repair in Washington   Beauty Salons in Washington   Car Rental in Washington   Dentists in Washington   Doctors in Washington   Flowers in Washington   Hotels in Washington   Insurance in Washington   Loans in Washington   Mortgages in Washington   Movers in Washington   Pizza in Washington   Realtors in Washington   Restaurants in Washington   Storage in Washington   Tax Preparation in Washington   Travel in Washington   Featured   More... Powered by Local.com Happening Now Having it your way? Horsemeat found in Burger King burgers Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Kansas considers cutting out income tax Most Read Most Shared Most Emailed MILLER: National assault weapon ban coming Thursday PRUDEN: Hillary Clintons last hurrah? A lasting image while explaining Benghazi MILLER: Spreading gun hysteria D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges Two-thirds of U.S. weapons owners would 'defy' a federal gun ban Who are the best and worst bosses on Capitol Hill? Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Newest threat to Islam: Lego Star Wars EDITORIAL: Inaugurating Leviathan North Korea said it's set to carry out nuclear test, aim weapons at U.S. Communities Independent voices from the TWT Communities The Tygrrrr Express A politically conservative and morally liberal Hebrew alpha male hunts left-wing viper Why Hillary Clinton Matters Hillary Clinton's Benghazi hearings: Winners and losers Hail Mary Food of Grace Chef Mary Moran discusses the food we eat, where it comes from and what it does for us. Cooking in your challenging kitchen Recipe & Class: Persimmon, pomegranate & burrata salad Sports Around Contributions to the Communities Sports desk from readers. Li Na and Victoria Azarenka in 2013 Australian Open tennis final Serena Williams upset loss to U.S. teen in 2013 Australian Open tennis TV Den Television commentary, reviews, news and nonstop DVR catch-up. TV tonight: American Idol and strong ABC line-up battle for ratings TV tonight: A taste of The Taste, premiering tonight Photo Galleries Clinton testifies on Benghazi attack 17 Photos President Obama's second inaugural 47 Photos Obama sworn in for second term 13 Photos D.C. residents volunteer during the National Day of Service 18 Photos Falcons reach NFC title game 33 Photos 'Lincoln' leads Oscars with 12 nominations 11 Photos Redskins lose 24-14 to Seahawks in playoffs 62 Photos Redskins fans celebrate playoff appearance 15 Photos Redskins' 7th straight win sends them to playoffs 34 Photos Operation Welcome Home Maryland opens its arms to U.S. troops 10 Photos Same-sex couples wed in Maryland 8 Photos Notable deaths of 2012 59 Photos Newsletter Get free daily emails on topics of interest to you, from breaking news to the day’s top stories. Privacy Policy To sign up for our daily emails, click here . To manage your email subscriptions, click here . 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Local - Newsmakers - Inside the Beltway - Inside the Ring - Pruden on Politics - Embassy Row - Weather Opinion - Editorials - Commentary - Letters - Water Cooler - Books - Kuhner - Nugent - Cartoons Video Specials Sports - Football - Baseball - Basketball - NCAA - Olympics - Tennis - Golf - Hockey - Soccer - Horse Racing - Video Life - Entertainment - Home and Lifestyle - Travel - Health - The List - Technology - Books - Video Books Communities Multimedia Radio Specials Blogs - Inside Politics - Water Cooler - Capitals Watch - Daly OT - D1scourse - From the Sports Editors - Guns - Mystics Watch - Nationals Watch - Redskins Watch - Screen Play - United Watch - Wizards Watch - Technology Subscribe | Classifieds | E-Edition | Customer Service | Careers | Terms | Privacy | Marketing | Directory | RSS | Advertise | About | Contact All site contents © Copyright 2013 The Washington Times, LLC | 3600 New York Avenue NE | Washington, DC 20002 | 202-636-3000 U.S. pop culture seen as plague - Washington Times News Politics National World Security Economy D.C. Local Newsmakers Inside the Beltway Inside the Ring Pruden on Politics Embassy Row Weather BLOGS: Inside Politics Technology Opinion Editorials Commentary Letters Water Cooler Books Kuhner Nugent Cartoons BLOGS: Guns Water Cooler Video Staff Exclusives Politics Newsmaker Interviews Water Cooler Entertainment Strange and Weird National News Sports Football Baseball Basketball NCAA Olympics Tennis Golf Hockey Soccer Horse Racing Video BLOGS: Capitals Watch From the Sports Editors Nationals Watch Redskins Watch Screen Play United Watch Wizards Watch Life Entertainment Home and Lifestyle Travel Health The List Technology Books Video Media Radio: Andy Parks Photo Galleries Video Specials Presidential Inauguration 2013 A Guide to the 113th Congress Benghazi Attack Under Microscope Superstorm Sandy Health Care Reform Communities Trending: Senate Barack Obama China Pentagon White House Editors' Picks: BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of ‘germ’ warfare raises fear in the Mideast EDITORIAL: Reining in England’s busybodies BIGELOW: Knocking fiscal sense back into government North Korea warns that nuke test may be imminent Union membership at lowest point since 1930s Air Force officials testify about sexual assaults PRIEBUS: Holding Obama to his inauguration promises Deep freeze to keep folks bundled up, chilling out Obama won’t propose carbon tax RNC backs the hard line in debt fight CONNECT: Facebook Twitter RSS Home Unfiled Radio Account Edit My Profile Email Alerts Edit Password Logout Log In E-Mail Alerts Subscribe Classifieds E-Edition U.S. pop culture seen as plague Comment(s) Size: + / - Print By The Washington Times Thursday, December 30, 2004 Follow Us On Facebook Follow @washtimes Question of the Day Should women be allowed to serve in direct combat? Yes No Undecided Other View results Part Five of Five: Robert H. Bork remembers his ambivalence in 1989 as the Berlin Wall came down and dungarees and rock music poured into the former East Germany. “You almost began to want to put the wall back up,” says the former Supreme Court nominee, a tart critic of American popular culture. If there is one proposition on which Western European elites and radical Islamists, American social conservatives and snobby latte town aesthetes all seem to agree, it is this: American popular culture is a subversive thing. The critiques are both secular and sectarian, and they gained intensity in 2004. French President Jacques Chirac, during a visit to Hanoi in October, accused the United States of spreading a “generalized underculture in the world.” This juggernaut of crassness, if unchecked, he suggested, will stamp out whatever folkways and native idiosyncrasies lie in its path. “All other countries would be stifled to the benefit of American culture,” Mr. Chirac warned, speaking in a city once under French dominion. “If there was a single language, a single culture, it would be a real ecological disaster.” For Islamic fundamentalists, American pop culture beckons the faithful to depravity. Sayyid Qutb, a founder of political Islamism, spotted the subversive potential as early as the late 1940s. Not in Manhattan or Hollywood, but in Greeley, Colo. At a church dance. While a disc jockey played the swing-era classic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” “The dancing intensified,” wrote Qutb, an Egyptian then studying America’s education system, in his influential book “Milestones.” “The hall swarmed with legs. … Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love.” After love, license. Followed by perversion. Then chaos. ‘Global theme park’ Things have gotten considerably racier since Harry S. Truman was president — and American pop culture has become ever more pervasive. The world is way more “American.” The pull of our ideals, media culture and economic opportunity works in mysterious counterpoint, and often dissonantly, with the overwhelming military might and principled clout for which we have been chided of late in the court of the “world test.” This series has considered aspects of this pervasive American influence — from ideals of freedom to language, entrepreneurial ingenuity and sports — and some of the consequences and repercussions. Sometimes, you’d think we were the bad guys. As it turns out, though, individual national identities tend to more than hold their own against American pop culture within their borders. But even so, not one of these countries is a serious rival to America as an international culture. (Maybe that’s what’s eating the French.) Our pop culture is resented in parts of the world as evidence of a poisonous contagion. “Coca-Colonization” it’s been called, another takeover of the Third World, but with a twist: imposing a cookie-cutter consumerist culture from without rather than looting natural resources from within. American-made movies, music, television shows and pop icons are said to litter the globe, disrupting cultural ecosystems and Americanizing (read: corrupting) impressionable minds. The effects are everywhere. Last month, an advertisement in Jerusalem featuring “Sex and the City” actress Sarah Jessica Parker hawking soap was deemed too revealing. Two weeks ago, Chinese censors suspiciously eyed a poster of a semi-naked Pamela Anderson, the “Baywatch” icon, protesting the fur industry. Singer Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” in February was a sneak preview seen ‘round the world. There’s fear and revulsion here at home, of course, on both the left and right. “Jihad vs. McWorld” author Benjamin Barber, a liberal communitarian, has written that American “cultural imperialism,” fueled by a global economy, will “mesmerize peoples everywhere with fast music, fast computers and fast food — MTV, Macintosh and McDonald’s — pressing nations into one homogenous global theme park.” The most recent reports from the Motion Picture Association of America show that in 2003, the top five films worldwide were all American-made. Offshore box-office business overall hit $10 billion for the first time, and the MPAA attributed the growth of 5 percent to the strong performance of movies such as “Finding Nemo,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. In recent years, American recording artists accounted for 50 percent to 60 percent of the top 100 albums in major world markets, according to data provided by the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). But IFPI also says that up to seven in 10 records sold worldwide carry music from artists native to the local market. In France, for example, French artists still accounted for about 60 percent of sales this year. Cross-pollination “American dominance is just a myth,” says Charles Paul Freund, senior editor of Reason magazine. “The biggest films in most major markets are really not American films.” Mr. Freund notes that Bollywood movies still rule the Indian market. Likewise in Western Europe, native films are more popular than American imports. Even the Chinese film industry may become a juggernaut within a generation. Cultures are cross-pollinating to compete in an increasingly global marketplace. And just as in pro sports, American music, movies and TV suck in talent from other places and recast and regurgitate them in more potent ways. More foreign stars are showing up in Hollywood films: Producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard plan to cast foreign actors alongside Tom Hanks in their adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code.” For the first time a Japanese movie — this year’s horror flick “Ju-on: The Grudge” — was remade for American audiences by the same director, Takashi Shimizu. And don’t forget a New Zealand filmmaker, Peter Jackson, directed the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. America imports reality-TV concepts from the United Kingdom, echoing the way “All in the Family” and “Sanford and Son” were drawn from British sitcoms back in the day. Our TV shows have to fight for foreign audiences compared with 20 years ago. “Seinfeld,” at the peak of its U.S. ratings strength in the mid-1990s, earned only a late-night slot in Britain because its American quirkiness didn’t generate demand, notes Harvey Feigenbaum, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University who studies the overseas appeal of U.S. culture. More than 70 percent of the most popular shows in 60 different countries were produced locally in 2001, Mr. Freund says, with American programs struggling in prime-time slots. Mr. Feigenbaum says foreign viewers generally prefer to see their own culture beamed back from their television sets. And yet they still have a healthy appetite for American fare in a way that we don’t have for theirs. Some competitive realities work in favor of American content. Thanks largely to spreading privatization, the number of television networks internationally has exploded, greatly expanding the demand for cheap programming. Stateside shows such as “ER” and “Lost” may cost oodles to produce, but they can be sold easily overseas because the fixed cost is spread over numerous buyers. Foreign production companies, by comparison, generally sell shows for one market, their own, so the full costs must be covered. “They’re willing to suffer a drop in market share because that’s what they can afford,” Mr. Feigenbaum says of international networks’ interest in U.S. shows. Whose culture? It’s sometimes a thin line between American pop culture and “global” culture. “Somebody would look at Pizza Hut in Thailand and say this is American cultural imperialism,” postulates Harvard University’s Joseph Nye. “But wait a minute — where did pizza come from? We’re a country of immigrants. Our culture is constantly changing, and we often repackage things that were cultural exports to this country.” OK, Italian immigrants invented pizza. Optimists say globalization means more cultural choices for everyone, not global homogeneity. “No American artifact will ‘Americanize’ a foreign user any more than playing a Japanese-produced video game will make you Asian,” Mr. Freund argues. “It’s preposterous.” The spread of American pop culture is potentially “a force for good,” a prescription for gaining allies through attraction rather than coercion, says Mr. Nye, author of “Softpower: The Means to Success in World Politics.” “In Iran, you’d find that the ruling mullahs would be repelled by our country,” he says. “But if you look at Iranian teenagers, there’s nothing they would like more than to watch an American video in the privacy of their own home.” Mr. Nye says even a movie such as Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” the screed against President Bush that recently opened in Tehran, could wind up having a counterintuitively positive effect within closed societies. He paraphrases how Soviet audiences reacted to the 1957 movie “12 Angry Men,” with its narrative of American bigotry and racism: ” ‘If they can make that movie about themselves, they must be free.’ ” Reason to worry The chance that a young Middle Easterner will see expressions of freedom in American culture is, to Mr. Bork’s mind, dim. Because he thinks most of what Hollywood exports is “trash.” Of course, one man’s “trash” is another’s retro refinement: The biggest U.S. crossover into Europe’s pop music market this year was jazz-pop singer Norah Jones, who triumphed at home as an antidote to the very sort of puerile, youth-pandering pop music that Mr. Bork detests. Her “Feels Like Home” album was a top seller in Germany, Britain, Holland and Australia. Sure, there’s the bloody “Kill Bill” movies. But what’s so “trashy” about international hits such as “Finding Nemo,” Pixar’s family-friendly aquatic hit? Or, more recently, “The Incredibles,” which tweaks the nanny-state risk-aversion and hyper-litigiousness stifling American energy and creativity? Another controversial American movie — Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” — proved almost as popular overseas as the Good Book it was based on. Fittingly enough for our theme, the Nicolas Cage movie “National Treasure” proved to be good, clean fun and with more than one twist on American history. Granted, these are exceptions in artistic taste and vision. Conservatives who detest the ABC phenom “Desperate Housewives,” gangsta rap and the entertainment mainstreaming of homosexuals, however, are not likely to prefer a measure of tyranny to a free culture awash in sex, violence and indecency. In a recent cover story in National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru argues that the conflation of American religious conservatives and Islamic fundamentalists is unfair. The former don’t want to live under a theocracy; they seek no more than a return to the moral norms and restraint of the 1950s. Still, Mr. Bork, author of “Slouching Towards Gomorrah,” thinks some conservative (not to say radical) Muslims have a legitimate point — as do American evangelicals and others on the religious right. “They have good reason to be very worried about” the spread of American movies, music and fashion, Mr. Bork allows. “I suppose it’s better than what they have now, but I wouldn’t celebrate too much if they began to adopt our popular culture.” Power to provoke Mr. Freund offers an inspiring anecdote. In Talibanized Afghanistan, in 1997, all aspects of culture — movies, music, photographs, art — were strictly forbidden. Yet smuggled copies of “Titanic” (which many an American pastor preached against) found their way into Afghan homes. The movie was so popular that young men in the capital of Kabul wanted their hair cut in the style of star Leonardo DiCaprio. At weddings, cakes were shaped like the Titanic. It seems as if pieces of “Titanic,” so to speak, are tastiest where local cultural cuisines don’t nourish. So maybe American pop culture in a host of forms doesn’t rock the world in quite the same way as our love of freedom, our faith, our big-heartedness, our enterprise, our language and higher education system, and our passion for winning a good ball game all do. But move over, Jacques Chirac. A former French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, holds that America’s power in the post-Cold War era continues to rest on our ability to “inspire the dreams and desires of others, thanks to the mastery of global images through film and television.” British Invasions and Bollywoods, if not despots, have nothing to fear from our pop culture. Even in crasser forms, it likely will go on reflecting America by inspiring, challenging and provoking. And when not suppressed by censors or stifled by state subsidy, the individual artist, entrepreneur or pol in other lands will tend to want to compete. Now that’s Americanization. Part IIII: Second place not an option in U.S. sports • Christian Toto contributed to this report. Comments Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. blog comments powered by Disqus You Might Also Like Kansas considers cutting out income tax Navy cracking down on drunk sailors D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges Celebrities In The News Adele: British singer to perform Bond theme ‘Skyfall’ at Oscars Shakira: Congrats flood in for singer’s new baby boy Justin Timberlake: Singer to perform at pre-Super Bowl party Commentary MONAHAN: Gaining ground in a 40-year march on abortion By Jeanne Monahan An anniversary marks a historic moment BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of 'germ' warfare raises fear in the Mideast TYRRELL: A penalty for Harry MILLER: Spreading gun hysteria EDITORIAL: Strike versus stumble Business Directory Popular Searches   Apartments in Washington   Attorneys in Washington   Auto Dealers in Washington   Auto Parts in Washington   Auto Repair in Washington   Beauty Salons in Washington   Car Rental in Washington   Dentists in Washington   Doctors in Washington   Flowers in Washington   Hotels in Washington   Insurance in Washington   Loans in Washington   Mortgages in Washington   Movers in Washington   Pizza in Washington   Realtors in Washington   Restaurants in Washington   Storage in Washington   Tax Preparation in Washington   Travel in Washington   Featured   More... Powered by Local.com Happening Now Having it your way? Horsemeat found in Burger King burgers Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Kansas considers cutting out income tax Most Read Most Shared Most Emailed MILLER: National assault weapon ban coming Thursday PRUDEN: Hillary Clintons last hurrah? A lasting image while explaining Benghazi MILLER: Spreading gun hysteria D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges Two-thirds of U.S. weapons owners would 'defy' a federal gun ban Who are the best and worst bosses on Capitol Hill? Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Newest threat to Islam: Lego Star Wars EDITORIAL: Inaugurating Leviathan North Korea said it's set to carry out nuclear test, aim weapons at U.S. Communities Independent voices from the TWT Communities The Tygrrrr Express A politically conservative and morally liberal Hebrew alpha male hunts left-wing viper Why Hillary Clinton Matters Hillary Clinton's Benghazi hearings: Winners and losers Hail Mary Food of Grace Chef Mary Moran discusses the food we eat, where it comes from and what it does for us. Cooking in your challenging kitchen Recipe & Class: Persimmon, pomegranate & burrata salad Sports Around Contributions to the Communities Sports desk from readers. Li Na and Victoria Azarenka in 2013 Australian Open tennis final Serena Williams upset loss to U.S. teen in 2013 Australian Open tennis TV Den Television commentary, reviews, news and nonstop DVR catch-up. TV tonight: American Idol and strong ABC line-up battle for ratings TV tonight: A taste of The Taste, premiering tonight Photo Galleries Clinton testifies on Benghazi attack 17 Photos President Obama's second inaugural 47 Photos Obama sworn in for second term 13 Photos D.C. residents volunteer during the National Day of Service 18 Photos Falcons reach NFC title game 33 Photos 'Lincoln' leads Oscars with 12 nominations 11 Photos Redskins lose 24-14 to Seahawks in playoffs 62 Photos Redskins fans celebrate playoff appearance 15 Photos Redskins' 7th straight win sends them to playoffs 34 Photos Operation Welcome Home Maryland opens its arms to U.S. troops 10 Photos Same-sex couples wed in Maryland 8 Photos Notable deaths of 2012 59 Photos Newsletter Get free daily emails on topics of interest to you, from breaking news to the day’s top stories. Privacy Policy To sign up for our daily emails, click here . To manage your email subscriptions, click here . Find Us On Facebook - The Washington Times - Sports - Opinion - Andy Parks - Photos - Communities Follow Us On Twitter - The Washington Times - Politics - Opinion - Nation - World - D.C. Local - Culture - Sports - Books - Andy Parks - Photos - Communities Home News - Politics - National - World - Security - Economy - D.C. 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Local Newsmakers Inside the Beltway Inside the Ring Pruden on Politics Embassy Row Weather BLOGS: Inside Politics Technology Opinion Editorials Commentary Letters Water Cooler Books Kuhner Nugent Cartoons BLOGS: Guns Water Cooler Video Staff Exclusives Politics Newsmaker Interviews Water Cooler Entertainment Strange and Weird National News Sports Football Baseball Basketball NCAA Olympics Tennis Golf Hockey Soccer Horse Racing Video BLOGS: Capitals Watch From the Sports Editors Nationals Watch Redskins Watch Screen Play United Watch Wizards Watch Life Entertainment Home and Lifestyle Travel Health The List Technology Books Video Media Radio: Andy Parks Photo Galleries Video Specials Presidential Inauguration 2013 A Guide to the 113th Congress Benghazi Attack Under Microscope Superstorm Sandy Health Care Reform Communities Trending: Senate Barack Obama China Pentagon White House Editors' Picks: BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of ‘germ’ warfare raises fear in the Mideast EDITORIAL: Reining in England’s busybodies BIGELOW: Knocking fiscal sense back into government North Korea warns that nuke test may be imminent Union membership at lowest point since 1930s Air Force officials testify about sexual assaults PRIEBUS: Holding Obama to his inauguration promises Deep freeze to keep folks bundled up, chilling out Obama won’t propose carbon tax RNC backs the hard line in debt fight CONNECT: Facebook Twitter RSS Home Unfiled Radio Account Edit My Profile Email Alerts Edit Password Logout Log In E-Mail Alerts Subscribe Classifieds E-Edition Kerry’s Iraq odyssey Comment(s) Size: + / - Print By The Washington Times Wednesday, September 8, 2004 Follow Us On Facebook Follow @washtimes Question of the Day Should women be allowed to serve in direct combat? Yes No Undecided Other View results John Kerry has had so many positions on U.S. troop levels in Iraq and so many nuances that just about everyone — from the very hawkish to the very dovish — has agreed with him at one time or another. Early in the campaign, The Washington Post noted yesterday, Mr. Kerry said it was impossible to predict when U.S. soldiers would return home without talking to commanders in the field, and even suggested increasing the number of U.S. troops. But when Mr. Kerry’s primary campaign faltered under a withering assault from Howard Dean and the antiwar left, he changed his tune. During a Sept. 4, 2003, debate in New Mexico, for example, Mr. Kerry said: “We should not send more American troops. That would be the worst thing. We do not want more Americanization. We do not want a greater sense of American occupation.” But in December, Kerry foreign policy adviser Rand Beers said the candidate “would not rule out the possibility” of sending additional troops to Iraq. In an April 18 “Meet the Press” appearance, Mr. Kerry stated that the United States “cannot fail”in Iraq, adding, “if it requires more troops in order to create the stability that eliminates the chaos, that can provide the groundwork for other countries, that’s what you have to do.” On May 28, Mr. Kerry called for increasing the size of the American military by 40,000, in order to relieve “over-extended” National Guard troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last month, Mr. Kerry once again shifted. During a series of Aug. 1 TV interviews, Mr. Kerry promised to substantially reduce U.S. troop strength in Iraq by the end of his first term in the White House. “I will have significant, enormous reduction in the level of troops,” he said. One week later, Mr. Kerry said that he planned to begin withdrawing troops during his first six months in office, with a goal of bringing most of them home by the end of his first term. Then, three days ago, he said he could bring all of the troops home by the end of his term. Perhaps there is some way that one can reconcile all of these formulations (along with the new rationalizations and nuances we are likely to hear from Mr. Kerry in the coming weeks). Sometimes Mr. Kerry sounds like he is motivated by a desire to pander to the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic Party; at other times, he sounds like he is trying to score points with people like Sen. Joe Lieberman and moderates who understand that it would be a disaster for the United States to cut and run in Iraq. When you add it all up, Mr. Kerry sounds like a man without any fixed beliefs who is embarrassing himself by trying to be all things to all people. 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TV tonight: American Idol and strong ABC line-up battle for ratings TV tonight: A taste of The Taste, premiering tonight Photo Galleries Clinton testifies on Benghazi attack 17 Photos President Obama's second inaugural 47 Photos Obama sworn in for second term 13 Photos D.C. residents volunteer during the National Day of Service 18 Photos Falcons reach NFC title game 33 Photos 'Lincoln' leads Oscars with 12 nominations 11 Photos Redskins lose 24-14 to Seahawks in playoffs 62 Photos Redskins fans celebrate playoff appearance 15 Photos Redskins' 7th straight win sends them to playoffs 34 Photos Operation Welcome Home Maryland opens its arms to U.S. troops 10 Photos Same-sex couples wed in Maryland 8 Photos Notable deaths of 2012 59 Photos Newsletter Get free daily emails on topics of interest to you, from breaking news to the day’s top stories. Privacy Policy To sign up for our daily emails, click here . To manage your email subscriptions, click here . 