From Charles of Charles' Orwell Links:
I just added two essays on Orwell at the BBC by Prof. Douglas Kerr of the University of Hong Kong. Securing
the rights to these essays took me two months and involved getting permission from Prof. Kerr, Manchester University Press and Routledge.
Orwell's time at the BBC is an interesting period in his life and I believe that the addition of these essays will be of interest to many visitors to the site.The links being:
"Orwell’s BBC Broadcasts: Colonial Discourse and the
Rhetoric of Propaganda"
and
"In the Picture: Orwell, India and the BBC".
Any fans of Margaret Atwood around here? I'm on an Atwood kick this month. Bracing stuff. Once you get used to her constant noticing of brutality, it's frequently very funny too.
If the above isn't persuasive, some bits in The Blind Assassin might help. There's a newspaper clipping from Barcelona dated May 1937, and then a few pages later, in an entirely different context: "I've looked back over what I've set down so far, and it seems inadequate..." I realize these are very, very light hints of an Orwell interest, but there's something familiar to me in a writer who so much enjoys making casual mock-objective announcements of unpleasant facts.
In an interesting counterpoint to the Observer article I quoted below, blogger archy spots a strange little lawsuit by a boy arguing the flip side of the Observer's case. Essentially, both the article and the lawsuit are noting that girls, being trained from earliest childhood to obey authorities and seek their approval, are therefore better at building good records for themselves in our current rule-bothered educational institutions. From this, the Observer sensibly enough concludes that girls need relief from the extreme pressures they face to be smiling, orderly, perfect little achievers. The lawsuit, however, argues that boys -- not girls, only boys -- should get special allowances for their supposedly greater propensity to goof off and defy authority. That is, boys should continue being allowed to act like kids, while girls who have been culturally shaped into dutiful, harried, worried, decorous little grownups should be rewarded for their trouble by losing points on the very exams that they've been unfairly taught to view as indicators of their personal worth.
Prejudice, of course, is not logical. When girls did worse on tests they were said to be dumber. Now that girls do better on tests they're said to be natural apple-polishers. What we need, however, is a society in which girls and boys are equally allowed to think and act like kids. May we someday see that day.
Tribune is in a bad way. Apparently it ran (its editors claim in ignorance) a defamatory article which the victim pursued all the way to the libel court, despite a full apology given the same prominent position in the paper as the original piece. It now faces five-figure damages and costs. You can read the appeal here. My knowledge of Tribune's content runs out in about 1949 and so I can't advise you whether it's even worth saving or not. But given the paper's literary heritage it seems a shame for it to go down over such a trivial lapse of judgment (the original 'defamation' was No Big Deal really). If you decide you want to help out, send donations to: TRIBUNE SPECIAL APPEAL FUND, c/o FINANCE DEPT. 9 ARKWRIGHT ROAD, LONDON NW3 6AN.
Over at Cliopatria, Ralph Luker links to this story of fundamentalists trying to push their religious views into California textbooks. In this case, the fundamentalists are Hindu, and the textbooks are on World History.
It's interesting to compare the accuracy of the Wikipedia article on the Aryan invasion theory with the BBC's background article. The Wikipedia entry is a bit light on the subject — coverage of the modern political debate is limited to a page worth of text at the end of the article. The BBC, on the other hand, presents the nationalist version as unquestioned fact, with such phrases as "Why is the theory no longer accepted?" and "It even teaches that some of the most revered books of Hindu scripture are not actually Indian, and it devalues India's culture by portraying it as less ancient than it actually is."
UPDATE 1/25 (Alan A): The Beeb has amended its page to reflect our criticisms.
I feel a strange urge to read bleak things when winter descends upon Central Texas. The thermometers drop into the sixties, and my back porch becomes really comfortable precisely when the days are too short to take advantage of it. For a few years I broke out Solzhenytsin's Gulag Archipelago when December rolled around, but this year I've been plowing through post-apocalyptic sci-fi. In the hope of getting something out of this spree — other than a vague desire to move somewhere with a better water supply — I'm thinking of posting a few reviews of the best and the worst of the genre, but there's so much that I feel like I need to adopt some sort of structure for them.
What are the essential elements of apocalyptic fiction? We've argued here before about the difference between dystopia and apocalypse, and were never able to come to any sort of conclusion. So I'll describe what I think are the important elements of an end-of-the-world story, in the hope that you folks will add to the list.
Turns out they are different from girls, and not just because of the Malign Influence of the Patriarchy. But those differences are now working to their disadvantage.
