Filed under: Environment
Sushi is a word that just about works as a tongue twister that starts to sound like something else when the tongue gets tired. Here is a ripping piece by an author named Nick Tosches on that celebrated aspect of Japanese cuisine. There are so many aspects of this article that are of interest that I worry only citing a few phrases does great injustice to the whole piece. I continue nonetheless. The following is his very tosh description of why sushi is so popular in the States.
Why? I’m sure there are social-anthropological theories, all of them bound to be as boring as they are meaningless. The real answer, I think, is simple.
America is addicted to sugar, but it seeks increasingly to veil its addiction. Power Bars. Sounds healthy. Main ingredient: fructose syrup. Almost 25 percent sugar. The guy, Brian Maxwell, who got rich selling these things, selling sugar as nutrition, swore by them and croaked at the age of 51. Eat a Power Bar and nobody gives a glance. Run up a bag of dope and people look at you funny. I don’t get it. How about a nice, large Tazo Chai Frappuccino Blended Crème from Starbucks? Sounds healthy—I mean, after all, chai—and classy too: crème? Sugar content: 17 teaspoons.
A killer sugar addiction, a preoccupation with health, no matter how misguided, and pretensions, or delusions, of worldly sophistication. Sushi perfectly satisfies them all.
Tosches goes on to explain how the rice is sweetened as is often the soy sauce people use. As for me, I managed to develop a taste for the glory of sashimi. For me, it was the intoxicating mixture of the salty variant of soy and the wasabi.
There’s one other part of this piece that is simply hilarious. Tosches wishes to satisfy his desire for eating whale meat.
I want to know what kind of whale makes for the best grub. Eva-san talks to the boss. He makes a forlorn gesture to a poster on the wall that pictures all the species of whales in the sea, and, forlornly, he expounds awhile.
The great blue whale, the largest animal that has ever lived, is by far the best, he says. But, as it’s considered one of the world’s most endangered species, it has been unobtainable for more than 35 years. I feel for the guy.
“No black market?”
“Too big to hide.”
J.S.
Filed under: Education
While supply teaching 10 year–olds today another teacher came into my classroom to conduct the French class. I took the opportunity to get back into my novel I was reading when my ears pricked up upon hearing her say “O.K. I’m now going to talk in English for 2 minutes to explain to you how to use a dictionary.” I thought to myself that anyone that was willing to explain how to use a dictionary couldn’t be all that bad. Here was her explanation, plus ou moins.
“Look up the word headache. Look it up in the english section of your dictionary [they were using english–french dictionaries]. You will see next to the word some symbols in brackets that nobody bothers reading or understanding. Then you will see prep or adj which means preposition or adjective etc. Finally you have ‘mal de tête’. Which do you think is the word in French? The symbols that nobody uses, prep, or mal de tête?”
As it happens, I once thought that those symbols in between the brackets were impossible to decipher, and I didn’t use them largely because I didn’t know how to. They were intimidating because they were different. However, over time I came to understand their utility and also a little bit about how interesting an idea it was to come up with them in the first place.
As the teacher finished her class I realised that I had a bit of a choice in front of me. The easy one would be to keep my mouth shut and to say nothing. This is easier because discussing the phonetic alphabet with the kids would only get back to her next time she taught the class. The first thing that they would say is that they knew what the symbols meant. This would mean that the next time I supply teach at this school, if even asked back, I will face another teacher who will feel that I have made her look a little silly in front of the students. At the very least, she might feel that her credibility has been undermined. However, my hesitation to say something was precisely related to the fact that she had said that “nobody uses them”. If she had said that she didn’t know what they meant, or that someone in the class could find out what they meant, I wouldn’t have had any hesitation to explain the phonetic alphabet at all. It was only because she had set up the scenario as such that she would lose face if I, or anyone else, said anything that I was hesitating at all. I wondered if this was in part a way that she presented things so as not to have to answer these questions.
I understand that there is a peer pressure in teaching to toe the line as a unit. If students feel that teachers are fallible then maybe it’ll be harder to maintain discipline in the classroom. However, I don’t feel that this should weigh more heavily than the pressure to teach and to encourage inquiry. After she left I closed the door and told the students to reopen their dictionaries. I took about five minutes to explain the basic principle of the phonetic alphabet. Some of them were bored, but I’m not sure all of them were.