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Local Newsmakers Inside the Beltway Inside the Ring Pruden on Politics Embassy Row Weather BLOGS: Inside Politics Technology Opinion Editorials Commentary Letters Water Cooler Books Kuhner Nugent Cartoons BLOGS: Guns Water Cooler Video Staff Exclusives Politics Newsmaker Interviews Water Cooler Entertainment Strange and Weird National News Sports Football Baseball Basketball NCAA Olympics Tennis Golf Hockey Soccer Horse Racing Video BLOGS: Capitals Watch From the Sports Editors Nationals Watch Redskins Watch Screen Play United Watch Wizards Watch Life Entertainment Home and Lifestyle Travel Health The List Technology Books Video Media Radio: Andy Parks Photo Galleries Video Specials Presidential Inauguration 2013 A Guide to the 113th Congress Benghazi Attack Under Microscope Superstorm Sandy Health Care Reform Communities Trending: Senate Barack Obama China Pentagon White House Editors' Picks: BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of ‘germ’ warfare raises fear in the Mideast EDITORIAL: Reining in England’s busybodies BIGELOW: Knocking fiscal sense back into government North Korea warns that nuke test may be imminent Union membership at lowest point since 1930s Air Force officials testify about sexual assaults PRIEBUS: Holding Obama to his inauguration promises Deep freeze to keep folks bundled up, chilling out Obama won’t propose carbon tax RNC backs the hard line in debt fight CONNECT: Facebook Twitter RSS Home Unfiled Radio Account Edit My Profile Email Alerts Edit Password Logout Log In E-Mail Alerts Subscribe Classifieds E-Edition Tomatsu shows what’s important Comment(s) Size: + / - Print By The Washington Times Friday, May 27, 2005 Follow Us On Facebook Follow @washtimes Question of the Day Should women be allowed to serve in direct combat? Yes No Undecided Other View results Shomei Tomatsu’s photographs of post-World War II Japan aren’t what visitors expect from a Japanese photographer. Mr. Tomatsu, Japan’s most important postwar photographer, didn’t photograph the obvious, such as the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan’s postwar movie hero Toshiro Mifune or Mount Fuji as the nationalist symbol. Mr. Tomatsu doesn’t let bombast invade his work. This admirable self-restraint is vividly illustrated in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s “Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation,” an exhibit of roughly 200 photos from 30 years. He photographs the ruins and rebirth of his country in deceptively simple terms — a little girl leading a Japanese World War II veteran through a pulverized Nagoya, a weaver’s hand, a prostitute expelling cigarette smoke through her nose. In all his work, and especially in the Corcoran show, Mr. Tomatsu’s metaphor of “skin” invites — even demands — that viewers probe what’s beneath. “If you look at skin closely,” he once said, “you’ll see everything that’s important.” The photographer wants visitors to carefully scrutinize the pores of a heavily made-up aging actress, the reflection of sun and clouds on water, the coarse hairs of a woman’s beehive hairdo. Through thousands of photos over the course of his 50-year career, Mr. Tomatsu, 75, poetically documented his times — traditional Japan before the war, shocked Japanese after the A-bomb attacks, the mixed blessings of Americanization. He never preaches. Rather, he presents charged objects, such as an atomic-heat-melted glass bottle or a fragment of a stone angel shattered at Nagasaki, then lets viewers experience them. Take, for example, his dispassionate 1960s Nagasaki “A-Bomb” series, probably his most famous. He focuses on single objects and people, such as the bone of a skull fused to a steel helmet by the blast. Other photos show a woman’s face ravaged by nuclear burns and a damaged wristwatch stopped at 11:02, Aug. 9, 1945, the time of the explosion. All have “skins,” or surfaces, that tell much about the objects. Although the “A-Bomb” series is, like much of his work, compassionate, “He knows not to shove his way in, to pretend he went through what they did,” says exhibit co-curator Leo Rubinfien. “He acknowledges that he’s an outsider.” In the late 1960s, he shot Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood, or “Underground City,” the center of Tokyo’s sex trade and a place an exhibit label calls “the scepter of desire gone wild.” Mr. Tomatsu summed up its anger, excesses and down-at-the-heels inhabitants with violent close-ups of a “Butoh Actor,” a grotesquely eyelashed actress and a grimacing, wild-haired man from his series “Eros, Tokyo.” The artist’s disdain for Americans is evident in the “Americanization” section of the exhibit, but his series “Chewing Gum and Chocolate,” which focuses on Americans settling into life in Japan, is one of his best. He shoots a U.S. Navy officer in military whites and medals — a sharp contrast to the grime and dirt where the photographer groveled for food as a teenager in Nagoya. In another photo, a solidly middle-class American couple is shown against traditional Japanese houses. The exhibit’s wall texts mention Mr. Tomatsu’s photo series but don’t identify them. The curators should have described them and explained how they fit into this exhibit’s sections. But this is a small flaw in an otherwise commendable introduction to the work of an artist too little known in the United States. WHAT: “Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of a Nation” WHERE: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 17th Street at New York Avenue NW WHEN: Open daily except Tuesdays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and until 9 p.m. on Thursdays. Through Aug. 29 TICKETS: $6.75 adults, $4.75 seniors, $3 students, $12 for families Comments Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. blog comments powered by Disqus You Might Also Like Kansas considers cutting out income tax Navy cracking down on drunk sailors D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges Celebrities In The News Adele: British singer to perform Bond theme ‘Skyfall’ at Oscars Shakira: Congrats flood in for singer’s new baby boy Justin Timberlake: Singer to perform at pre-Super Bowl party Commentary MONAHAN: Gaining ground in a 40-year march on abortion By Jeanne Monahan An anniversary marks a historic moment BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of 'germ' warfare raises fear in the Mideast TYRRELL: A penalty for Harry MILLER: Spreading gun hysteria EDITORIAL: Strike versus stumble Business Directory Popular Searches   Apartments in Washington   Attorneys in Washington   Auto Dealers in Washington   Auto Parts in Washington   Auto Repair in Washington   Beauty Salons in Washington   Car Rental in Washington   Dentists in Washington   Doctors in Washington   Flowers in Washington   Hotels in Washington   Insurance in Washington   Loans in Washington   Mortgages in Washington   Movers in Washington   Pizza in Washington   Realtors in Washington   Restaurants in Washington   Storage in Washington   Tax Preparation in Washington   Travel in Washington   Featured   More... Powered by Local.com Happening Now Having it your way? Horsemeat found in Burger King burgers Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Kansas considers cutting out income tax Most Read Most Shared Most Emailed MILLER: National assault weapon ban coming Thursday PRUDEN: Hillary Clintons last hurrah? A lasting image while explaining Benghazi MILLER: Spreading gun hysteria D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges Two-thirds of U.S. weapons owners would 'defy' a federal gun ban Who are the best and worst bosses on Capitol Hill? Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Newest threat to Islam: Lego Star Wars EDITORIAL: Inaugurating Leviathan North Korea said it's set to carry out nuclear test, aim weapons at U.S. Communities Independent voices from the TWT Communities The Tygrrrr Express A politically conservative and morally liberal Hebrew alpha male hunts left-wing viper Why Hillary Clinton Matters Hillary Clinton's Benghazi hearings: Winners and losers Hail Mary Food of Grace Chef Mary Moran discusses the food we eat, where it comes from and what it does for us. Cooking in your challenging kitchen Recipe & Class: Persimmon, pomegranate & burrata salad Sports Around Contributions to the Communities Sports desk from readers. Li Na and Victoria Azarenka in 2013 Australian Open tennis final Serena Williams upset loss to U.S. teen in 2013 Australian Open tennis TV Den Television commentary, reviews, news and nonstop DVR catch-up. TV tonight: American Idol and strong ABC line-up battle for ratings TV tonight: A taste of The Taste, premiering tonight Photo Galleries Clinton testifies on Benghazi attack 17 Photos President Obama's second inaugural 47 Photos Obama sworn in for second term 13 Photos D.C. residents volunteer during the National Day of Service 18 Photos Falcons reach NFC title game 33 Photos 'Lincoln' leads Oscars with 12 nominations 11 Photos Redskins lose 24-14 to Seahawks in playoffs 62 Photos Redskins fans celebrate playoff appearance 15 Photos Redskins' 7th straight win sends them to playoffs 34 Photos Operation Welcome Home Maryland opens its arms to U.S. troops 10 Photos Same-sex couples wed in Maryland 8 Photos Notable deaths of 2012 59 Photos Newsletter Get free daily emails on topics of interest to you, from breaking news to the day’s top stories. Privacy Policy To sign up for our daily emails, click here . To manage your email subscriptions, click here . 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Local Newsmakers Inside the Beltway Inside the Ring Pruden on Politics Embassy Row Weather BLOGS: Inside Politics Technology Opinion Editorials Commentary Letters Water Cooler Books Kuhner Nugent Cartoons BLOGS: Guns Water Cooler Video Staff Exclusives Politics Newsmaker Interviews Water Cooler Entertainment Strange and Weird National News Sports Football Baseball Basketball NCAA Olympics Tennis Golf Hockey Soccer Horse Racing Video BLOGS: Capitals Watch From the Sports Editors Nationals Watch Redskins Watch Screen Play United Watch Wizards Watch Life Entertainment Home and Lifestyle Travel Health The List Technology Books Video Media Radio: Andy Parks Photo Galleries Video Specials Presidential Inauguration 2013 A Guide to the 113th Congress Benghazi Attack Under Microscope Superstorm Sandy Health Care Reform Communities Trending: Senate Barack Obama China Pentagon White House Editors' Picks: BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of ‘germ’ warfare raises fear in the Mideast EDITORIAL: Reining in England’s busybodies BIGELOW: Knocking fiscal sense back into government North Korea warns that nuke test may be imminent Union membership at lowest point since 1930s Air Force officials testify about sexual assaults PRIEBUS: Holding Obama to his inauguration promises Deep freeze to keep folks bundled up, chilling out Obama won’t propose carbon tax RNC backs the hard line in debt fight CONNECT: Facebook Twitter RSS Home Unfiled Radio Account Edit My Profile Email Alerts Edit Password Logout Log In E-Mail Alerts Subscribe Classifieds E-Edition Activists rap new test for citizens Comment(s) Size: + / - Print By The Washington Times Wednesday, November 15, 2006 Follow Us On Facebook Follow @washtimes Question of the Day Should women be allowed to serve in direct combat? Yes No Undecided Other View results The federal government intends to replace the current test for U.S. citizenship with one that relies less on knowledge of specific facts and more on an applicant’s grasp of democratic principles, but many immigrant-advocacy groups are up in arms about the change, which they worry may discriminate against those who don’t speak English and with less education. “We want to focus more on the building blocks of democracy, rather than the colors of the flag” or questions about the name of the form used to apply for naturalized citizenship, which are on the current test for citizenship, said Chris Bentley, a spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is making the change. USCIS is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Bentley said USCIS officials want a new test that can ensure that those seeking to become American citizens know about “freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion.” “Our goal is not to make this test harder or easier for anyone, but to make it much more meaningful,” he said. Mr. Bentley said the proposal to redesign the test for naturalized citizenship came out of a report by a commission headed by former Rep. Barbara Jordan during the Clinton administration that “looked at all kinds of issues related to immigration.” The Jordan commission’s report emphasized “effective Americanization of new immigrants, that is the cultivation of a shared commitment to the American values of liberty, democracy and equal opportunity,” including policies to “help newcomers learn to speak, read and write English effectively.” The new citizenship test will be administered to all applicants for naturalization nationwide starting in January 2008. However, beginning this winter, at least 5,000 people in 10 cities will take part in a voluntary testing program featuring the new questions. The number of potential questions will be narrowed from 125 to 100 during the pilot program. To pass, an immigrant must correctly answer six of 10 questions asked. But more than 220 immigrant organizations, led by the Illinois Coalition of Immigrant and Refugee Rights, have signed a letter to USCIS Director Emilio Gonzalez denouncing the new test, which they worry will make it harder for “poorer legal immigrants with less English and less education” to win U.S. citizenship. “Already immigrants must pass a citizenship test that many native-born Americans could not pass,” say groups that include the National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Forum, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the United Farm Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. There are some tough questions on the current test and queries that could be described as meaningful. One of the more difficult asks a person to identify amendments to the Constitution guaranteeing voting rights. Others ask what is the “supreme law of the land” — the U.S. Constitution — and the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution). Just because the test for American citizenship is being revised “does not mean all the current questions will be done away,” said Mr. Bentley. He was unable to provide any sample questions from the new test. Jack Martin, special-projects director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group that is critical of unlimited immigration, said there are both potential improvements and problems with the proposed changes. “The effort at standardization makes sense … the concept is good, and there really are some trivial questions on the current test,” he said. “Our only concern is that questions not be dumbed down” so that immigrants could become American citizens “without having a good understanding of U.S. history, culture and social systems, so they can vote intelligently,” Mr. Martin said, adding that citizenship tests “should be designed to make sure citizens are prepared to participate in our political process.” As for those worried the new test might be harder or easier, Mr. Bentley said, USCIS intends to avoid those situations “by looking at pass-fail rates of the past.” Researcher Amy Baskerville contributed to this report. Comments Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. blog comments powered by Disqus You Might Also Like Kansas considers cutting out income tax Navy cracking down on drunk sailors D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges Celebrities In The News Adele: British singer to perform Bond theme ‘Skyfall’ at Oscars Shakira: Congrats flood in for singer’s new baby boy Justin Timberlake: Singer to perform at pre-Super Bowl party Commentary MONAHAN: Gaining ground in a 40-year march on abortion By Jeanne Monahan An anniversary marks a historic moment BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of 'germ' warfare raises fear in the Mideast TYRRELL: A penalty for Harry MILLER: Spreading gun hysteria EDITORIAL: Strike versus stumble Business Directory Popular Searches   Apartments in Washington   Attorneys in Washington   Auto Dealers in Washington   Auto Parts in Washington   Auto Repair in Washington   Beauty Salons in Washington   Car Rental in Washington   Dentists in Washington   Doctors in Washington   Flowers in Washington   Hotels in Washington   Insurance in Washington   Loans in Washington   Mortgages in Washington   Movers in Washington   Pizza in Washington   Realtors in Washington   Restaurants in Washington   Storage in Washington   Tax Preparation in Washington   Travel in Washington   Featured   More... Powered by Local.com Happening Now Having it your way? Horsemeat found in Burger King burgers Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Kansas considers cutting out income tax Most Read Most Shared Most Emailed MILLER: National assault weapon ban coming Thursday PRUDEN: Hillary Clintons last hurrah? A lasting image while explaining Benghazi MILLER: Spreading gun hysteria D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges Two-thirds of U.S. weapons owners would 'defy' a federal gun ban Who are the best and worst bosses on Capitol Hill? Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Newest threat to Islam: Lego Star Wars EDITORIAL: Inaugurating Leviathan North Korea said it's set to carry out nuclear test, aim weapons at U.S. Communities Independent voices from the TWT Communities The Tygrrrr Express A politically conservative and morally liberal Hebrew alpha male hunts left-wing viper Why Hillary Clinton Matters Hillary Clinton's Benghazi hearings: Winners and losers Hail Mary Food of Grace Chef Mary Moran discusses the food we eat, where it comes from and what it does for us. Cooking in your challenging kitchen Recipe & Class: Persimmon, pomegranate & burrata salad Sports Around Contributions to the Communities Sports desk from readers. Li Na and Victoria Azarenka in 2013 Australian Open tennis final Serena Williams upset loss to U.S. teen in 2013 Australian Open tennis TV Den Television commentary, reviews, news and nonstop DVR catch-up. TV tonight: American Idol and strong ABC line-up battle for ratings TV tonight: A taste of The Taste, premiering tonight Photo Galleries Clinton testifies on Benghazi attack 17 Photos President Obama's second inaugural 47 Photos Obama sworn in for second term 13 Photos D.C. residents volunteer during the National Day of Service 18 Photos Falcons reach NFC title game 33 Photos 'Lincoln' leads Oscars with 12 nominations 11 Photos Redskins lose 24-14 to Seahawks in playoffs 62 Photos Redskins fans celebrate playoff appearance 15 Photos Redskins' 7th straight win sends them to playoffs 34 Photos Operation Welcome Home Maryland opens its arms to U.S. troops 10 Photos Same-sex couples wed in Maryland 8 Photos Notable deaths of 2012 59 Photos Newsletter Get free daily emails on topics of interest to you, from breaking news to the day’s top stories. Privacy Policy To sign up for our daily emails, click here . To manage your email subscriptions, click here . Find Us On Facebook - The Washington Times - Sports - Opinion - Andy Parks - Photos - Communities Follow Us On Twitter - The Washington Times - Politics - Opinion - Nation - World - D.C. Local - Culture - Sports - Books - Andy Parks - Photos - Communities Home News - Politics - National - World - Security - Economy - D.C. Local - Newsmakers - Inside the Beltway - Inside the Ring - Pruden on Politics - Embassy Row - Weather Opinion - Editorials - Commentary - Letters - Water Cooler - Books - Kuhner - Nugent - Cartoons Video Specials Sports - Football - Baseball - Basketball - NCAA - Olympics - Tennis - Golf - Hockey - Soccer - Horse Racing - Video Life - Entertainment - Home and Lifestyle - Travel - Health - The List - Technology - Books - Video Books Communities Multimedia Radio Specials Blogs - Inside Politics - Water Cooler - Capitals Watch - Daly OT - D1scourse - From the Sports Editors - Guns - Mystics Watch - Nationals Watch - Redskins Watch - Screen Play - United Watch - Wizards Watch - Technology Subscribe | Classifieds | E-Edition | Customer Service | Careers | Terms | Privacy | Marketing | Directory | RSS | Advertise | About | Contact All site contents © Copyright 2013 The Washington Times, LLC | 3600 New York Avenue NE | Washington, DC 20002 | 202-636-3000 Home-grown terror threat not taken seriously, report says - Washington Times News Politics National World Security Economy D.C. Local Newsmakers Inside the Beltway Inside the Ring Pruden on Politics Embassy Row Weather BLOGS: Inside Politics Technology Opinion Editorials Commentary Letters Water Cooler Books Kuhner Nugent Cartoons BLOGS: Guns Water Cooler Video Staff Exclusives Politics Newsmaker Interviews Water Cooler Entertainment Strange and Weird National News Sports Football Baseball Basketball NCAA Olympics Tennis Golf Hockey Soccer Horse Racing Video BLOGS: Capitals Watch From the Sports Editors Nationals Watch Redskins Watch Screen Play United Watch Wizards Watch Life Entertainment Home and Lifestyle Travel Health The List Technology Books Video Media Radio: Andy Parks Photo Galleries Video Specials Presidential Inauguration 2013 A Guide to the 113th Congress Benghazi Attack Under Microscope Superstorm Sandy Health Care Reform Communities Trending: Senate Barack Obama China Pentagon White House Editors' Picks: BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of ‘germ’ warfare raises fear in the Mideast EDITORIAL: Reining in England’s busybodies BIGELOW: Knocking fiscal sense back into government North Korea warns that nuke test may be imminent Union membership at lowest point since 1930s Air Force officials testify about sexual assaults PRIEBUS: Holding Obama to his inauguration promises Deep freeze to keep folks bundled up, chilling out Obama won’t propose carbon tax RNC backs the hard line in debt fight CONNECT: Facebook Twitter RSS Home News Security Radio Account Edit My Profile Email Alerts Edit Password Logout Log In E-Mail Alerts Subscribe Classifieds E-Edition Home-grown terror threat not taken seriously, report says Comment(s) Size: + / - Print By Lolita C. Baldor - Associated Press Wednesday, September 15, 2010 Enlarge Photo Story Topics War_Conflict Politics United States Of America Thomas H. Kean New York'S Times Follow Us On Facebook Follow @washtimes Question of the Day Should women be allowed to serve in direct combat? Yes No Undecided Other View results The U.S. was slow to take seriously the threat posed by home-grown radicals, and the government has failed to put systems in place to deal with the growing phenomenon, according to a recent report compiled by the former heads of the Sept. 11 commission. The report says U.S. authorities failed to realize that Somali-American youths traveling from Minnesota to Mogadishu in 2008 to join extremists was not an isolated issue. Instead, the movement was one among several instances of a broader, more diverse threat that has surfaced across the country. “Our long-held belief that homegrown terrorism couldn’t happen here has thus created a situation where we are today stumbling blindly through the legal, operational and organizational minefield of countering terrorist radicalization and recruitment occurring in the United States ,” said the report, which was obtained by the Associated Press. As a result, there is still no federal agency specifically charged with identifying radicalization or working to prevent terrorist recruitment of U.S. citizens and residents, said the report, released by the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group. The group, headed by former 9/11 commission leaders Thomas H. Kean and Lee Hamilton , laid out a detailed description of domestic terrorism incidents ranging from the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting spree and the attempted Christmas Day airliner attack in late 2009 to last May’s botched car bombing in New York's Times Square. Over the past year, terrorism experts and government officials have warned of the threat posed by homegrown radicals, saying terrorist recruits who go abroad could return to the U.S. to carry out attacks. But the U.S. , the group said, should have learned earlier from Britain ’s experience. Before the 2005 London suicide bombings, the British thought that Muslims there were better integrated, educated and wealthier than their counterparts elsewhere. Similarly, the U.S. thought that its melting pot of nationalities and religions would protect it from internal radical strife, the report said. The terrorists, said the report, may have discovered America’s “Achilles’ heel, in that we currently have no strategy to counter the type of threat posed by homegrown terrorists and other radicalized recruits.” U.S. officials have acknowledged the need to address the radicalization problem, and for the first time, the White House this year added combating homegrown terrorism to its national security strategy. The National Counterterrorism Center and a National Security Council interagency group of representatives from 13 federal agencies and offices have taken the lead in looking at ways to counter violent extremism within the U.S. and abroad, Denis McDonough, the chief of staff of the president’s National Security Council, said in an interview with the Associated Press in June. The effort includes officials from the departments of Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice and State. The administration’s response includes a “new interagency effort that brings together key stakeholders” and continued “outreach to communities across the country,” said Ben Rhodes, the White House’s deputy national security adviser. The FBI, meanwhile, has worked to reach out to the Somali communities, in an effort to counter the radicalization of the youth. The report also points to an “Americanization” of the leadership of al Qaeda and its allied groups, noting that radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who had links with suspects in the failed Times Square bombing and the Fort Hood shootings, grew up in New Mexico. And Chicagoan David Headley played a role in scoping the targets for the Lashkar-e-Taiba attacks on Mumbai in late 2008 that killed 166 people. Abroad, al Qaeda, its affiliates and other extremist groups have splintered and spread, seeking safe havens in undergoverned areas of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and places in North Africa and East Africa. That diversified threat has intensified as militants reach out to potential recruits through the Internet. Assessing future threats, the report lists potential future domestic targets, including passenger jets, western or American hotel chains, Jewish or Israeli sites and U.S. troops, even at their own bases in America. And it warns that it is no longer wise to think that American extremists will not resort to suicide bombings. As an example, they point to Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who has been charged with killing 13 people and wounding 32 in last year’s shootings at Fort Hood, saying he had written about suicide operations in e-mails, and that his attack appeared to be one. Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Comments Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. blog comments powered by Disqus You Might Also Like Kansas considers cutting out income tax Navy cracking down on drunk sailors D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges Celebrities In The News Adele: British singer to perform Bond theme ‘Skyfall’ at Oscars Shakira: Congrats flood in for singer’s new baby boy Justin Timberlake: Singer to perform at pre-Super Bowl party Commentary MONAHAN: Gaining ground in a 40-year march on abortion By Jeanne Monahan An anniversary marks a historic moment BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of 'germ' warfare raises fear in the Mideast TYRRELL: A penalty for Harry MILLER: Spreading gun hysteria EDITORIAL: Strike versus stumble Business Directory Popular Searches   Apartments in Washington   Attorneys in Washington   Auto Dealers in Washington   Auto Parts in Washington   Auto Repair in Washington   Beauty Salons in Washington   Car Rental in Washington   Dentists in Washington   Doctors in Washington   Flowers in Washington   Hotels in Washington   Insurance in Washington   Loans in Washington   Mortgages in Washington   Movers in Washington   Pizza in Washington   Realtors in Washington   Restaurants in Washington   Storage in Washington   Tax Preparation in Washington   Travel in Washington   Featured   More... Powered by Local.com Happening Now Having it your way? Horsemeat found in Burger King burgers Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Kansas considers cutting out income tax Most Read Most Shared Most Emailed MILLER: National assault weapon ban coming Thursday PRUDEN: Hillary Clintons last hurrah? A lasting image while explaining Benghazi MILLER: Spreading gun hysteria D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges Two-thirds of U.S. weapons owners would 'defy' a federal gun ban Who are the best and worst bosses on Capitol Hill? Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Newest threat to Islam: Lego Star Wars EDITORIAL: Inaugurating Leviathan North Korea said it's set to carry out nuclear test, aim weapons at U.S. Communities Independent voices from the TWT Communities The Tygrrrr Express A politically conservative and morally liberal Hebrew alpha male hunts left-wing viper Why Hillary Clinton Matters Hillary Clinton's Benghazi hearings: Winners and losers Hail Mary Food of Grace Chef Mary Moran discusses the food we eat, where it comes from and what it does for us. Cooking in your challenging kitchen Recipe & Class: Persimmon, pomegranate & burrata salad Sports Around Contributions to the Communities Sports desk from readers. Li Na and Victoria Azarenka in 2013 Australian Open tennis final Serena Williams upset loss to U.S. teen in 2013 Australian Open tennis TV Den Television commentary, reviews, news and nonstop DVR catch-up. TV tonight: American Idol and strong ABC line-up battle for ratings TV tonight: A taste of The Taste, premiering tonight Photo Galleries Clinton testifies on Benghazi attack 17 Photos President Obama's second inaugural 47 Photos Obama sworn in for second term 13 Photos D.C. residents volunteer during the National Day of Service 18 Photos Falcons reach NFC title game 33 Photos 'Lincoln' leads Oscars with 12 nominations 11 Photos Redskins lose 24-14 to Seahawks in playoffs 62 Photos Redskins fans celebrate playoff appearance 15 Photos Redskins' 7th straight win sends them to playoffs 34 Photos Operation Welcome Home Maryland opens its arms to U.S. troops 10 Photos Same-sex couples wed in Maryland 8 Photos Notable deaths of 2012 59 Photos Newsletter Get free daily emails on topics of interest to you, from breaking news to the day’s top stories. Privacy Policy To sign up for our daily emails, click here . To manage your email subscriptions, click here . 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Nichols December 13, 2012 , 11:42 a.m. English pantomime comes to Pasadena with a sitcom wink, a Top 40 backbeat and enough topical in-jokes to make Jon Stewart woozy in “A Snow White Christmas.” This larky take on the classic fairy tale, which opened at the Pasadena Playhouse on Wednesday, isn’t exactly high art, but that won’t hinder the enjoyment of undemanding audiences. The brainchild of Lythgoe Family Productions -- son Kris wrote the script, mom Bonnie directs and paterfamilias Nigel turns up in a video cameo -- “Snow White” seeks to Americanize the essentials of the panto tradition. Current-day song hits intertwine with frolicsome choreography (courtesy of Spencer Liff) and shrewd participatory maneuvers that ensure the house’s involvement with the action. Accordingly, we cheer the titular heroine ( Nickelodeon star Ariana Grande, unaffected and soaring of vocals), boo the Wicked Queen of North Hollywood (“Dallas” fixture Charlene Tilton, channeling Mae West on Red Bull) and watch court jester Muddles (the lithe, improv-quick Jonathan Meza) benignly flirting with front-row girls and trading vaudeville shtick with Herman the Huntsman (big-voiced David Figlioli). PHOTOS: Arts and culture by The Times There’s a handsome swain, Prince Harry of Hancock Park (Curt Hansen, toothsome and tongue-in-cheek), seven Fat Tuesday-headed dwarfs, a show-stealing miniature pony named Blitzen (Little Man, destined for equine greatness) and, naturally, a Magic Mirror (a droll, video-projected Neil Patrick Harris , who has likely never had a cushier gig). Song choices, though a tad jarring amid the uncredited storybook sets, Verilite swirls and lavish costumes (designed by Julia Clancey, Keev Guessford and Donna Maas) will appeal to the postmillennial generation. Snow White arrives with Lady Gaga ’s “ Born This Way ” and bemoans her fate to Katy Perry ’s “Firework”; the dwarfs cavort to “Lazy Song”; Prince Harry croons “The Power of Love”; the queen conspires to "Thriller" and "Bad Things"; and so forth, right up to the group singalong and "Celebration" finale. It’s all harmless fun, although the jokes grow sophomoric, even fairy tales require a measure of actual threat for their happy endings to fully register, and the absence of a holiday standard seems curious. Still, if “A Snow White Christmas” is closer to countless theme-park shows than traditional panto, it will certainly enchant its targeted demographic while giving their parents a respite from the umpteenth “Nutcracker” and “Christmas Carol” on tap. “A Snow White Christmas,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m., 3 and 7 p.m. Saturdays, 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Sundays. No shows Dec. 18-19. Ends Dec. 30. $22-$72. (626) 356-7529 or www.PasadenaPlayhouse.org . Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes. ALSO: Charles Rosen dies at 85; pianist wrote 'The Classical Style' Al Pacino in 'Glengarry Glen Ross': What did the critics think? Zubin Mehta's heady days as Los Angeles Philharmonic music director MORE INTERACTIVE: Christopher Hawthorne's On the Boulevards VOTE: What's the best version of 'O Holy Night'? PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times Comments 0 Comments (0) Add comments | Discussion FAQ Currently there are no comments. Be the first to comment! Comments are filtered for language and registration is required. The Times makes no guarantee of comments' factual accuracy. Readers may report inappropriate comments by clicking the Report Abuse link next to a comment. Here are the full legal terms you agree to by using this comment form. More Arts --Topics-- Art Theater Classical music Architecture Dance Jazz Opera Advertisement Connect Recommended on Facebook Follow @latimes Every show. Every game. Every ticket. Be the first on your street to see the show. 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Local Newsmakers Inside the Beltway Inside the Ring Pruden on Politics Embassy Row Weather BLOGS: Inside Politics Technology Opinion Editorials Commentary Letters Water Cooler Books Kuhner Nugent Cartoons BLOGS: Guns Water Cooler Video Staff Exclusives Politics Newsmaker Interviews Water Cooler Entertainment Strange and Weird National News Sports Football Baseball Basketball NCAA Olympics Tennis Golf Hockey Soccer Horse Racing Video BLOGS: Capitals Watch From the Sports Editors Nationals Watch Redskins Watch Screen Play United Watch Wizards Watch Life Entertainment Home and Lifestyle Travel Health The List Technology Books Video Media Radio: Andy Parks Photo Galleries Video Specials Presidential Inauguration 2013 A Guide to the 113th Congress Benghazi Attack Under Microscope Superstorm Sandy Health Care Reform Communities Trending: Barack Obama Senate China Pentagon White House Editors' Picks: BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of ‘germ’ warfare raises fear in the Mideast EDITORIAL: Reining in England’s busybodies BIGELOW: Knocking fiscal sense back into government North Korea warns that nuke test may be imminent Union membership at lowest point since 1930s Air Force officials testify about sexual assaults PRIEBUS: Holding Obama to his inauguration promises Deep freeze to keep folks bundled up, chilling out Obama won’t propose carbon tax RNC backs the hard line in debt fight CONNECT: Facebook Twitter RSS Home Unfiled Radio Account Edit My Profile Email Alerts Edit Password Logout Log In E-Mail Alerts Subscribe Classifieds E-Edition EDITORIAL: America’s ‘identity crisis’ Comment(s) Size: + / - Print By The Washington Times Sunday, June 8, 2008 Follow Us On Facebook Follow @washtimes Question of the Day Should women be allowed to serve in direct combat? Yes No Undecided Other View results The Bradley Project on America ’s National Identity issued a report which contends that America’s national identity is being weakened by the spread of multiculturalism and globalization. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation established this project in 2007. The vast majority of the 2,421 respondents in a Harris Interactive National Survey commissioned by the Bradley Project expressed concern that American society is increasingly polarized and divided - and that knowledge of the nation’s common heritage and ideals is eroding. The results are disturing and point to a growing problem that requires attention. The study reveals that 84 percent maintain that there is a unique American national identity. This consists of viewing American identity as based on a set of ideas and on a way of life - rather than founded on ethnicity. Those surveyed define American national identity as a commitment to freedom: This includes free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of opportunity and political freedom. The American ethos contains the following traits: competition, individualism, optimism, self-reliance, religious faith and patriotism. The majority of respondents view America as a unique democracy; the nation upholds the rule of law and a has a formidable Constitution. Yet 63 percent maintain that American national identity is growing weaker; 24 percent state that Americans are already so divided we can no longer sustain a common identity. Most alarming is the result among younger respondents: Those below age 35 are more likely to declare that there is no national identity. This points to a failure by the current generation of adults to transmit the nation’s heritage to the youth. The Bradley Project on American National Identity seeks to “initiate a conversation” on America’s “identity crisis.” The study reveals that the overwhelming majority share a fear that America is being balkanized; 80 percent of whites, 86 percent of blacks and 74 percent of Hispanics are concerned that America is increasingly divided along ethnic and cultural lines. Americans can therefore begin to demand changes in their communities based on the evidence available. For example, 89 percent state that new immigrants must be Americanized - which means they must learn English and embrace American culture. Also, the majority of parents insist that they would be upset if their children were taught in school that America is “fundamentally a racist country.” The majority of participants also agree that citizenship rather than ethnicity should be the focus of education. The advocates for this national conversation insist that their aim is to redress the balance: They are not demanding the creation of a uniform America, but an America in which both diversity and unity are in harmony. They declare that the pendulum has swung too far toward a devaluation of all that is good in America; there is instead a constant harping on America’s flaws. They also state that there is too much emphasis on our differences rather than on areas of common ground. The study recommends that American history be taught in elementary schools and colleges; this includes teaching primary documents and a celebration of American heroes. The authors of the report are calling for the end to the celebration of the generic Presidents Day and the restoration of the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln as national holidays. They also insist that newcomers must be taught American values, that we should provide civic education based on explaining the principles of American democracy (not “global citizenship”) and that we should institute a Presidential Award for American Citizenship to students and new immigrants. (We add English literacy to the list.) The study presents valuable information and provides good suggestions. Indeed, the “national conversation” on American identity that began more than 30 years ago - and has been raging in the education system and across our society ever since - requires increased focus based on the will of the majority of the American people. America’s national identity is being systematically and deliberately eroded by internationalists and mutliculturalists who occupy positions of influence: They seek to replace American nationalism with a globalist agenda. The data presented by the Bradley Project provides hope that Americans want to reclaim their national identity. A daily and long-term battle is necessary in order to resist current trends. Reclaiming America’s heritage will require the sustained and determined action of Americans in each community for years to come. Comments Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. blog comments powered by Disqus You Might Also Like Kansas considers cutting out income tax Navy cracking down on drunk sailors D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges Celebrities In The News Adele: British singer to perform Bond theme ‘Skyfall’ at Oscars Shakira: Congrats flood in for singer’s new baby boy Justin Timberlake: Singer to perform at pre-Super Bowl party Commentary MONAHAN: Gaining ground in a 40-year march on abortion By Jeanne Monahan An anniversary marks a historic moment BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of 'germ' warfare raises fear in the Mideast TYRRELL: A penalty for Harry MILLER: Spreading gun hysteria EDITORIAL: Strike versus stumble Business Directory Popular Searches   Apartments in Washington   Attorneys in Washington   Auto Dealers in Washington   Auto Parts in Washington   Auto Repair in Washington   Beauty Salons in Washington   Car Rental in Washington   Dentists in Washington   Doctors in Washington   Flowers in Washington   Hotels in Washington   Insurance in Washington   Loans in Washington   Mortgages in Washington   Movers in Washington   Pizza in Washington   Realtors in Washington   Restaurants in Washington   Storage in Washington   Tax Preparation in Washington   Travel in Washington   Featured   More... Powered by Local.com Happening Now Having it your way? Horsemeat found in Burger King burgers Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Kansas considers cutting out income tax Most Read Most Shared Most Emailed MILLER: National assault weapon ban coming Thursday PRUDEN: Hillary Clintons last hurrah? A lasting image while explaining Benghazi MILLER: Spreading gun hysteria D.C. man who shot dogs biting boy could face charges Two-thirds of U.S. weapons owners would 'defy' a federal gun ban Who are the best and worst bosses on Capitol Hill? Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Newest threat to Islam: Lego Star Wars EDITORIAL: Inaugurating Leviathan North Korea said it's set to carry out nuclear test, aim weapons at U.S. Communities Independent voices from the TWT Communities The Tygrrrr Express A politically conservative and morally liberal Hebrew alpha male hunts left-wing viper Why Hillary Clinton Matters Hillary Clinton's Benghazi hearings: Winners and losers Hail Mary Food of Grace Chef Mary Moran discusses the food we eat, where it comes from and what it does for us. Cooking in your challenging kitchen Recipe & Class: Persimmon, pomegranate & burrata salad Sports Around Contributions to the Communities Sports desk from readers. Li Na and Victoria Azarenka in 2013 Australian Open tennis final Serena Williams upset loss to U.S. teen in 2013 Australian Open tennis TV Den Television commentary, reviews, news and nonstop DVR catch-up. TV tonight: American Idol and strong ABC line-up battle for ratings TV tonight: A taste of The Taste, premiering tonight Photo Galleries Clinton testifies on Benghazi attack 17 Photos President Obama's second inaugural 47 Photos Obama sworn in for second term 13 Photos D.C. residents volunteer during the National Day of Service 18 Photos Falcons reach NFC title game 33 Photos 'Lincoln' leads Oscars with 12 nominations 11 Photos Redskins lose 24-14 to Seahawks in playoffs 62 Photos Redskins fans celebrate playoff appearance 15 Photos Redskins' 7th straight win sends them to playoffs 34 Photos Operation Welcome Home Maryland opens its arms to U.S. troops 10 Photos Same-sex couples wed in Maryland 8 Photos Notable deaths of 2012 59 Photos Newsletter Get free daily emails on topics of interest to you, from breaking news to the day’s top stories. Privacy Policy To sign up for our daily emails, click here . To manage your email subscriptions, click here . 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Local Newsmakers Inside the Beltway Inside the Ring Pruden on Politics Embassy Row Weather BLOGS: Inside Politics Technology Opinion Editorials Commentary Letters Water Cooler Books Kuhner Nugent Cartoons BLOGS: Guns Water Cooler Video Staff Exclusives Politics Newsmaker Interviews Water Cooler Entertainment Strange and Weird National News Sports Football Baseball Basketball NCAA Olympics Tennis Golf Hockey Soccer Horse Racing Video BLOGS: Capitals Watch From the Sports Editors Nationals Watch Redskins Watch Screen Play United Watch Wizards Watch Life Entertainment Home and Lifestyle Travel Health The List Technology Books Video Media Radio: Andy Parks Photo Galleries Video Specials Presidential Inauguration 2013 A Guide to the 113th Congress Benghazi Attack Under Microscope Superstorm Sandy Health Care Reform Communities Trending: Senate Barack Obama China Pentagon White House Editors' Picks: BELLAMY VAN AAIST, LOPEZ, KAHLILI: Scent of ‘germ’ warfare raises fear in the Mideast EDITORIAL: Reining in England’s busybodies BIGELOW: Knocking fiscal sense back into government North Korea warns that nuke test may be imminent Union membership at lowest point since 1930s Air Force officials testify about sexual assaults PRIEBUS: Holding Obama to his inauguration promises Deep freeze to keep folks bundled up, chilling out Obama won’t propose carbon tax RNC backs the hard line in debt fight CONNECT: Facebook Twitter RSS Home Blogs Mystics Watch Radio Account Edit My Profile Email Alerts Edit Password Logout Log In E-Mail Alerts Subscribe Classifieds E-Edition Ajavon is one of top contenders for WNBA Most Improved Player ← return to Mystics Watch Comment(s) Size: + / - Print By Carla Peay - The Washington Times September 6, 2011, 12:50PM Follow @ckpeay Recent Entries Mystics focus on life lessons as season draws to a close Crystal Langhorne done for the season Monique Currie relishes spoiler role in Sunday's Mystics vs. Liberty game Mystics try to stop nine-game losing skid Mystics free fall continues with their latest loss Matee Ajavon came to the United States in 1992 at the age of six, and after almost 20 years, says she's pretty “Americanized” by this point. Born in Liberia, the Mystics guard is about to complete her fourth season in the WNBA, but it's a bittersweet one for Ajavon. The Mystics are about to close out one of their worst season's in franchise history - they are 6-26 with two games left - but for Ajavon, it's been a breakout season for her personally, one which has her in strong contention for the WNBA's Most Improved Player. “I was able to start this year, and I grew a lot as a player,” Ajavon said. “It's really been a tough season for our team. No one ever wants to lose. We went through a couple of changes this year, and we're just trying to make the best of it, but we also grew as a team,” Ajavon said. One of the changes includes