Lots of issues to chew over here. (Hat tip to Barb).
This would have been a comment in the post below, but for some reason it keeps getting blocked because of 'questionable content' (?). Alan H, have you been a-tinkering with the spamblocker?
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From what I've seen, the people who have decided not to return have made those decisions out of despair.
No, I don't think you can make sweeping assumptions like that. The picture seems to be much more complicated.
LA Times, December 12, 2005.Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina Resettle Along a Racial Divide. By Tomas Alex Tizon and Doug Smith, Times Staff Writers
Hurricane Katrina may have emptied whole sections of New Orleans, but it hasn't set in motion the great national diaspora that was widely foreseen. Instead, the vast majority of displaced households are staying close to their former homes, postal records show.
A Times analysis of address changes after the hurricane also highlights the metropolitan area's sharp distinctions of class and race. Poor blacks from the city were more likely to land farther away in places much different from home. In many cases, those evacuees stayed wherever government-chartered buses or planes stopped.
Evacuees from the suburbs, mostly middle-class whites, tended to find housing closer by in areas similar to their neighborhoods, which minimized the disruption to their lives and left them in a better position to return as soon as circumstances allow.
Despite the initial alarm over a massive migration that would irreversibly scatter the city's population across the 50 states, only a small percentage has landed more than a day's drive -- about 300 miles -- from New Orleans. Fifty-nine percent found new housing without leaving the storm-damaged area.
These patterns emerged from a Times analysis of about 325,000 address changes from Aug. 29 -- the day Katrina hit -- through mid-October, representing about a quarter of the 1.5 million households in the hurricane-damaged region no longer receiving postal delivery. For privacy reasons, the U.S. Postal Service excluded destinations where fewer than 25 families relocated -- a total of about 30,000 households.
The findings provide only a snapshot of migration patterns. Migration will be in flux for a long time, possibly years, as thousands continue to lead unsettled and unstable lives in hotel rooms, trailers and other temporary housing.
"We should look at this situation as a kind of motion picture, and this gives us a glimpse of one scene," said William H. Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan.
"I would bet that six weeks from now, two months from now, two years from now these numbers will be dramatically different," said Frey, author of "America by the Numbers: A Field Guide to the U.S. Population."
Address changes that have poured in since mid-October, however, followed the same migration pattern, the postal service said.
Caveats aside, Frey and other researchers said there was evidence -- primarily anecdotal -- corroborating The Times' finding that poor blacks ended up farther away in wealthier, more rural areas that are predominantly white. The move to more-prosperous cities could amount to a second chance for many evacuees and could change New Orleans forever.
Tulane University sociology professor James Elliott said New Orleans, more than any other large American city, is a place of concentrated poverty, where schools and social agencies perform poorly and where a large number of residents seem stuck in a cycle of poverty that goes back generations.
"Will moving to a new place help some people? The answer is 'probably,' " Elliott said, adding that much would depend on how accommodating their new hometowns turn out to be.
The greater distance from home and their lack of financial and social resources will make it more difficult for poor people to return, whereas middle-class residents who want to go back home are more likely to be able to afford it. What this could portend for the rebuilding of New Orleans is a city with radically different demographics.
"It points to a New Orleans that could become much more white and middle-class," said Laura Ann Sanchez, a researcher at the Center for Family and Demographic Research at Ohio's Bowling Green State University. Sanchez lived and taught in New Orleans for six years, leaving in 2000.
"The truly astonishing melting pot of race and culture that made New Orleans such a gem could be gone forever," Sanchez said.
About 65% of the address changes were turned in by evacuees from the New Orleans area. Of that group, most came from densely populated Orleans Parish, one of the poorest areas in the nation, whose population was about two-thirds black. Many of these evacuees settled in areas where the populations on average were two-thirds white.
Nearly 15% of the Orleans Parish evacuees scattered to such distant cities as Las Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Boston.
By contrast, the displaced population of New Orleans' suburban counties, which were about two-thirds white, evacuated to areas similar in racial demographics. The suburban group largely settled nearby, with 10% staying within the same ZIP Code and more than 90% relocating within the region.
In hurricane-damaged areas beyond New Orleans and its suburbs, the tendency to stay close was even stronger, with nearly half of address changes occurring within the same ZIP Code.
Overall, about 80% of the evacuees remained in the Southern states closest to the hurricane-damaged region, with the top destinations being suburban New Orleans, followed by Houston; Baton Rouge, La.; Dallas; and Atlanta.