I think that in politics people are encouraged to toe the line even if someone within their party says something ridiculous. Every once in a while if someone says something completely bonkers then the whole party might turn on them and demand that they excuse or explain themselves. I feel that this is a similar type of situation. If people in these situations felt more at ease to encourage ever so gently another perspective then it would not be such a precedent each time that someone disagreed.
Jonathan Smith
Filed under: China
Pretty darned interesting article here at City Journal by a Frenchman named Guy Sorman. He also has a piece on Nicolas Sarkozy here. Essentially he argues that the rise of China as a 21st century economic power is far from certain. He also believes that far too many of the peasants have been left out of the economic growth that has already happened. In some ways, it sort of feels like the House of Saud but on a much larger scale. Reading the piece I could easily wish for more sources to verify some of the story but at the same time it is China and freedom of information is still hard to come by. The ethics in having the Olympics in China in 2008 could be put into question too. I did not know, for example, that 3,000 odd people died in the protests in 1989. Has China really made amends for that? There’s this unbelievable story as well:
Sarmon claims that this was admitted to by Beijing and made known in the press. Well, if it was mentioned then it was but a blip on the screen.
If nothing else, the piece is a stark reminder of how far much of the West has come in its historical journey in relation to a place like China. Unions, human rights, even the idea of real estate, are all distant notions in large parts of China.
J.S.
Filed under: Iran
My cabbie tonight was from Iran. I know this because he was speaking on his cell phone and I asked him what language he was speaking. He dared me to guess. I refused. It was Persian. We ended up discussing Iran and politics. Sure enough, no one has more distaste for the Iranian government than someone that has moved halfway across the world to escape them. This, above all else, is what will continually surprise and disappoint me about current Western life. Instead of welcoming allies who encourage the same values as our own such as democracy, women’s rights and reason we choose to let the loudest thugs from these regimes rule discourse in our communities. It was no surprise to him or me that individuals from the Iranian government are paid to try and encourage the hijab in communities in the West.
Jonathan Smith
I have no idea if the title of this post made sense at any moment in the history of the english language. And yet, this question is still vitally important in France. In brief, the article states that the current minister of education in France wants to reassert the “vous” between the students and teachers in France. Personally, this strikes me as attacking the symptoms of some of the problems in France and not some of the causes. On the other hand, it may be demonstrating a will for change on a deeper level than has existed for awhile. Still, the fact that some professors are referred to by their first name and others by their title doesn’t necessarily translate to respect in English either. I can’t help but add that one can still say “Vous êtes un vrai connard” tout en respectant le vouvoiement.
J.S.
Filed under: Rhetoric
Seize the moment, but take care not to let the future seize you.
The previous sentence might be arguably a version of antimetabole. I am such a fan of antimetabole that I’ve mentioned it before on this very blog. There is power in repetition and redundancy. For example, we do have two eyes just in case one decides to quit on us. We have two of other things too. I’ve been thinking of antimetabole today as I’ve just come from assisting at the wedding of a good friend of mine. I suppose that a true antimetabolic phrase would finish as “not to let the moment seize you“. Still it is of great fascination to me that these celebrations can only by their very nature last for a brief period of time, and yet one hopes that it sets the tone for the years to come. I don’t feel that my powers of articulation are capable at this moment in describing how it is that the shortness of a wedding and the hopeful length of a successful marriage matches the quality of reversing the clauses in a phrase, but I do feel that the relationship exists between the two.
J.S.
Filed under: Language
One of the aspects of a learning a language that one must come to terms with is the sheer enormity of the task. I often find it incredible to think that I can speak, listen, write and read so well in English (my mother tongue). Even more so, I find it more incredible how similarly so many others speak the same mother tongue. For me, this sensitisation to my own language only came about after making the effort to learn French.
If there were an auditory equivalent to La Bibliotheque Nationale it just might be europe1.fr – 24 hours a day people talk in French. Even better, there is the distilled version of all their shows without their commercials at http://www.europe1.fr/podcast/index.jsp.
Without exaggerating, there are times I can listen to these selections of French and simply marvel at it all. Now, if I could only find the equivalent of this webpage for arabic, persian, italian, russian, polish and others!
