After They've Seen Paree

April 14, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Remember “freedom fries”? The phrase was part of the spirit of France-bashing that the Bush administration and its friends in the media whipped up six years ago. France and other European countries were saying that invading Iraq might not be such a nifty idea. They even voted against it in the U.N.

The Bushies sure showed them who was right.

The Republicans still use France and Europe as synonyms for various forms of political wickedness. We Americans, they say, don’t want a “European-style” health care system (i.e., one that delivers health care at a lower price to all its people).

But the Americans-don’t-like-France idea is largely a figment of the right-wing imagination. These Republicans are speaking for a smaller and smaller portion of the US population. The Daily Kos poll recently asked the “favorable/unfavorable” question, and it turns out it’s not just us liberal, urban, coastal elitists who have a soft spot in our hearts for France.

QUESTION: Do you have a favorable or unfavorable
opinion of the country of France?

	FAV	UNFAV	NO OPINION
ALL	61	32	7
DEM	66	29	5
REP	56	37	7
IND	60	32	8
OTH/REF	58	35	7
NORTHEAST	71	21	8
SOUTH	43	51	6
MIDWEST	67	26	7
WEST	69	24	7

France is well-liked everywhere . . . except the South. The pattern was nearly identical when the places in question were not France but, respectively, Europe, New York, and San Francisco.

It looks as though what Sarah Palin referred to as “the real America” is merely one region of America. And if recent voting patterns in Virginia, North Carolina, and Missouri are any indication, that region is shrinking. Tant pis.

Here We Go Lucy Liu

April 13, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s been a big flap, especially on the left side of the blogosphere, about Betty Brown, the Texas legislator who suggested that Asians adopt Anglo names for purposes of registering to vote. Those Chinese names are just too hard for Texans to deal with.

Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?

So said Ms. Brown to Ramey Ko of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Sure, we could get all cultural relativist on this one and say that if Chinese is so difficult, how is it that over a billion people manage to speak it every day. We could also accuse her of racism, but nothing in the news reports suggests that she’s mean-spirited or even that she wants to keep Chinese people off the voting rolls. In fact, in the excerpt from the hearing that appears on YouTube, she asks Ko to come up with a proposal for solving the problem.

But she is behind the times when it comes to name changing. (Ms. Brown is not even really saying that Asians should change their names. She just suggested that they adopt a nom-de-ballot so that the poll supervisors don't make mistakes.) I’m not sure whether it’s because of PC-mandated tolerance for ethnic differences or just fashion, but we just don’t do the name-change thing so much any more. Even among media stars, names no longer have to sound American; they don’t have to sound “good.”

Annie Mae Bullock (born in 1939) performed under her married name, Tina Turner (she later dropped the husband but not the name.) Turner good, Bullock not so much. But for Sandra, born a quarter-century later, Bullock was a keeper.

Actors now keep names that they (or the studios) in earlier times would have changed as too ethnic or just ungraceful. When the studios ran things, names like Dunst or Hudgens would never gotten cast. But now we have, to name but a few

• Renee Zellweger
• Calista Flockhart
• Seth Rogen
• Jeff Goldblum
• Ben Affleck
• Amanda Righetti
• Antonio Banderas
• Liev Schreiber
• Leonardo DiCaprio
• Shia LeBeouf
• Gwyneth Paltrow
• Kate Beckinsale
• Milla Jovovich
• Charlize Theron
• Jake Gyllenhaal
• Zac Efron

Compare them with these names from an earlier era.

• Betty Joan Perske
• Frances Gumm
• Bernard Schwartz
• Edythe Marrenner
• Constance Ockleman
• Laszlo Lowenstein
• Natalia Zakharenko
• Issur Demsky
• Margarita Cansino
• Marion Morrison
• Lucille LeSueur
• Fred Austerlitz
• Archie Leach
• Julius Garfinkle

If you don’t recognize any of them, it’s because they were all changed. John Wayne, Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth, et al.

Yes, some young hopefuls do change their names – Winona Horowitz, Jennifer Anastassakis, and others. But my impression is that it happens far less nowadays. Michael Shalhoub (b. 1932) became Omar Sharif. Tony Shalhoub (b. 1953) became Monk.