The postal service information, tracking movements among regions that share the first three digits of a ZIP Code, roughly corroborates Federal Emergency Management Agency statistics on people who have applied for aid.
The postal service does not normally release address changes but has agreed to provide quarterly summaries. The next release will be in January.
After initial stays in emergency shelters, many blacks went where they had family, which partly explains the migration to Houston, Dallas and Atlanta. Earlier migrations of Louisiana blacks to these cities created networks of extended families, particularly in Houston, about a five-hour drive from New Orleans. Louisianans have long migrated to Houston for jobs and better schools.
At its peak, Houston housed as many as 200,000 evacuees. City officials say as many as 50,000 have left, creating speculation that residents are trickling back home -- or close to home.
Audrey Singer, a migration expert in Washington and author of an academic paper titled "The World in a Zip Code," said many New Orleans evacuees want to get as close to home as possible to monitor the recovery process. Studies show that about half the residents in the most devastated areas of the city are homeowners.
"Being close by is a good thing for them because they can get back quickly and check on their properties," Singer said.
Many evacuees have made frequent trips to retrieve whatever belongings they could salvage. New Orleans officials have said more and more residents are making their way back to the city for the first time, if only for a brief visit.
Frey, the Michigan demographer, said he was skeptical about media surveys in which nearly 40% of evacuees said they would not return home. Those surveys, he said, were conducted in emergency shelters during the first weeks after Katrina, a time when most people were still in shock.
More than three months after Katrina barreled through the region, thousands of evacuees are still dazed and disoriented, making it difficult to predict how many will return home, Frey said.
The uncertainty is exacerbated by the seeming lack of progress in rebuilding New Orleans. Many evacuees are standing by in frustration as government leaders debate what course of action to take, according to Amy Liu, a policy analyst at the Brookings Institution.
"My sense is that many families are anxious to go back," Liu said, but as more time passes without a concrete recovery plan for New Orleans, the more likely it is that evacuees will settle elsewhere.
Some experts paint a picture of a huge, restless, growing population of evacuees hovering just outside New Orleans, waiting for a green light to allow them back into their old lives.
Such a longing for home is understandable, especially among low-income blacks, Frey said. Nearly nine out of 10 blacks in New Orleans were born in Louisiana. Compare that with Houston, where 75% of black residents are Texas-born, and Atlanta, where 57% are native to Georgia.
Many black New Orleans residents, especially those in their 40s, 50s and 60s, "had not traveled widely outside of their neighborhoods, much less to a different city or state," Frey said. "This population felt more settled in one place than any population anywhere in the United States."
UN peacekeepers retreat to Abidjan while "Young Patriot" demonstrators — led by military officers — take control of the state radio, calling for seizure of the airport and expulsion of neutral forces.
My translation of part of the Reporters Without Borders press release:
Around noon on January 16, 2006, several hundred of the "Young Patriots" were massed before the main offices of Radiotélévision ivoirienne (RTI) in the Cocody neighborhood of Abidjan, demanding to "make a live declaration." According to numerious eye-witnesses, the demonstrators had at their head the chef d'état-major of the Ivory Coast National Armed Forces, General Philippe Mangou, as well as the Security Operations Command Center commandant colonel Georges Guiai Bi Poin. Alerted, the channel's officers refused to give in to the demands. After the demonstraters had tried to penetrate into the studio by force, the channel officers attempted to negotiate a compromise in the afternoon. Finally, the demonstraters accepted the principle of the broadcast of a remote declaration.The next day, around a hundred demonstrators were still installed around the headquarters of RTI. The perimiter of the station had been placed under the protection of the Ivorien military. One soldier, questioned by Reporters Without Borders, indicated that the presence of his unit was to dissuade the "Young Patriots" from taking over the building.
In the middle of the day on January 18, around 300 demonstrators penetrated the courtyard of RTI, after security forces opened the gates to them. "They never had to open offices that remained closed," a source close to the action told Agence France-Presse. After having threatened the technicians on duty, they obtained for broadcast a message from the leader of the Ivory Coast Student and Scholarl Association, Serge Koffi, asking "all the youth to come down into the streets to demand the departure of the "impartial forces" and to totally liberate our country." The leader asserted that he had "taken" the station. After the 1:00 PM news update, the RTI antenna continued to be occupied by the "Young Patriots," who projected words ordering mobilization, calling after 4:30 PM for demonstrators to "take the airport."
