Guarding Against Symbols

September 28, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

A mosque at Ground Zero in New York is already a reality. Sunday’s “Sixty Minutes” report on the controversy showed dozens of Muslims praying in a room of the building that now stands on the contested tract of the proposed Islamic Cultural Center. “Sixty Minutes” did not report on the anguish these daily prayers were inflicting on the souls of the dead or even on their living relatives and friends.

The mosque, as many have noted, is not exactly “at” Ground Zero. It’s a couple of blocks away, and you can’t see it from Ground Zero. But that’s not the point. The point, for the opponents, seems to be pollution. Anything that is at all connected with The Terrorists must be kept far enough away (just how far is never specified) so as to prevent any kind of symbolic contact.

Something similar is going on with the proposed Flight 93 memorial in Pennsylvania. Back in 2005, a jury of family members, local leaders, and designers reviewed proposals and selected a winner. Now, there’s a big protest.

The problem, I think, was not in the design – a circle set in the naturally occurring bowl of land, one segment of the circle planted with trees, a tower with wind chimes.
It would have been built and unremarked if the authors had given it a different name, say “The Arc of Embrace.” But it was called “The Crescent of Embrace.”

Maybe you didn’t see it when you looked at the graphic. But, like priests trained in ferreting out all traces of sin, keen-eyed observers have discerned the unmistakable Muslim symbol, the crescent, lurking here. Look at this side-by-side that’s been circulating in the right blogosphere, with frequent suggestions that the similarity (I mean identical sameness) was intentional.

If you didn’t see it, that just shows how successful the terrorists have been in hiding their evil influence.

This emphasis on purity is part of the Us-vs.-Them mentality. They are out to destroy Us. We must constantly be on our guard. And any hint of Them, no matter how slight or symbolic, is a threat and must be rooted out.

Who is Them? In this clash of civilizations, Them is all of them. In America, you can’t come right out and say “Arabs” or even “Muslims.” So you have to be against “the Terrorists.” The vast majority of Muslims worldwide, and nearly 100% of American Muslims, are not terrorists. But that distinction is no more important today than it was when George W. Bush convinced most Americans that invading Iraq was a good way to fight Al Qaeda.

I just wonder why South Carolina decided to become a haven for terrorism.

I’m America, and So Can You

September 25, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some political columnists seem incapable of acknowledging that their own views are just that – their own (e.g., I don’t trust Obama). Instead, they prefer to attribute the opinion to “the public,” or “the country,” or even more immodestly “America” (“America doesn’t trust Obama.”)*

Here’s David Brooks in yesterday’s Times:

The public seems to be angry about values. The heart of any moral system is the connection between action and consequences. Today’s public anger rises from the belief that this connection has been severed in one realm after another. . . . What the country is really looking for is a restoration of responsibility.

I guess he never went to anger management or couples therapy, where they tell you to make “I statements” (“When you text at the dinner table, I feel ignored,”). Instead, it’s, “When you text at the dinner table, America feels ignored.”

I had thought that the restoration the country was looking for was more economic than moral, but then what do I know? I assume that Brooks has some evidence about what’s really on the public’s mind, but he’s keeping it to himself. So I rounded up the usual suspects – Gallup, Pew, etc. (“When you say the public feels some way, I check out the polls.”)


The entire category, for that last bar was “Ethics/moral/religious/family decline; dishonesty.” The proportion of people mentioning any one of those as the top problem was 3%.

It also turns out that while the subprime/CDO/CDS/MBS collapse had a huge impact on how Americans felt about the economy, it didn’t much affect their opinions of the country’s morality, opinions which were pretty low to begin with. Americans take a dim view of other Americans’ morality.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

Gallup did not ask specifically about the “responsibility” that the country is so concerned about. But the question was open-ended, and of the 76% who thought that values were getting worse, 7% mentioned something along the lines of “people not taking responsibility for their own behavior.” Seven percent of 76% is 5%

To sum up, only 3% of American think that morality is the top problem. When asked directly about morals, only 5% point to responsibility.But David Brooks says that what the country really wants is responsibility.

Who you gonna believe – David Brooks, or your lyin’ polls?

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*This observation is not original with me. But I cannot remember who to tip my hat to. I think it was either one of the Monkey Cagers (but which one?) or Henry at Crooked Timber. The title of this post is a direct rip-off of Steven Colbert.

Living In the City

September 23, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“In the one block from the subway stop to your building, I saw a greater diversity of people than I see in my town in a year.” My brother lives in central New Jersey, in a town with not much racial diversity. “It’s like living in a Methodist wedding,” he once said. He doesn’t come to New York very often.

