KAYAK and “All-American Muslim” … a question of tone
Robert Birge, the chief marketing manager of a company called KAYAK, found himself having to defend his company from accusations of religious bigotry because they stopped advertising on a program called “All-American Muslim.” I’m as against giving in to appeals from crazy religious bigots as the next All-American liberal, but I’ve no reason to doubt his explanation. What caught my eye, though, was a demonstration of how an executive in defense mode, can sometimes lose track of the tone of what he is saying. After commenting on the “vitriol” in many of the emails from the Islamophobes, he wrote: “Many of the emails I’ve received expressing disappointment in our decision have been much more civil, and I applaud you for that.” And then, as Frank and Nancy might have said, he went and spoiled it all by adding: “Lastly, I watched the first two episodes. Mostly, I just thought the show sucked.” Civility towards me, excellent; civility to others, apparently, not so much.
My guess—that’s all it is—is that Mr. Birge was so hot under the collar about the accusations of bigotry that his internal editor blew its top. But it says something good about where we are in America today that he knew he had to defend his company from the allegation that it harbored anti-Moslem bigots.
Grading Obama
A journalist from The Root asked me some questions on my views about the President. Rather than answering them separately, I sent an email, whose contents are below. Excerpts appeared on TheRoot.Com.
When President Obama was elected I told my friends that we were going to have to get used to disagreeing with a president we liked. This wasn’t because I was especially cynical about him. It was because it seems to me the presidency is a very constrained office and it is extremely hard, even when you have both houses controlled by your party, to get things done. Despite these difficulties President Obama did, in fact, get a great deal accomplished in the first years of his term, including a revolutionary reform of the government’s role in healthcare provision, and, more recently, a final withdrawal from Iraq. (Both of these things are good for America, I believe, and the first was especially good for black America which is disproportionately underserved by our current healthcare system.) Nevertheless, I believe I have been proved right. On many topics, whatever his own private convictions, the President has done pretty much what a Republican (or most other Democrats) would have done, in ways that are a good deal more conservative than his campaign rhetoric. In dealing with the financial crisis, for example, so it seems to me, his administration has done too little for the poor and too much to please the masters and mistresses of the world of finance. (This is not a particularly original observation: what’s puzzling is that it is apparently controversial in some quarters.)
The presidency also leads even those who are instinctively suspicious of an over-reaching executive to seek to enlarge and protect powers that are democratically suspect: the persistence of Guantanamo and the President’s insistence that he has the right to assassinate US citizens overseas are examples of this, examples that do not distinguish him from others, both Democrat and Republican. I have too little confidence in my own grasp of what is actually possible in the poisonous atmosphere in Washington today, to know whether Barack Obama could have achieved more of the progressive aims I hoped he stood for. And, if I am disappointed, I am not, for the reasons I have mentioned, very surprised. Given the ways in which African-Americans have been disproportionately affected by the Great Recession, the failures of the administration to deliver particularly for the worst of have been particularly unhelpful for that part of the population. As I wrote in the current New York Review of Books, “For example, the median net worth of white families—which stood at a little under $150,000 in 2007—fell by about a third. For black families, who started with a median net worth a little under $10,000, the corresponding fall was close to four-fifths. At the end of the recession, then, the median white family had a net worth of about $100,000; the median black family could claim a mere $2000. Unemployment for people between 16 and 19 years old rose to about 27 percent in the depths of the recession; but the black rate was about double that. Meanwhile, as the recession was beginning, the incarceration rate in the United States rose, for the first time, to one percent. But where for white adults the rate was about one in ninety-nine, the rate for black adults was one in fifteen.”
A weakened President with the House in enemy hands and a majority in the Senate that can be stopped by the rules of that body from doing almost anything is no doubt not in a good position, whatever his own racial identity, to counteract the long-term resistance of most Americans to grasping that we need to do something serious about the racial dimensions of inequality. Those who complain on this account should probably not focus their objections on the President.
An Early Snow Storm
The weather the weekend of the 29th and 30th of October caught us and our electricity company off guard. Fortunately, we can cook with gas: and so, after a delicious candlelit dinner, we retired to the sitting room and read poetry to each other in front of a blazing fire. Thomas Hardy, James Fenton, A. E. Houseman. Despite the modernity of the poems, it felt like a quick trip back to the 18th century, when the house was built … though the iPhone Kindle was our one non-print source!
New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Award Ceremony
On October 26 I was presented with a very handsome paperweight as the 2011 New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Award at the rather fine museum in Montclair, NJ. (They have a fascinating collection of American Indian art.) I gave a short lecture on “The Life of Honor.” The other finalists were these very fine books:
Thomas Belton, Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State (Rutgers University Press)
Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (University of Chicago Press)
Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Michael Perino, The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora’s Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance (Penguin Press).
The Italian Translation of “The Honor Code” is now out from Raffaello Cortina.
Click image to buy.
Princeton Sept. 11, 2011 gathering of remembrance, Cannon Green
It was a moving occasion, which it will be possible to view on the Princeton WebMedia site soon. My own remarks are available here.