I've been thinking about interviews lately. Having conducted several score in the past few years, I've found myself weighing in on other people's discussions of the subject.
Being on an apocalyptic sci-fi kick lately, I stumbled across Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 "Deer In The Works." It's a typical piece of Gray Flannel Suit existentialism, but contains an interview sequence that shocked me:
He walked into booth twenty-six and extended his hand to Mr. Dilling, a man of his own age. "Mr. Dilling, my name is David Potter. I was curious to know what openings you might have in advertising and sales promotion, and thought I'd drop in for a talk."Mr. Dilling, an old hand at facing young men who tried to hide their eagerness for a job, was polite but outwardly unimpressed. "Well, you came at a bad time, I'm afraid, Mr. Potter. The competition for that kind of job is pretty stiff, as you perhaps know, and there isn't much of anything open just now."
David nodded. "I see." He had had no experience in asking for a job with a big organization, and Mr. Dilling was making him aware of what a fine art it was — if you couldn't run a machine. A duel was under way.
"But have a seat anyway, Mr. Potter."
"Thank you." He looked at his watch. "I really ought to be getting back to my paper soon."
"You work on a paper around here?"
"Yes. I own a weekly paper in Dorset, about ten miles from Ilium."
"Oh — you don't say. Lovely little village. Thinking of giving up the paper, are you?"
"Well, no — not exactly. It's a possibility. I bought the paper soon after the war, so I've been with it for eight years, and I don't want to go stale. I might be wise to move on. It all depends on what opens up."
"You have a family?" said Mr. Dilling pleasantly.
"Yes. My wife, and two boys and two girls."
"A nice, big, well-balanced family," said Mr. Dilling. "And you're so young, too."
"Twenty-nine," said David. He smiled. "We didn't plan it to be quite that big. It's run to twins. The boys are twins, and then, several days ago, the girls came."
"You don't say!" said Mr. Dilling. He winked. "That would certainly start a young man thinking about getting a little security, eh, with a family like that?"
Both of them treated the remark casually, as though it were no more than a pleasantry between two family men. "It's what we wanted, actually, two boys, two girls," said David. "We didn't expect to get them this quickly, but we're glad now. As far as security goes — well, maybe I flatter myself, but I think the administrative and writing experience I've had running the paper would be worth a good bit to the right people, if something happened to the paper."
"One of the big shortages in this country," said Dilling philosophically, concentrating on lighting a cigarette, "is men who know how to do things, and know how to take responsibility and get things done. I only wish there were better openings in advertising and sales promotion than the ones we've got. They're important, interesting jobs, understand, but I don't know how you'd feel about the starting salary."
The first thing that struck me was how much of this conversation would be illegal nowadays. The smoking, obviously, but the first question the interviewer initiates is "You have a family?". The second shocking thing about this exchange was that the interviewer never actually asked the applicant to demonstrate a single skill relevant to the job.
Does anybody know how accurate Vonnegut is? Was the post-war period really like that? Or is this just a bit of poetic license appropriate to the genre?
Here's a neat little Net toy for those of you with UK ancestry. The distribution of Allports is shown here. I knew the name had Midlands origins but I'm shocked and slightly appalled to see its heavy distribution in mid-Wales. I'm 'ex-industrial legacy' and 82 per cent of people have a higher-status surname. Lawks.
(Although it seems quiet now they've been having some server problems due to heavy useage, so be patient).
Sometimes I love the transparent society.
Via Cliopatria
Speaking of Free Speech ...
While we're waiting for Pat Robertson to apologize for his next undoubtedly imminent gaffe, it's nice to see that someone else is picking up the slack.
"Faced with howls of protest, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin apologized Tuesday for claiming that a vengeful God smote New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina because of heavenly disapproval of America's involvement in Iraq and of rampant violence within urban black communities.Nagin also offered a less sweeping apology for his remarks about the city's future demographics in the aftermath of the storm and subsequent catastrophic flood. His comments came in a speech, delivered on Martin Luther King Day with City Hall as a backdrop, in which the mayor said God intended New Orleans to rise again as a "chocolate city," which he defined as a "black-majority city."
Nagin said he was in error on his claim that Katrina's devastation was a result of God's will. Those charges led some critics, particularly on the Internet, to compare Nagin with television evangelist Pat Robertson, who sometimes asserts that events stemmed from the wrath of God. Nagin said Tuesday he does not believe the Lord punished New Orleans.