Ajavon as the team's starting two-guard, a role she inherited after Alana Beard missed her second straight season due to injury. Formerly cast as an absolute spark plug of energy off the bench in her three seasons in Washington, Ajavon has embraced the starting role. “It was my first year starting, so I was able to play a lot. I just wanted to be able to contribute to my team however I could,” Ajavon said. Ajavon played in college at Rutgers, and spent her first season in the WNBA with the now-defunct Houston Comets before joining the Mystics. As a starter this season, Ajavon has increased her points-per-game average to just under 15 (14.8). She's also averaging 1.7 steals, 3.0 assists, and 2.3 rebounds per game this season, and plays about 31 minutes per game, making her one of the few bright spots for the Mystics this year. “You can't just label us as a bad team because of the loses,” Ajavon said.” “For the most part, we competed with a lot of teams and our games went down to the wire. One of the biggest things we learned was to never be satisfied with the losing; to never get used to it. A lot of things about our program will change by next year,” Ajavon said. Ajavon said she hopes to return to Liberia in a couple of years, and wouldn't mind having some WNBA hardware to take with her, the like 2011 Most Improved Player Award. “It would be a great accomplishment for to win,” Ajavon said. “It shows how how hard I've been working and waiting my turn. I just want to continue to grow and get better,” Ajavon said. Among her favorite players, Ajavon lists former Rutgers teammate Epiphanny Prince, who made the all-star team this year, and all-time great Tamika Catchings, selected as one the the top-15 players in WNBA history. Ajavon models her game after another all-time top 15-player, Cappie Pondexter. Head coach and general manager Trudi Lacey believes Ajavon deserves serious consideration for the MIP Award. “In a starting role this year, Matee has really improved,” Lacey said. “There's a lot of upside to her game.” Ajavon said she tries to take a little bit from everyone's game and add it to her own. Former MIP winner, all-star teammate Crystal Langhorne, thinks it's working. “Matee has meant so much to this team,” Langhorne said. “For her come in and play how she's played with the absence of certain players, I think it really shows how much confidence she's gained, and how much she's learned as a player,” Langhorne said. “She's really stepped up her game this year and showed people in this league what she can do.” ← return to Mystics Watch Paid Advertisement About the Author Carla Peay Follow @ckpeay Carla Peay keeps you up to date on the Washington Wizards and the NBA. 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Gallup: Obama hits record high for polarizing politics Newest threat to Islam: Lego Star Wars EDITORIAL: Inaugurating Leviathan North Korea said it's set to carry out nuclear test, aim weapons at U.S. Newsletter Get free daily emails on topics of interest to you, from breaking news to the day’s top stories. Privacy Policy To sign up for our daily emails, click here . To manage your email subscriptions, click here . Find Us On Facebook - The Washington Times - Sports - Opinion - Andy Parks - Photos - Communities Follow Us On Twitter - The Washington Times - Politics - Opinion - Nation - World - D.C. Local - Culture - Sports - Books - Andy Parks - Photos - Communities Home News - Politics - National - World - Security - Economy - D.C. 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Yes No Undecided Other View results In a follow-up to its “Leaving Islam?” bus campagin, Stop the Islamization of America has launched a “pro-freedom” cab ad campaign in Chicago against honor killings. The campaign aims both to offer safety to girls in trouble and to raise awareness nationwide about a little-acknowledged problem. “Honor Killing Victim” is displayed on each ad, next to a picture of a victim of an honor killing in the West — two in the U.S. , and one each in Britain and Germany . Underneath, the ad reads, “is your family threatening you?” with a website, LeaveIslamSafely.com. “They wanted liberty They got death” flanks each ad. Each of the Muslim girls featured on the ads — Americans Amina and Sarah Said and Noor Almaleki; German Gulsum Semin; and Briton Banaz Mahmod — was killed in attacks blamed on family members, reportedly for refusing an Islamic marriage, dating a non-Muslim, or becoming “too Americanized.” The Semin and Mahmod deaths ended in murder convictions; the Saids and the Almaleki cases have murder charges pending against the fathers, though Yaser Said is a fugitive. The campaign follows the attempted honor killing last week of Afshan Azad, the “Harry Potter” films star who was badly beaten last week by her Muslim father and brother for dating a non-Muslim. The ads in Chicago are the first in a nationwide campaign that SIOA hopes will raise Amercans’ awareness of the honor killings happening in their own country. According to a recent survey cited on SIOA’s website, 91 percent of the honor killings worldwide and 84 percent of those in the United States are done by Muslims. “Young Muslim girls must know there is an escape from their homemade concentration camps,” said Pamela Gellar, executive director of the group and a widely-read anti-jihad blogger. © Copyright 2013 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. About the Author Michal Elseth Michal Elseth is an intern with the National Journalism Center working in commentary and national news for the summer. She graduated in May with a Bachelor of Arts in English from Hillsdale College. Michal loves D.C. and life as a graduate, but she is actually from the other Washington and hopes to work in journalism there. 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While he did not elaborate on what an American version of Islam might look like, he did note that different interpretations of the faith have emerged over the religion's nearly 1,400-year existence. "The same principles and rituals were everywhere, but what happened in different regions was there were different interpretations," Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is on the first leg of a 15-day Mideast tour funded by the U.S. State Department, said. "So we recognize that our heritage allows for re-expressing the internal principles of our religion in different cultural times and places." Rauf refused to discuss the political firestorm over the plans for an Islamic cultural center about two blocks from the World Trade Center towers. Foes of the project say it is insensitive and disrespectful to the victims of 9/11 and their families. The debate has become politicized ahead of November's midterm congressional elections. Mosque Near WTC Divides Sept. 11 Relatives Howard Dean on Mosque Comments: "Not Going to Back Off" Rudy Giuliani: Move Mosque away from Ground Zero Instead, Rauf preferred to focus on shared concerns. Speaking after leading Friday prayers at a neighborhood mosque outside Bahrain's capital Manama, he said radical religious views pose a security threat in both the West and the Muslim world. He said he hopes to draw attention during his trip in the Middle East to the common challenges to battle radical religious beliefs. "This issue of extremism is something that has been a national security issue - not only for the United States but also for many countries and nations in the Muslim world," Rauf said. "This is why this particular trip has a great importance because all countries in the Muslim world - as well as the Western world - are facing this ... major security challenge." This is Rauf's fourth U.S-government sponsored trip to the region, according to the State Department. He traveled twice to the Mideast in 2007 during the Bush administration and once earlier this year. Rauf will also visit Qatar and the United Arab Emirates during this trip to talk about Muslim life in America. Details of the imam's specific plans in each country have been closely guarded - possibly in reaction to the rancor in the United States over plans proposed by Rauf's organization, The Cordoba Initiative, for an Islamic cultural center near the site of the World Trade Center towers. President Barack Obama has said he believes Muslims have the right to build an Islamic center in New York as a matter of religious freedom, though he's also said he won't take a position on whether they should actually build it. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg came out in support of the mosque, calling it a test of the separation of church and state. New York Gov. David Paterson suggested last week that leaders of the project might want to consider relocating out of sensitivity to families of those killed on Sept. 11. He said he had the support of Islamic clergy, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who led the city through the attacks and their aftermath. The governor and state officials won't say what other site would be suitable for the center or where the state owns nearby land. This week, Paterson said he had hoped to meet with developers in a couple of days to talk about the concerns of those still hurt and angry over the Sept. 11 attacks. He told WNYC Radio's "The Take Away" on Friday that he's still seeking a meeting, but that the group postponed a Monday meeting because of Rauf's travels. Muslims have been holding prayer services since last year in the building that the new project will replace. Fact Check: The "Ground Zero Mosque" Debate Howard Dean: NYC Mosque a "Real Affront" "Ground Zero Mosque" Developers: We Won't Move Pelosi Questions Funding of NYC Mosque Critics Obama has "No Regrets" Weighing in on NYC Mosque Buchanan: Newt Gingrich "Opportunist" on Mosque Mosque Opponents Leaving X-Rated Shops Alone © 2010 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Popular on CBSNews.com The Top 5 feel-good stories of 2012 The most heartwarming and inspiring stories of the year include a committed dog owner, an elderly food reviewer, and a Secret Santa Tragic moments of 2012 From senseless shootings to natural disasters, here's a look back at some of the year's most shocking stories Charges levied in Philly "Basement of Horrors" case 4th grader youngest certified Microsoft technician Play Video Missing Coast Guardsman reappears after 3 months Polar air mass keeps icy grip on Northeast Deep freeze to last into weekend in eastern U.S. Schools in Calif. town get high-powered rifles Calif. porn actress-turned teacher loses appeal Linda Pugach, blinded in infamous NYC crime, dies 79 Comments Add a Comment link icon report icon email icon liberalme says: Just to keep the facts straight HELEN---it was the REPUBLICANS who voted and PASSED to rezone that area in 2000! Personally, I do think it to be a good idea to move the mosque elsewhere as it shows no respect to Americans--but that's where it ends, I don't care how many mosques, temples, catholic, baptist or any other house of worship there is or where it is---just not a good idea for the mosque to go there. You Helen are too FIXED on FIXED news and apparently have no mind of your own! reply Lawyers-Guns-n-Money06 replies: link icon report icon email icon Fixed News, what a laugh! Fox has become too moderate for these ueber-fascists. It's not news to them any more unless it comes from some internet meme, WND or AIM. liberalme replies: link icon report icon email icon No these people pray to the hammity, lintball and beck (the wreck) gods--they wouldn't have anything to say or know how to think without those commedians. link icon report icon email icon Lawyers-Guns-n-Money06 says: by helen97068 August 20, 2010 6:52 PM EDT The Community Center IS a Mosque. ========================== Calling this thing a mosque is like calling a mall a fast food joint because it has a McDonalds in it. reply Lawyers-Guns-n-Money06 replies: link icon report icon email icon ...or calling a Catholic hospital with a chapel in it a cathedral. link icon report icon email icon AmazingGrce says: The Snake - sung by Al Wilson - Comes to mind when I hear about any effort to "Americanize Islam" Nuff Said reply Lawyers-Guns-n-Money06 replies: link icon report icon email icon AIn't gonna happen. More than likely, there will be an attempt for the swastika-zation of America. link icon report icon email icon bradkt1 says: Marginalizing, isolating and demonizing moderate Muslims only gives ammunition to the extremists, the rejectionists and the terrorists and their sympathizers. I have no problem with those who wish to meet with this group to try to find a satisfactory alternative for locating this planned Islamic cultural center...but, at the same time, I believe that we must support the right on any law-abiding religious group to build a house of worship where they want to. I understand that the 9/11 terrorist attacks left wounds that are still raw. I only hope that a negotiated compromise can be reached. I think that this issue is bringing out the worst in a lot of people and is being exploited and demagouged by some politicians for purely political gain and at the cost of some of the values that the 9/11 terrorists tried to destroy in this country. reply Brian5013MS replies: link icon report icon email icon helen97068 agreed Phxfire replies: link icon report icon email icon Islam is no more an advocate for murder and mayhem than Christians are all for white supremacy and overthrowing the government (like so many extremist 'Christians). Its another extreme faction of a religion that is provoking attacks and making so many of you extremists in your own right. Helen, etal, you need to be better informed, through rational, honest and unbiased sources. I suggest you start at the library. link icon report icon email icon Myopinion046 says: Yeah, after Sharia Law is in place like that imam has stated is his intent. reply starving1968-3 replies: link icon report icon email icon Myopinion046 apparently has ZERO confidence in America, our military, our laws, our constituion...... Lawyers-Guns-n-Money06 replies: link icon report icon email icon Yup, the ueber right wing propagandists are fanning the flames and molding the narrative. Goebbels would be proud. See all 4 Replies link icon report icon email icon cbswayne says: CBS News is just fanning the flames on this issue when it calls the community center a mosque. reply link icon report icon email icon M_Miles says: A Ground Zero area mosque supporter spends $23 million dollars to establish legal status for Islamic law tribunals. Nancy Pelosi you might want to find out where that money came from? HINT: read article associated with following paragraph and link. An investigation by three Republican congressmen has revealed the Obama administration has secretly spent $23 million of U.S. taxpayer dollars in Kenya to fund a "Yes" vote on a constitutional referendum scheduled for Aug. 4 that would increase access to abortions in Kenya and establish legal status for Islamic law tribunals. http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=181405 reply dihardman replies: link icon report icon email icon 1.Has anyone associated Obama's vacation dates with Ramadan month of fasting and prayer? Check the calendar...2009 & 2010 - 2 yrs. in a row, Obama has taken time off. ***Did taxpayers' dollars pay for that Ramadan dinner where Obama spoke in support the mosque? ***It's obvious that Obama puts his muslim background above the hearts of American citizens and above the price those paid who were victims of 9/11 2.Also, what happened to the investigation re: Obama's birthplace?? That investigation seems to have disappeared just like the $23 billion did. Don't you think it's strange that his grandmother passed away just before he was sworn in? Is she really dead or has he put her away in hiding? What about the disappearance of his aunt who kept saying Obama was born in Africa?? 