(Personal note. I saw Betty Joan Perske in the street the other day – old, bent over, walking slowly with her dog – so much different from the person in the movies that although she looked vaguely familiar, I couldn’t place her. I waited till she went inside, then asked the doorman of her building. He paused for a minute as if trying to decide whether this was a violation of a tenant’s privacy. “That,” he said, “was Miss Lauren Bacall.”)

Sunday in the Park

April 12, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Walking from the subway exit to your place,” said my brother once when he came to visit, “in that one block, I saw a greater diversity of people than I see at home in a year.” He lives in a small town near Princeton.

He should have been in Central Park last Sunday. The first beautiful spring weekend day – it was as though the weather had sent a text message to everyone in the New York metro area telling them to come to the Park. It was Sunday in the Park with Georges and Marisol and Byong-suh and Dmitri and Shlomo and just about everyone.

Here is the Imagine circle in Strawberry Fields, just inside the West 72d St. entrance. If you want diversity, stop here for a minute (take a close look at the people in the picture). Listen to the conversations, and you’ll hear a half-dozen different languages. You’ll also hear Beatles music. Yesterday, it was these four men of a certain age. Here they’re doing “Eight Days a Week.”

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Later they were joined by three other guys – same certain age – who asked to sit in and then sang a perfect cover of country harmony on “What Goes On?”

The Park had much other music to offer. One group was singing something that sounded like medieval church music, with the tunnel giving an echo effect like that of a cathedral. Not far away, these girls were playing a classical tango.



They were at Bethesda Fountain. But the big attraction there are the AfroBats. They do some impressive flips, but it’s their comedy that entertains the crowd, who fill the steps and the plaza above and stand five or six deep at ground level.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

To make themselves heard, the AfroBats deliver their lines in unison – three guys speaking in perfect unison and with great comic timing.

I love street entertainers. This kid was trying to pick up some spare money with his juggling.



People use the park for all kinds of purposes. Koreans do wedding photography there. This guy, in addition to the usual posed shots, was having the bridal couple run up a low hill while he followed with his videocamera. (The bride has shed her shoes, which are out of their picture, but not mine.)


The roadways are filled with bicycles, the casual pedalers and the serious cyclists in their bright spandex. Certain venues have become the turf of roller skaters and roller-bladers doing their graceful dances while their boom boxes boom.

The cherry trees were not quite in bloom. But there should be full of pink and white blossoms for Easter, today.

Private Schools or Private Students

April 8, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Washington DC voucher program gave kids from poor families up to $7500 to cover the costs of attending private schools. The program, OSP (for Opportunity Scholarship Program) was started in the recent Bush administration, and it’s based on an idea much cherished by conservatives: private is good, public is bad. Programs run by the government (like public schools) are not as good as similar programs run by private entities (like private schools).

The results three years out have now been published (here). In reading, the voucher kids were 3.7 months ahead of their public school counterparts. In math, there was no difference.

Click on the table to see a larger version.

The Washington Post story ran with the headline

Study Supports School Vouchers
In District, Pupils Outperform Peers On Reading Tests

But does this mean that private schools do a better job of educating poor kids? If so, they should do a better job at teaching math as well. But they don’t.

I don’t really know what’s going on, but I have a guess. Reading is not just about decoding strings of letters. It is part of a general verbal ability. Kids learn verbal skills in school from teachers, but they also learn them from everyone they hear. For most of our time on this planet, we humans did not read or write or go to school, yet we learned to speak the language of our respective cultures. We learned from those around us. We still do.

If you send a kid to a school with children whose parents are willing and able to spend $6600 a year or more (sometimes much more*), that kid will be talking with kids whose verbal skills – vocabulary, grammar, syntax – are more sophisticated than what kids might hear in the public schools of Washington DC. That affects reading scores because among schoolchildren, at least when the teacher isn’t insisting they be quiet, verbal interaction is constant. Mathematical interaction, not so much.

So, at least when it comes to verbal skills, it’s not the kind of school that you go to that makes a difference. It’s the kind of kids who attend that school.

* The tuition at Sasha and Malia’s school, Sidwell Friends, is $28,000. Most of the OSP students went to much less costly schools. Over half the OSP kids (59%) went to Catholic schools, another fifth (22%) went to other faith-based schools (a category that may include Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school). The average income was about $22,7000, slightly above the poverty line; virtually all the kids were black or Hispanic.