"I sincerely apologize for that and if there was anything I could take back, that would be it," he said. "I think it was inappropriate."
Nagin acknowledged consulting with religious leaders since Katrina, and in his myriad public appearances he has commented eloquently on the important role faith must play if New Orleans is to endure. He said he regrets delivering a different message on Monday.
"I don't know what happened there," he said. "I don't know how that got jumbled up. That whole God thing, I don't know how that got mixed up in there."
...
Nagin acknowledged that some white residents considered his speech a divisive attack. But his intent was not to lash out at the city's white residents, he said. Rather, the "psyche" of black New Orleanians is on edge, and he said he wanted to soothe growing concerns and, at the same time, encourage people to return to the city. As additional context, Nagin pointed to the shootings at Sunday's second-line parade that left many returning black residents feeling jagged.
But Nagin was vague when asked why some displaced African-American residents believe they are not welcome. He described it as a hodgepodge of factors that have coalesced into a pessimistic "buzz." In his speech, however, Nagin was quite pointed, urging his audience to disregard "what people are saying Uptown" and reiterating, "This will be a chocolate city at the end of the day." The reference appeared to be to a 1975 song, "Chocolate City," by the band Parliament, which commented on white urban flight and black repopulation. Nagin said he has used the chocolate reference before and was simply referring to New Orleans' past, and future, as a majority black city.
Nagin said he did not mean to imply that Uptown residents are racist and apologized for using the phrase. The mayor was contrite about comments he made in an effort to stir up what he thought was an unnecessarily languid event, one at which he said other speakers "weren't saying anything" despite the enormous issues at stake.
There's been a lot written on how American monoglottism hurts our foreign policy, intelligence operations, and military operations. Probably the best I've seen on the subject comes from Andrew Todd's comment on Cliopatria today:
What it comes down to is that you have to start teaching all major third-world languages in the first grade on a compulsory basis, and go on doing so for twenty years, before you get usable results. Naturally, there would be more people wanting their children to take Chinese than other languages, so classes in Amharic, Berber, and Pushtu would be filled by use of the compulsory power. Most of the places where the Marines are likely to be sent in are places where the State Department doesn't want you to go, and doesn't want you to trade with. If there is a distinctive local language, there is likely to be no good reason for learning it, save for military purposes.
(Emphasis mine.)
Administrators at the University of Wisconsin apparently skipped out on the civics class that explained the First Amendment.
Japan's retreat to the bedroom (no, not that type of retreat).
(hatip to Barb).
One answer: "The rich have decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers."
Take a look at these comments and you can see a pattern of inculcated fatalism that is (at least to these atheistic Western eyes) deeply creepy and which allows the Saudis to, if not get away with murder exactly, then certainly with criminal irresponsibility.
Virginia Postrel writes today on the sad atrophy of great prose among modern megachurches and "contemporary Christian" culture:
After all, nobody reads the KJV anymore. Forget poetry (not to mention sensitivity to the underlying Hebrew), today's suburban Christianity is all about accessibility. It's been dumbed down.Now I'm not a Christian, let alone an evangelical. If megachurches want to play bad-to-mediocre rock instead of great hymns, that's their business. But the spread of Christian pap does have spillovers, not the least of which is that devout Christian faith no longer brings with it a deep familiarity with what's actually in the Bible, as opposed to a few verses from the preacher's PowerPoint. Unless the person is over a certain age, Biblical literacy, when you do find it, rarely means acquaintance with great English. Forget theological or philosophical sophistication. I'd settle for the ability to comprehend complex sentences.
Throughout American history, Christian (largely Protestant) devotion has stretched people's minds and given them reason to think, if only within a closed system of belief. Religious practice has taught people to read, write, and speak. The rhythms and rhetoric of the Bible have given America its greatest political rhetoric, from Abraham Lincoln's to Martin Luther King's. Today's Christianity produces...George W. Bush.
The King James was always my favorite growing up, because of the language. When my grandmother said grace, she correctly conjugated the second-person singular, and if I recall correctly also alternated between "my/mine" and "thy/thine" before vowels. Deciphering the speech made learning my first foreign language much easier, and more trivially helped me win a Scrabble game on a challenge against "kine".
It wasn't until studying Hebrew in college that I realized that so much of the "poetry" of the KJV is due to use of Hebrew word order: Hebrew is VSO, which for some reason can convert sentences about administrative reorganization to beauty. And there arose in the land a new pharoah, who knew not Joseph.