Experiments in Ethics is now available in Korean
Here is a link to buy the Korean edition of Experiments in Ethics. Thanks so much to the translators!
Amnesty Global Ethics Series
There’s a website for the series now. Click here to go there: Amnesty International Global Ethics Series. Elaine Scarry‘s remarkable Thinking in an Emergency is already out. She shows how much less free we are than we are accustomed to believe, because of the ways in which the idea of an emergency–a potential nuclear or terrorist attack–has been used to authorize the avoidance of democratic oversight.
Next to come, from Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus, Can Intervention Work?, which explores the massive, military-driven efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans, the expansion of the EU, and the bloodless “color” revolutions in the former Soviet states. Rory Stewart–who is now a British Member of Parliament–will be in the United States this month to talk about the book, including a session at Barnes and Noble in New York. Stewart has persuaded me that it’s time for the US and NATO to leave Afghanistan.
Para todos mis amigos que hablan español
Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez ha publicado un examen de mi trabajos recientes de Nexos en línea, que usted puede encontrar en Prensa/Internacional en este sitio.
My (non-existent) China visa
I applied for a passport in early April of this year, because I was planning the trip to Hong Kong I described earlier, and wanted to take a tourist side-trip to China in June 2011, while I was there. I knew that they required a passport valid for at least six months from the date of entry. My old passport was set to expire in September 2011. I gave myself this extra time because I had two other trips abroad planned in between and wanted time to get the visa before those trips, since I wasn’t sure how long it would take, and I had rather small amounts of time between those trips and my departure for Hong Kong.
After receiving this passport, in early May, my partner and I applied for visas through It’s Easy, describing exactly the same plans on each application and showing, of course, the same home address. When I looked at the It’s Easy website on Monday May 9, his visa was listed as having been granted. Mine was not. So I called It’s Easy and, eventually, after several calls, I was told on Tuesday afternoon that the Chinese embassy had said that it had mislaid my passport. I was told that they had also said they would return it if and when they found it. I was due to go to the Istanbul Seminar the next Monday, so, with It’s Easy’s assistance, I immediately applied for an expedited new passport, which was returned to It’s Easy that Saturday, May 14th. I was able to collect my new passport on the Monday morning and flew with it to Istanbul until the next Sunday.
On Monday May 23, a day later, my partner took a new application with the new passport to It’s Easy and I reapplied. (I was off early that morning to give a lecture and some seminars in Seattle.) When I looked on the website on the Wednesday—by which time, they had assured me, the visa would be back—I discovered that it was not. After calling and talking to them and visiting their office, they told me that the visa had now been officially declined. And they returned to me my current passport and the application form I had issued on Thursday May 26. They did not then say anything about my old passport.
As I examined the returned visa application on the train back to Princeton that afternoon, I noticed that it had been altered after I had given it to them. The form now applied for multiple entries—which had not been my intention—and also, under the part of the form that requires you to list relatives living with you, someone had added in clumsy block capitals the word “John Appiah, Brother, Student.” Now I don’t have a brother. In fact, though I have lived in Ghana, where the name Appiah and the given name John are both quite common, I have never met a John Appiah. And, in any case, the only person living with me is my partner. So I called It’s Easy to ask about this and they said they could only respond if I came in again.
I went in again, therefore, on the afternoon of Friday May 27, on my way to the airport to give a lecture in Canada. They said they had changed the application to one for multiple entries because I might not have been aware that each trip from China to the mainland required a new visa. I regret that they did this, since, as you’ll see, I had some reason to avoid drawing attention to my application, and my only aim was to make one visit. But the owner of It’s Easy said the other change—the addition of John Appiah—was not in a hand of anyone working for them … and, indeed, it did look like the handwriting of someone whose first script was not English, and so might well have been done in the consulate. And they also told me that the Chinese consulate had now returned my original passport, which they gave to me.
Naturally, the Chinese consulate has given no reason for the denial of a visa. My main theory about this is that, as the President of the PEN-American Center, as one of the nominators of Liu Xiaobo for the Peace Prize, who published his letter of nomination and a defense of it in Foreign Policy magazine, and as someone who has appeared on CNN Asia criticizing the policies of the Chinese government in relation to free expression, I was denied a visa as part of the ongoing closing down of debate in China. (All these facts about me are available, of course, at the click of a Google search button.) This theory appeals to my ego; though it makes the Chinese government look paranoid, since I do not suffer from delusions of grandeur about my ability to challenge the Communist Party regime. But, bureaucratic incompetence is no doubt also a possibility: it is conceivable that a John Appiah caused some problem for them at some point and that they decided, in their ignorance that Appiah, like John, is a common enough name, that he must be connected with me.
In any case, while Henry was able to visit Beijing and Shanghai, I had the pleasure of an extended stay in Hong Kong, including a very interesting lunchtime discussion with the excellent U.S. Consul General in Hong Kong, and of a visit to Macau. I have no plan to apply for a Chinese visa any time soon again.