3.As for the $23 Billion secretly spent by Obama's adm...I am appalled that he was able to do this using taxpayers money...I'm sure our millions of unemployed could have made much better use of that money and it would have added a spark to our economy. Too many Americans are hurting and he spent our money on abortions in Kenya and legal status fror Islamic law tribunals, is unbelieveable! What's wrong with this picture? 4. What about taxpayers' money being spent on traveling costs for Obama to campaign for Democrats? Is it OK to use our money for campaign funds regardless of the party you represent? Why haven't the other party members opposed this? 5.How much longer are we the American people going to stay silent and let this type of "leadership" continue? VOTE PEOPLE VOTE! ***Obama is taking us down much quicker than Al Quaeda ever could. How does he continue to get away with this?? ***Whose side is Obama on?? Has he forgotten that he's an "American" president?? ***Am I upset? You bet your life I am! I have never been a protester, but my limit is boiling over! ***A ps note to Nancy Pelosi - I believed she said the League of Women voters were traitors because they did not agree with Obama's administration. Well, Nancy, "I am not a traitor, I am not a racist, I am not for/against Democrats nor am I for/against Republicans, but I am an American tax paying citizen, a wife, mother, grandmother speaking up for unity (our motto used to be "United we stand...) I am against an administration that is robbing us blind (the silent $23 billion is just one of many examples) silently breaking this country, dividing us (where is the unity Obama campaigned on?) His administration is killing our souls bit by bit, silently taking away our constitutional rights, and trying to take away God... ***I have news for Obama - God is much bigger than you, and if you succeed in any form or fashion to remove his name or take away our right to worship/pray, it's only because God has allowed it for completion of His divine plan, and not for your glory. ***After spouting off like this, don't be surprised if I am arrested or suddenly disappear, or have an "accident"...who knows how far this administration will go to "snuff" out anyone who says anything negative that doesn't suit their needs? link icon report icon email icon M_Miles says: Ground Zero area mosque supporter secret may need investigation by Nancy Pelosi? . . . An investigation by three Republican congressmen has revealed the Obama administration has secretly spent $23 million of U.S. taxpayer dollars in Kenya to fund a "Yes" vote on a constitutional referendum scheduled for Aug. 4 that would increase access to abortions in Kenya and establish legal status for Islamic law tribunals. From article at following link . . . http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=181405 The Ground Zero area mosque supporter under investigation wants to establish Islamic law tribuals?! "Wait,is that President Obama they are talking about in the article?!" reply link icon report icon email icon PapaGracio says: All this talk about islaminizing America is just another front.Liberals turning the heads of americans away from the Mexicanization of Amercia. Which is there true goal! You have not seen much on the tube about Arizona recently have you? Using Ahab the Arab to cloak the invasion of Manuel the Mexican. Although, givien the choice I would take the latter. If all of American life looked like a Cheech and Chong movie, I would be satisfied. Very satisfied. reply link icon report icon email icon ge556 says: helen97068 said, "1. Muslim leaders love converts and Liberals are very easy targets." Wow, helen. I think you win a special cluelessness award for that one. Guess I'll tell my wife to buy a burqa and quit her job now. reply See all 79 Comments Add a Comment Submit Comment Click here to add another comment. The posting of advertisements, profanity, or personal attacks is prohibited. By using this Web site you agree to accept our Terms of Service . Click here to read the Rules of Engagement . Reply to Comment Submit Comment Cancel The posting of advertisements, profanity, or personal attacks is prohibited. By using this Web site you agree to accept our Terms of Service . Click here to read the Rules of Engagement . 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All rights reserved. Don’t Pick On Immigrants: Re-Americanize Everyone | TIME.com Skip to Content TIME Ideas Sections → NewsFeed U.S. Politics World Business Tech Health Science Entertainment Style Sports Opinion Photos Magazine Video LIFE.com Lists TIME Home Home U.S. Politics World Business & Tech Health & Science Life & Style Arts & Entertainment Letters Contributors Top 10 of 2012 Magazine Video LIFE Person of the Year Search Search TIME Follow Facebook Twitter Google+ Tumblr RSS Apps U.S. Don’t Pick On Immigrants: Re-Americanize Everyone By Eric Liu March 20, 2012 0 Share John Amis / AP Immigration rights demonstrators march outside the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on March 1, 2012. Related Mississippi Lawmakers Pass Controversial Immigration Bill CNN.com Email Print Share Facebook Twitter Tumblr LinkedIn StumbleUpon Reddit Digg Mixx Delicious Google+ Comment Follow @TIMEIdeas Have you ever watched someone become American? Last week, at a national citizenship conference I organize, thirty immigrants from 17 countries swore an oath and became citizens of the United States. It was a stirring experience for the hundreds of people in the room. (MORE : Pictures of the Week ) Our speaker that day was Gerda Weissmann Klein, an octogenarian Holocaust survivor from Poland who was liberated from the camps, married the GI who liberated her, became a U.S. citizen, wrote a celebrated book , and founded the organization Citizenship Counts . Her message, to Americans new and longstanding, was simple: freedom is responsibility. I was struck by Klein’s remarkable personal journey, but even more so by her full-throated faith in American citizenship. For such faith is becoming rare. Immigration is in the news every day—but mainly because states like Arizona, Alabama and Mississippi are enacting laws to drive immigrants out. And while the courts are striking down some of these laws, the politics of citizenship remain fraught. From the right, you get demagogues shouting about brown-skinned anchor babies and clamoring to deport the undocumented. From the left, you get advocacy for the oppressed but otherwise, when it comes to national civic identity, mainly silence. Conservatives forget that citizenship is more than a thing to withhold from immigrants. Progressives forget it’s more than a set of rights. What’s missing is a reckoning with the true content of our citizenship – with the exceptional nature of our inheritance and the skills needed to sustain it. That absence looms large as our communities become ever more fragmented and our politics more polarized. (MORE : Why Jeremy Lin Makes Us All American ) More than ever today, we need to re-Americanize Americans. We need a movement – for native-born citizens and newcomers alike; adults as much as children – to reanimate our creed, cultivate character for civic life, and foster a culture of strong citizenship. Here’s how to reinforce those three civic pillars. Creed. To be Americanized is first to be immersed in the tenets of our democratic faith, expressed in seminal texts, speeches, and stories, from Jefferson’s time to our own. It means being comfortable telling everyone that what separates this nation from others is that it has a moral identity. When Jefferson proclaimed the truth of human equality “self-evident,” he was not recording a fact; he was asserting one. His saying so helped make it so. It falls on us to keep it so. To reanimate the creed we need to focus in part on revitalizing civic education in our schools. Though public education is largely left to the states, there should be a federal requirement that the basic texts of our nation’s civic creed be taught, in an upward spiral, every year from kindergarten to twelfth grade. After all, as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor   notes , this was the very point of creating free and compulsory public education: to make citizens.   Character.  Civic character is more than industry, perseverance, and other personal virtues. It is character in the collective: team-spiritedness, mutuality, reciprocity, responsibility, empathy, service, cooperation. It is acting as if you believed that society becomes how you behave. Educators and parents need to teach not just the texts but also the context of civic character: how the everyday choices we make in public cascade into an ethic of responsibility – or not. Culture. Is there a gap between the high ideals of America’s civic religion and our very imperfect union? Certainly. But our country is unique in that it measures its worth by naming, and ever narrowing, that gap. To Americanize means to build a culture of song, story, and scene around this fact. The patriotic pageants of yore didn’t acknowledge the creative tension between ideals and reality. But we can create new pageants to interpret the old rituals and symbols in contemporary ways, not with irony but with urgency. In the end, a new Americanization movement can’t just be about listing our privileges and immunities, which we catalog in our laws. It also has to be about reinforcing our duties, which we convey in our habits. Of course, Americanization can be abused and co-opted by those with a narrow, even racist idea of America. That’s what happened a century ago during the last push to Americanize immigrants. But the potential for abuse does not absolve us of responsibility for proper use; it only doubles the burden. That means progressives have to get over their distaste for patriotism and assert that they, too, claim America. After all, our nation is dedicated to a proposition that is inherently progressive. The right has to get over its fear of demographic change and a majority-minority future. After all, the thing most worth conserving in American life is our tradition of adaptation to change. New citizens do this kind of fearless claiming by swearing an oath. It’s time for us all to become sworn-again Americans. MORE : Why Latino Voters Will Swing the 2012 Election Eric Liu @ericpliu Liu is the author of several books, including The Gardens of Democracy and The Accidental Asian . He was a speechwriter and policy adviser to President Clinton. The views expressed are solely his own. 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All rights reserved Privacy Policy Your California Privacy Rights RSS Newsletter Mobile TIME For Kids Subscribe Contact Us Terms of Use Media Kit Reprints & Permissions Help Site Map Ad Choices Custom Content Powered by WordPress.com VIP our partners Ground Zero mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf wants to 'Americanize' Islam - NY Daily News Thursday, January 24, 2013 NYDailyNews.com / New York Jobs Classifieds Contests Daily Reader Offers Home Delivery Services Apps Search Field site web blogs Powered by Yahoo Daily News America New York More of New York : Events Bronx Brooklyn Queens Uptown Weather Death Notices New York Pics News Politics Sports Showbiz Opinion Living Photos Video Autos New York Ground Zero mosque Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf wants to 'Americanize' Islam By Samuel Goldsmith , Celeste Katz AND Adam Lisberg / DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS Friday, August 20, 2010, 12:49 PM Print Print Comment Siegel for News Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is in Bahrain as part of a State Department-funded tour. Related Stories No fund-raising for mosque on U.S. dime, imam told Imam planning Islamic center, mosque near WTC site rips critics Mosque hysteria Debate heats up over proposed mosque near Ground Zero Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf refused to discuss his controversial Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero on the first day of his State Department junket. Instead, he spoke in Bahrain about the threat religious radicals pose to both the West and the Muslim world. "This issue of extremism is something that has been a national security issue," Rauf said. "This is why this particular trip has a great importance because all countries in the Muslim world - as well as the Western world - are facing this major security challenge." His first speech on the tour came after a long week of calls from across the country to move Park51 , the planned 13-story community center and mosque two blocks north of Ground Zero. The imam will also visit Qatar and the United Arab Emirates on the 15-day speaking tour designed to paint a picture of Muslim life in America . The State Department has said this is Rauf's fourth trip on their behalf. They insist the $16,000 junket funded by the Bureau of International Information Programs was scheduled long before the Park51 controversy began. Rauf also discussed his work on trying to "Americanize Islam," though he did not say what he hopes it would look like. "The same principles and rituals were everywhere, but what happened in different regions was there were different interpretations," he said. "So we recognize that our heritage allows for re-expressing the internal principles of our religion in different cultural times and places." Back in New York , Park51 officials hired lobbyist Tiffany Raspberry to negotiate with city and state officials after weeks of trying to manage its government relationships on its own. "I'm hoping to help the developer negotiate the political landscape in New York City and New York State," Raspberry told the Daily News. A new Twitter stream mocking Park51 emerged yesterday and took a harsh tone on the project. The fake feed carries inflammatory messages like: "There IS a need for our project! We need to laugh at Americans! We need to dance on the graves of infidels!" and "Allahu Akbar! Islam will dominate! Down with Israel (little satan) & America (big satan!) Thank u for ur support!" It's not clear who's operating the fake feed. With News Wire Services alisberg@nydailynews.com Post a Comment » Comments See All Comments [ Discussion Guidelines ] To post your comments, please, Sign in » . X Show more comments Ads by Yahoo! 