That was during the day. When New Yorkers go home, their neighborhoods become more homogeneous. Here’s a map that Eric Fisher posted, based on the cartography of Bill Rankin.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people. To help you get oriented, I’ve made Central Park yellow. The truly diverse neighborhoods are out in Queens – Astoria, Jackson Heights.

If you think we’re living in post-racial America, or if you’re curious about racial patterns in where people live, you must take a look at Eric’s Flickr site. He has created similar maps for 102 cities, so you’ll probably be able to find yours. His maps also have a flash function that identifies the neighborhoods as you mouse over them, so you might even see your neighborhood by name.

HT: Peter Moskos

Just Enough For the City

September 21, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

A New York Magazine cover in the late 1960s showed a fortyish man – pudgy, grey suit, white shirt, striped necktie – sitting on the sidewalk holding out a tin cup with a few pencils in it. A sign around his neck said, “I MAKE $80,000 A YEAR, AND I’M BROKE.”

At the time, $80,000 was about 8 times the national median, the equivalent roughly of $400,000 today. The point was that the “ordinary” expenses of ordinary New Yorkers ate up a lot of money. To be barely middle class, you had to be rich.

That cover came to mind because of the recent dust-up in the blogosphere set off by a post by Todd Henderson, a Chicago law professor. Henderson was complaining about the Obama tax proposal – to keep cuts for all but the rich, i.e, those earning more than $250,000. Henderson didn’t say how much his income was, but he did say

• that paying for mortgages, student loans, children’s education (private schools), and other expenses leaves him no room for luxuries.
• that he already pays $100,000 in taxes
• he certainly does not feel rich

Like most working Americans, insurance, doctors’ bills, utilities, two cars, daycare, groceries, gasoline, cell phones, and cable TV (no movie channels) round out our monthly expenses. We also have someone who cuts our grass, cleans our house, and watches our new baby.... [W]e have less than a few hundred dollars per month of discretionary income. We occasionally eat out but with a baby sitter, these nights take a toll on our budget. . . . [This is from an e-mail Henderson, or someone claiming to be him, wrote to Brad DeLong that DeLong reprinted.]

Henderson took a lot of flak. But there’s much to be said for his point, which is the same one that New York Magazine was making 35 years ago. Although these conclusions are not what Henderson intended, they still seem valid:

• there is such a thing as society
• society exerts pressure on people to spend their money on certain things
• some of these are things which, if you could not afford them, you would feel that you were not a member of your society or social group
• when income rises, so do these social “necessities.” Henderson sees private schools, two cars, and home ownership as necessities, not luxuries 

New York Magazine had the good sense to make the point with a touch of irony that Henderson utterly lacked. His sin was not that he feels strapped despite an income of $400,000 or more. It was that he seemed to have no feeling for the lives of those who earn half that, or those who have a merely average income ($50-60K), or those who scrape by on much less than the average.

As I recall, the New York Magazine story sketched out budgets for three different income levels. None of them, even the highest ($80K) left room for much in the way of savings or luxuries. A few years later, the great Stevie Wonder’s great album “Innervisions” came out, and I thought of writing a lyric based on its great song “Living For the City” (and I’m serious about all those “greats”). Here’s a slightly updated excerpt:

Six rooms on Central Park, the house out by the ocean.
He works at Goldman Sachs, he needs that next promotion.
His son’s at Yale, his daughters go to Brearly.
He only makes four hundred thousand yearly,
And it’s just enough, just enough for the city.

And so on.

Update: Since I started composing this post, Henderson has removed his original post “because my wife, who did not approve of my original post and disagrees vehemently with my opinion, did not consent to the publication of personal details about our family.” (Full retraction and apology here, but you can still find links to his original, now deleted post. Or try waybackmachine.)

I don’t know Henderson at all, and I hesitate to draw inferences about his character. But his new post adds to my original take – that he might be a decent and well-meaning person but that perhaps he is a bit short on self-awareness. He just doesn’t seem to realize how what he says will be seen by others – others like people with average incomes, others like his wife.

Update, September 2019.  In the original version of this post, for the information on the New York Magazine cover and Innervisions, I was relying on memory, and I said that they came out around the same time. I also did not have an image of the magazine cover. I recently found that cover. It was not from the 1970s, as the original post said, but from 1968. Innervisions dropped in 1973. I have changed the text, correcting for these errors, and I have put strikethrough on some of the incorrectly remembered details of the magazine cover, which I have now also included.