Jonathan Smith
Filed under: Bernard Kouchner, Euston Manifesto, French Politics, Nicolas Sarkozy
Nicolas Sarkozy was invested as President of France today. The grandiose, red-carpeted transfer of power, including, we are told, the handing over of the codes for the French nuclear arsenal, went off without a hitch. Like the previous ceremony in 1995 –where Mitterrand retired and was replaced by Chirac – the event had the air of a stable and orderly transition from one generation to the next; a sense heightened by the fact that Chirac has a good foot in height on Sarkozy, and insisted on patting him paternally on the shoulder as they climbed the steps of the Elysee Palace.
Predictably, now that the war is won, the talk is of nothing but peace. ‘In the service of France, there are no factions’, announced President Sarkozy from behind a freshly sawn-off lectern; a statement borne more, one suspects, out of hope than expectation, and only slightly undermined by the fact that he has just emerged as the victor in one of the most divisive presidential campaigns in French history. Pompous fatuities like this are de rigueur on such occasions.
Given the emptiness of his pillow-talk to the French nation, it is fitting that one of Sarkozy’s first ostensibly unifying gestures has, in fact, managed to stir up the pot. His appointment of socialist Bernard Kouchner to the post of Foreign Minister has rubbed salt into the still weeping wounds of the PS, whilst irritating several important members of the President’s own UMP, each of whom had more than half an eye on the post themselves.
Elevating ourselves, as we must, above the petty considerations of party politics, this bold appointment augurs well for Sarkozy’s foreign policy. Monsieur Kouchner is a rare beast, one on the verge of extinction in this country, if not his own: namely, a left-winger in favour of le droit – or, in the words of his seminal 1987 book on the subject, le devoir – d’ingerence. This right – or duty – to interfere in a country’s affairs in the event of a humanitarian catastrophe must be exercised by states if, as he attests, ‘the inhumanity of man belongs to all mankind’.
His credentials for the post are impeccable: a former Red Cross doctor, Kouchner is a founding member of Medecins sans Frontieres, whose heroic volunteers risk life and limb to bring humanitarian aid to victims of war and repression. Forged in the crucible of the Biafran civil war by a vanguard of French doctors, MSF and Kouchner (who parted company from the organisation in 1980) have been thoroughly admirable and consistent champions of humanitarian intervention; whether in Chechyna, the Balkans or, most recently, Iraq.
Of course, governments have not always heeded their calls – most shamefully in Rwanda, in 1994, when the country imploded and a million Tutsis were butchered. But when, in Kosovo, they did do so, Kouchner was there to help reconstruct the province’s civil administration as leader of the United Nation’s Interim authority. In his own country, he has long spoken out against his government’s -particularly the late President Chirac’s – affection for corrupt African despots; he once called President Mobutu ‘a walking bank safe in a leopard skin hat’ as his country’s troops were helping to crush anti-Mobutu rebels.
In the spirit of the French left’s noble internationalist traditions, Kouchner is unembarrassed to quote Francois Mitterrand maxim that “the sovereignty of states ceases when non-assistance to persons in danger begins”. He is no unilateralist, but unlike Chirac, de Villepin et al., he is certainly not an unqualified multilateralist. The Frenchman in the old joke who, upon hearing a plan, remarks, ‘I can see that it works in practice, but does it work in theory?’ would receive short shrift from Kouchner.. “Yes, to a stable world. Yes, to the United Nations system.”, he told an audience in a speech entitled The Future of Humanitarianism. “But we must stop this theoretical talk as soon as oppression begins and people in danger are appealing to us because their lives are in danger. We must listen carefully for that call.” At a time when the future of humanitarianism remains uncertain, Kouchner is the kind of oracle that we need.
Michael P
An interesting article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali here regarding the struggle between secular and Islamist political forces in Turkey. It makes for rather disspiriting reading, describing the Hobson’s choice Turkish voters seem to have between a form of religious-based rule and the sort of ultra-nationalist, but secular, government which sees the denial of its country’s historic role in the Armenian genocide as a matter of public policy.
The current tensions in Ankara centre around the election of a new president for the country. According to opinion polls, some 70% of Turks would vote for the fundamentalist Justice and Development Party’s (AK) candidate. Such statistics are however, at present, academic; the Turkish president is elected by the parliament, not the people, and the secularist MPs’ boycott of the vote on this issue forced the country’s constitutional court to pronounce the result – and the appointment of the AK Party’s Abdullah Gul – void.