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Order Print » Media Kit Autos Home Delivery Newsletters Businesses Place an Ad About our Ads Contact Us FAQ's Feeds Site Map Use of this website signifies your agreement to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . © Copyright 2013 NYDailyNews.com. All rights reserved. Americanize America's Immigrants | Conservative News, Views & Books THE HUMAN EVENTS GROUP REGNERY BOOKS Regnery Books Little Patriot Press HEALTH Newport Natural Health MONEY & INVESTING Eagle Daily Investor Mark Skousen Doug Fabian Nicholas Vardy Chris Versace Economy & Budget Energy & Environment Defense & National Security Politics Technology & Freedom Healthcare Staff Reporters John Gizzi David Harsanyi John Hayward Hope Hodge Audrey Hudson Neil W. McCabe Contributors Gary Bauer Al DiGuido James R. Edwards, Jr. Steven Greenhut Ken Hanner Mark LaRochelle Robert Maginnis Columnists Michael Barone Pat Buchanan Ann Coulter Newt Gingrich Charles Krauthammer Larry Kudlow David Limbaugh Michelle Malkin Oliver North Chuck Norris Bill O’Reilly Debra Saunders Thomas Sowell John Stossel George Will Walter Williams Human Events Blog Political Data Debt Earmarks Individual Contributions Candidate Contributions Committee Contributions Meet the Member Election 2012 2012 Results Map E-Letters Daily Events RedState Morning Briefing Ann Coulter Letter Newt Gingrich Letter Guns & Patriots About Us Immigration Americanize America’s Immigrants By: Deroy Murdock 3/12/2007 03:01 AM RESIZE: A A A Print Voters in Beverly Hills elected city council members last Tuesday. Americans from Bangor, Maine to Bellevue, Washington would fume if they saw the ballot. It appeared in English, Spanish, and Farsi. That’s right. U.S. citizens just days ago cast ballots published in the official language of Iran, the nation that nicknamed America “the Great Satan.” See for yourself here . This bizarre outrage highlights a bigger problem: What will America do with the millions of immigrants — illegal and otherwise — who pour in, across the veritable open field that is our southern frontier, and through the international airports that replaced Ellis Island? Whether this parade should be accelerated, slowed, or stopped, America’s immigrants should be Americanized. As this English-Spanish-Farsi ballot vividly demonstrates, American officials and elites expect so little of immigrants that voting, studying, and even publishing official documents in foreign tongues are increasingly routine. As this multicultural “gorgeous mosaic” has replaced the traditional melting pot, it has fueled many Americans’ immigration-related anxieties. GOP presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani said last month that he wants to see “Americanization as part of immigration .” Once our dangerously unguarded boarders are tightened — through low-tech fencing to high-tech surveillance tools — how should America handle immigrants who already are here? America should renew its commitment to English in civic life. Speaking other languages at home and in cultural festivals like Cinco de Mayo and Chinese New Year adds color and variety to the American scene. But if we cannot communicate among ourselves in the town square, a self-imposed, Balkanesque bedlam will engulf this land. Consequently, bilingual ballots should vanish. Immigrants are supposed to understand English before being naturalized. So, why are those who supposedly are fluent in English voting in other idioms? Farsi ballots suggest that American candidates should campaign in Farsi. If American immigrants from Iran don’t speak English, how will they follow the ongoing presidential race? Must Hillary Clinton or John McCain start stumping in Persian? Bilingual education also should be limited to two years per student, maximum, just as federal welfare benefits are limited to two years per recipient. Such classes should be truly bilingual, aimed at quickly moving students into mainstream English classes. Today’s “bilingual” education usually involves endless monolingual instruction, typically in Spanish, from which Hispanic students rarely emerge. As Americanization advocate John Fonte suggests, the Bush Administration immediately should reverse President Clinton’s Executive Order No. 11366. It requires that Uncle Sam publish all federal documents in Chinese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. As Fonte, a Hudson Institute senior fellow, told the Federalist Society last April 24: “The Bush Administration has pushed beyond even Clinton, requiring state DMVs to have foreign-language speakers available for voter registration in languages other than English.” This is grotesque and must stop. Fonte also would end the dual allegiance that naturalized immigrants lately have been permitted. As Fonte reports, Manuel de la Cruz took the Oath of Allegiance in which he declared, “…I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen…” Then, on July 4, 2004, this naturalized American won a state senate seat in Zacatecas, Mexico. De la Cruz should decide if he is Mexican or American. Ditto for dual citizens. U.S. citizenship should not be multiple-choice, with fealty to other flags. If the U.S. ever battled Iran, for instance, for which nation would dual Iranian-Americans cheer? Finally, through civic education, immigrants should discover and embrace America’s ideals of constitutionalism, individual liberty, personal responsibility, limited government, and free enterprise. They also should understand U.S. history and respect the key individuals who shaped this nation. In 1794, President George Washington outlined his expectations of immigrants: “…by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendents, get assimilated to our customs, measures and laws: in a word soon become one people.” This is “Americanization,” an admirable term every American should applaud. America revolves not around common blood or collective faith, but communal beliefs. Those who arrive and wish to stay should comprehend, absorb, and revere these ideas and the history, traditions, and institutions they inspired. This is no more radical than the words on American coins: E Pluribus Unum . Those who read this also read SPONSORED CONTENT FROM THE WEB SIGN UP » ADVERTISEMENT HUMAN EVENTS READER'S CHOICE POPULAR COMMENTS EMAILED Blackwell fights RNC rules change By: John Gizzi 1/24/2013 07:40 AM Five questions for Kerry at nomination hearings By: Hope Hodge 1/24/2013 06:17 AM The Cliffhanger, Jan. 24 By: John Hayward 1/24/2013 08:14 AM ‘Prevention, not containment’ for nuclear Iran By: Hope Hodge 1/24/2013 10:18 AM March for Life has new leader By: Neil W. McCabe 1/24/2013 09:27 AM By golly, Benghazi just might be dangerous By: John Hayward 1/24/2013 08:22 AM Unions are very unhappy about declining membership By: John Hayward 1/24/2013 09:54 AM House GOP for suspending the debt ceiling 20 By: John Hayward 1/21/2013 04:40 PM WWII vet, actor to be interred at Arlington 7 By: J. D. 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Story Comments Print Create a hardcopy of this page Font Size: Default font size Larger font size Posted: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 8:39 pm Is there a need to Americanize Modern Olympics? Dough Hecox rawlinstimes.com | 0 comments With the Olympics nearly here, I can’t help but wish President Obama, Congress or ANYone would take action. Someone should do something, because the Olympics have become entirely too foreign. To those of you arching your eyebrows and rolling your eyes derisively, as if to say “The Olympics is supposed to be foreign – it is an international competition,â€‌ I agree with you. I’m not saying there are too many foreign people in the Olympics. I’m saying there are too many foreign events. Allow me to explain. American athletes have always been at a disadvantage to their foreign counterparts. An American athlete growing up in, say, Afton, Wyo., has limited access to such foreign activities as judo or tae kwan do. Yes, I know there are several martial arts studios teaching Wyoming kids martial arts and each is probably pretty good, so don’t be offended – especially if you have martial arts training. I’m simply pointing out that taking a karate class in a Wyoming strip mall is a far cry from growing up, say, in Japan where the entire culture has been saturated with martial artistry for centuries. Hockey is similarly hard for Wyomingites, which is ironic considering we have nine months of winter. The problem is that all our hockey—quality ice is monopolized all winter long by ice—fishing derbies. Fencing, too, is difficult for Wyomingites because most of us assume it has to do with stringing barbed wire to keep our cattle out of trouble. As Time Magazine reported recently, Wyoming has – per—capita – more athletes in the 2012 Olympic Games than any other state. This is no surprise. Surviving endless hurricane—force winds and the arctic deep freeze we call winter is an athletic act in itself. When it comes to the game of survival, Wyomingites beat Mother Nature every year – and she doesn’t make it easy. Our cowboy heritage ensures that Wyoming athletes would do fine in equestrian events, and our mountainous terrain makes the Equality State a proving ground for the world’s greatest skiers. However, Wyomingites – and Americans in general – deserve more opportunities to challenge the world’s best athletes in more traditionally American activities. Judging by the Americans I see at all—you—can—eat buffets and shopping mall food courts, competitive eating is a huge sport here in the United States and would be a great addition to the Olympics. True, it’s not an athletic activity in the traditional sense but the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island in New York and the various watermelon—, pie— and corn—on—the—cob—eating contests at county fairs nationwide, make competitive eating something worthy of consideration. Not just anyone can eat like that. With shows like “Man vs. Food,â€‌ “The Biggest Loserâ€‌ and “Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition,â€‌ reality TV has turned eating responsibly and physical fitness into a game show, we might as well capitalize on it. Because America already has a swollen, overweight leg up on the competition, let’s call irresponsible eating and not working out a sport. Our country has some of the world’s fattest kids, so sumo wrestling shouldn’t only be an Olympic sport but one that is promoted in U.S. high schools as a varsity sport. In either competitive eating or sumo wrestling, American kids would be unbeatable. Demolition derby is another classic American sport in which we would literally crush the competition, and for a very simple reason. American cars are the biggest. A 1970 Ford Galaxie 500 will always beat a Daewoo. In fact, you could fit a Daewoo in its trunk. If that seems unfair, fine. Let’s make it a Monster Truck contest. America’s Bigfoot will always beat its Daewoo equivalent. The only downside is that either Robosaurus or Megasaurus would frighten Japan’s athletes into a blind panic. I’ve seen how Japanese people react when Godzilla comes to town, so fire—breathing, car—eating dinosaur—shaped trucks could turn the Olympic Monster Truck rally into absolute bedlam. If monster truck rallies and competitive eating aren’t the judges’ cup of tea, rodeo would be a classic addition to the Olympics. Wyoming’s cowboys and cowgirls would stand a better shot against their foreign competitors calf—roping, team—roping or barrel—racing than, say, ice skating against Norwegians or playing jai alai against Basque athletes. If we can put a McDonalds in every nation on Earth, we can make the Olympics a little more American too. U.S. athletes will do well in London next month, but I won’t rest until we’ve won a gold medal in every Olympic event there is – and even in a few there aren’t. More about Rawlins ARTICLE : Hospital ends 2012 in the black ARTICLE : Have heart: Family prepares for Congenital Heart Defect Awareness Week ARTICLE : Flawless ARTICLE : Republicans choose candidates for commissioner ARTICLE : Premium purchase: Insurance president buys company that started his career Discuss Print Posted in Columns on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 8:39 pm. | Tags: Dough Hecox , Rawlins , Carbon County , Wyoming , Olympics , United States , America , Obama Similar Stories Column: Rawlins prison ghosts ready for their closeup Most Read Premium purchase: Insurance president buys company that started his career Encampment chief resigns CCSD1 names teachers of the month Creative learning: Smart Start offers children artistic learning experiences Republicans choose candidates for commissioner Rules of Conduct 1 Keep it Clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexually-oriented language. 2 Don't Threaten or Abuse. 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Slideshow Sponsored Links U.S. has no plan to "Americanize" Somalia conflict Tweet Share this Email Print Related News Somali rebels attack in capital for third day Fri, Mar 12 2010 Somali tied to Islamists worked with two U.N. agencies Thu, Mar 11 2010 Death toll hits 54 from fighting in Somali capital Thu, Mar 11 2010 House rejects pullout from Afghanistan Wed, Mar 10 2010 U.S. calls Myanmar election laws "a mockery" Wed, Mar 10 2010 Related Topics Politics » WASHINGTON | Fri Mar 12, 2010 4:28pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Friday denied coordinating plans by Somalia's embattled government to launch an offensive against Islamist fighters, saying it had no plans to "Americanize" the conflict. Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson described as inaccurate reports suggesting that U.S. officials were ready to get more militarily involved as Somalia's government fights the Islamist al Shabaab, which has been linked to al Qaeda. "The United States does not plan, does not direct, and does not coordinate the military operations of the TFG (transitional federal government) and we have not and will not be providing direct support for any potential military offensives," Carson said. Carson told a news briefing the United States had provided limited military support to the transitional government, but that almost all of this was channeled through an African Union peacekeeping effort. Al Shabaab Islamist fighters attacked government positions this week seeking to seize the advantage before a long-awaited government offensive to drive them out of Mogadishu, the capital. Somalia has lacked an effective central government for 19 years. Western and neighboring countries say it has become a sanctuary for militants. Carson said the United States had provided about $185 million over the last 19 months to support African Union peacekeepers and about $12 million in direct support to the Somali transitional government. "The amounts of money that we're talking about are really relatively small," he said. Funds were spent on communications equipment, uniforms, and to support training of government soldiers by other African countries. The United States also provides about $150 million in food aid to Somalia. This has been complicated by a U.N. World Food Program's decision to suspend work in much of southern Somalia due to threats against staff and al Shabaab demands for payments for security. Carson said the United States continued to seek an "inclusive" political resolution to Somalia's crisis and believed that the transitional government, which only controls a portion of Mogadishu, was best placed to promote one. "The TFG has demonstrated an enormous capacity to survive," he said. (Reporting by Andrew Quinn; Editing by Alan Elsner) Politics Tweet this Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints Comments (0) This discussion is now closed. 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