Hamilton College has published the results from a poll of high-school seniors' attitudes to "Guns, Gays and Abortion". According to the poll, 2006 graduates are more liberal than the general population on gay rights, but map pretty closely to the rest of the American public on abortion and gun control.
Around the blogosphere, KC Johnson points out the patronizing tone of the pollster's analysis of student opinion about abortion and suggests that FMA supporters are fighting a losing battle. "Liberal Lion" at Quad Cities Back Stage echoes Johnson's observation about the FMA, and goes on in the comments to cast the poll's findings about abortion in a pro-choice light.
The blog at ACTA Online sees the poll as " urg[ing] us to move beyond caricature and stereotype when it comes to understanding where young adults stand and why they stand where they do." If you think you can hear Whitney Houston, you're not the only one. Trey at Daddy, Papa, and Me is heartened by the news, even if he's a bit unclear on Virginia history. . Andrew Sullivan also takes pleasure in the results, and looks into the numbers in a bit more detail,
Martha's post about a heresy trial in California came to mind a few weeks ago when I heard "Heretics" Episode of This American Life. It's about an hour long — just about the right length for a stroll around the neighborhood. Although if it's "Large Items Pick-up Week" in your neighborhood too, you might think about postponing that walk for a while, if only to keep a walking path through the garage. Sheesh — the things people get rid of...
From an article in The Weekly Standard titled Hawthorne's God:
His "Earth's Holocaust" tells the tale of a group of ardent reformers who commit most everything to flames in their desire to build a better world. At the end, only three are gathered at the great fire--"the hangman, the last thief and the last murderer." They decide to hang themselves as there is "no world left for us any longer." But a "dark-complexioned personage," whose "eyes glowed with a redder light than that of the bonfire," joins them and says no. "The wiseacres" have forgotten to throw the most crucial things into the flames. The last murderer inquires what that might be. "What but the human heart itself? . . . I have stood by this livelong night and sneered at the whole business. O take my word for it, it will be the old world yet."
I've never heard of the story. Is anybody else familiar with it?
First-hand reporting on last night's newsrooms from Done With Mirrors:
By that time, our presses were rolling and the trucks had begun to leave the plant. We were one of the papers that came out with the big, blaring "they're alive" headlines that later proved so heart-wrenchingly false.What did you learn about newspapers? Nothing that wasn't always true. We try to bring you the latest news, but even when we do our best there's always going to be a time gap, and things can fall in it. Big-city newspapers like the Chicago Tribune have the luxury of replating during a press run. Some copies get out wrong, some get out right.
From The Case for Contamination:
[P]reserving culture - in the sense of such cultural artifacts - is different from preserving cultures. And the cultural preservationists often pursue the latter, trying to ensure that the Huli of Papua New Guinea (or even Sikhs in Toronto) maintain their "authentic" ways. What makes a cultural expression authentic, though? Are we to stop the importation of baseball caps into Vietnam so that the Zao will continue to wear their colorful red headdresses? Why not ask the Zao? Shouldn't the choice be theirs?"They have no real choice," the cultural preservationists say. "We've dumped cheap Western clothes into their markets, and they can no longer afford the silk they used to wear. If they had what they really wanted, they'd still be dressed traditionally." But this is no longer an argument about authenticity. The claim is that they can't afford to do something that they'd really like to do, something that is expressive of an identity they care about and want to sustain. This is a genuine problem, one that afflicts people in many communities: they're too poor to live the life they want to lead. But if they do get richer, and they still run around in T-shirts, that's their choice. Talk of authenticity now just amounts to telling other people what they ought to value in their own traditions.
Not that this is likely to be a problem in the real world. People who can afford it mostly like to put on traditional garb - at least from time to time. I was best man once at a Scottish wedding at which the bridegroom wore a kilt and I wore kente cloth. Andrew Oransay, the islander who piped us up the aisle, whispered in my ear at one point, "Here we all are then, in our tribal gear." In Kumasi, people who can afford them love to put on their kente cloths, especially the most "traditional" ones, woven in colorful silk strips in the town of Bonwire, as they have been for a couple of centuries.
A good observation, I think, that fretting about cultural authenticity is something done by those who can afford it. The people I know trying to revive the Manx Language have a lot of time on their hands.
(Thanks to Ralph Luker)
I have a resolution for the new year. It may not be very ambitious, but I think that it's still worth sharing with you folks.
In 2006, I will learn to use the semicolon.
Anyone else?