Firmly placed within the ranks of the 30% who have reservations about the AK’s Islamist agenda is the Turkish Army’s high command, an avowedly and militantly pro-secular force which has ousted four governments from power in five decades. Before the decision of the constitutional court was handed down, it chose to flex its muscles once again by not-so-gently reminding anyone who was interested that the Turkish army remained the guardian of the country’s secular constitution.
As an Englishman, I can only cock a half-hearted snook at the type of thumb-on-the-scales measure that sees a particular type of person effectively barred from office. Our own country’s response to the threat of Papist fifth-columnists in the 17th century was to make it illegal for any Roman Catholic to take to the throne. That bar, it should not surprise you, is still on the statute book; although, funnily enough, there is no legislative obstacle to a king of England, or his Queen, being a Muslim (constitutionally, it would be troublesome- but not legally; a peculiarly English distinction)
Thanks to the siphoning of monarchical authority by the executive, we now, at least, elect our Kings, and will not permit anyone to tell us who we ought not to elect. The interference of the military in the democratic process, or the effective barring of candidates from elections, must leave a nasty taste in the mouth of any democrat. The AK Party is a popular force in Turkey. This is not only, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues, because they are able to draw upon the proselytising fervour of their supporters to an extent that conventional political parties could only dream of. Under the AK’s stewardship Turkey has experienced good economic growth and increased prosperity. Perhaps most importantly, it has taken the country on its first steps towards European Union membership, shedding a number of its religious shibboleths – such as the criminalization of adultery – along the way.
This is not to say, however, that secularists should stand idly by as Turkey submits –albeit consensually – to the abrogation of its secular constitution. A democratic government is government by consent of the people, not by the consent of a religious text or imam. You might say that it is none of our business whether the Turkish people agree with this particular precept or do not. But it becomes our business when that country wishes to join a club like the European Union. That organisation’s policy of selectively opening its doors to those nations committed to democracy, human rights and the rule of law is well established and has, unarguably, been much more successful at achieving lasting regime change throughout the continent of Europe than have recent displays of hard power in other climes.
Now is not the time, as Nicolas Sarkozy’s France seems to be contemplating, to turn our back on Turkey. On the contrary, liberals throughout Europe should be redoubling their efforts to fuel enlightened minds in that country.
Michael P
Filed under: Euston Manifesto, Iran, Iraq, Israeli / Palestinian, Labour Party
The Euston Manifesto event on Monday 30th April has now been posted in its entirety on Youtube at: http://www.youtube.com/eustonmanifesto
I’d recommend you watch it all, it would make interesting Sunday afternoon viewing. The quality of the debate was fantastic, which in part I suspect is due to the additional freedoms Labour Ministers now have in discussions of policy during this period of interregnum.
A theme of Nick Cohen’s writings both in the Observer and also in ‘What’s Left? How Liberals lost their way’ is the failure of the democratic Left (and by this I guess he means in large part the Labour party), has failed to convince the British public of the case for foreign interventions. This is undoubtably a truth – Labour Ministers have in the face of the public’s massive disapproval of Iraq (literally) gone soft: the case for intervention is rarely enunciated, the silence telling of the failure of US and UK reconstruction efforts.
Here, Nick Cohen asks Hilary Benn if he is willing to make the case for humanitarian intervention to Labour supporters: –
I think Hilary Benn is excellent throughout the debate, as is Pat McFadden, who gives us a sophisticated narrative of the causes of Terrorism and our failure to understand them. Responsibility, a key new Labour theme, is re-used to give suicide bombers back their autonomy and with it, their moral culpability.
The debate on the United Nations is interesting, as the failures of the UN are often glossed over or not discussed by politicians: like the NHS it is truly a ‘sacred cow’. I quite like Nick’s argument about the UN being ‘a club with no basic rules’, but Benn and Brian Brivati’s argument for the engagement of undemocratic nations is a good one.
I hope this triggers necessary debate on the future for humanitarian intervention, but also the threshold for future military interventions. Comments would be appreciated.
Migsuk
All The More Reason 