On The Turning Away

“Children who grow up in a different environment may have very different early experiences, and may process information differently than children from a different environment.”
- BBC

We chanced upon this interesting ‘discourse’ and thought it illustrates the “sanctimonious fatigue” from the anti-hicks with what they call “reverse snobbery”, aka culture war.

Self-styled liberal blogger: “Some of us, in fact, don’t give a rat’s ass where she [Ed: Gov. Palin] comes from.”

Commenter: “Really? Did you support Obama over Clinton and Edwards because you liked where Obama wants to take us all next. or because you liked where he comes from?”

A British academic concludes from her study that men with sexist views ‘earn more’ than their modern-thinking brothers. It could be because “more traditionally-minded men are interested in power, both in terms of access to resources - money in this case - and also in terms of a woman who is submissive.”

A shot across the brow for self-proclaimed progressive men?

Now that their preferred candidate is the de facto nominee, what do progressives, in particular men who spewed vitriol at Hillary and her supporters, feel amid the postmortem frenzy? Perhaps better late than never - they have come to realize that they cannot “brush aside” sexism after all.

It’s more a sop than mea culpa. Were they so swept off their feet by the maelstrom that they lost their head? “[T]he discourse we all engage in sometimes explicitly, and more often tacitly, reinforces” sexism and misogyny. But a Pyrrhic victory is a victory nonetheless - only it sets back progressive movement for decades.
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We recently asked a random number of people in our circle where they meet their friends. Perhaps not surprisingly, college (and to a lesser extent, high school) tops the list, followed by alumni events and networking occasions. So is it the happenstance where we meet that leads to friendship or is it because we consciously seek out those whose values we share?

Scientists at University of Leipzig endeavored to test the notion whether “People More Likely To Become Friends Based on Proximity Or Shared Values”.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, their findings suggest that friendships are based on more superficial factors like chance encounters, rather than intentional choice and common values and interests. But our straw poll does not seem to conform to their conclusion.
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As if to get its own back on the snub by New Line Cinema for premiering the over-buzzed Sex and the City in London on May 12, New York - which is arguably as big a star as the four Manolo-loving characters - has duly produced a kerfuffle this week.

First, thousands of ticket-holders were reportedly turned away by Radio City Music Hall; second, the self-proclaimed number one fan, who “traveled 10,000 miles from Singapore” and paid close to $20,000, was utterly disappointed. Adding salt to injury, critics slam the movie with scathing reviews: “screamy, garish and winsome.”

Well, not all is lost. At least not for what some call the attention-whore, a Chinese Chick at Harvard, who seems to relish being called out by Gawker for “oversharing” her post-BJ “facial” picture. If she thinks she is and can be sexually liberated, like the SATC women, she’s hopelessly at it, for writing about sexual exploits is nothing if not anachronistic.
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Samuel Johnson famously defined the pleasures of urban living in the 18th century, “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” Three centuries after his birth, the same can be said of New York, London - if not more - of the New World. At a time when the financial world is mired in what will surely be known as sub-prime crisis 2007, what better distraction than a showcase of Asian contemporary artists at Pier 92?

The Asian Contemporary Art Fair, launched last Thursday with a gala opening and closed yesterday, is billed as the first of its kind. Although it featured over 70 exhibitors from 10 countries, the elephant in the room is (greater) Chinese art. Korean artists dominated the rest of the display.

If there is a celebrated leitmotif in contemporary Chinese art scene of recent years, it’s cynical realism, a style brought by the collision of post-Mao communism and capitalism. “Cynical realism” was “the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation” to British novelist Aldous Huxley who coined the phrase; in today’s China, it perhaps best encapsulates the Zeitgeist of a country undergoing an unprecedented modernization.
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Dismal skies on a Friday afternoon before a long holiday weekend bring out the best in cubicle dwellers. Or so it seems. The thrill of surfing on company time and the agony of life in uncertain “sub-prime” times make thoughts invariable turn to rational decision-making. In other words, chances are, “An Economist Goes to a Bar” is being read at a desk near you.

It’s not entirely surprising, perhaps, that we were sent twice (from different IP addresses) the link to the piece about whether Gary Becker’s “positive assortative matching” concerning marriage still holds today.

In a nutshell, researchers at Columbia concluded, after two years of experiments at a local bar on “rational-minded daters searching for the most desirable partners”, that the stereotypes of men, aka “fragile egos”, looking for pretty faces appear to be true. Who knew? But their efforts to debunk the myth of “a white male preference for East Asian women”, while applaudable, leave much to be desired.
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It seems the Quiet American is back in vogue. In a speech in August, President Bush seized Graham Greene’s 1955 classic to draw dubious parallels between the catastrophic Vietnam conflicts and Iraq war, espousing the idea of U.S. naïveté “on entering the war and trying to turn it around and apply it to those now calling for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq”.

This week, NYT uberpundit Tom “flat” Friedman adds a seasonal twist to Greene’s eponymous character, calling the today’s college students “Generation Q” for they are “quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad”. But he concedes they are in dire need of radical ideas and political activism.

If anything, Bush’s invocation of The Quiet American was as much a travesty of Graham Greene’s novel as Friedman’s spin is. Last spring a much publicized report on the upsurge of narcissism called for urgent “remedies” to the epidemic of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, resulting from the “self-esteem movement” in the 1980s, among college students.
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Walking up Columbus Ave the other day, we noticed the closure of Hunan Park, an unassuming place that served somewhat bland Chinese. Nearby, the demise of Aegean, a Greek restaurant, was more conspicuous in the summer. And a popular Malaysian eatery across the street also decamped. Are Greek and pan-Asian/Chinese out of favor or what?

The subject of changing palates came up when we shot the breeze with friends recently. One of our pet peeves has been the growing number of Thai eateries in the city, against the backdrop of ever dwindling presence of Chinese restaurants. It’s no seismic shift, as our friends reassured us. After all, Thai cuisine, to most people, is nothing more than spicy Chinese food.
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