Content & Context

Unlike perhaps any other European city of a comparable size, Athens has yet to establish even one proper mosque for its growing population of Muslim immigrants, who cram instead into makeshift spaces that barely make do. That was supposed to be remedied, or on its way to being remedied, by now. Nearly two years ago, the Greek Parliament authorized a mosque for Athens, and Greek government officials pledged to help bring one into existence. But ground has not been broken, and considerable discord dogs the project, prompting doubts among Muslims here about whether it will come to be … The lack of progress on the mosque reflects the difficulties that Greece, a country of emigrants until the last few decades, is having as it adjusts to newcomers in general and Muslims in particular. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/international/europe/22GREE.html*

He goes to work in sneakers, blue jeans and a fine gold chain glinting under his black leather jacket. Anthony Bianchi looks little changed from the boy who went to Xaverian High School in Brooklyn, the guy whose mom, Frances, lives in Staten Island. But widen the camera angle—as Mr. Bianchi, who once helped produce the television show "The Jeffersons," might say—and cherry blossoms and Japanese-language billboards flash by the windows of his commuter train. One new billboard in town has a red, white and blue motif. It shows "Bianchi-san," in coat and tie, with a sharp new haircut, appealing for votes in the race for the Inuyama City Council on April 27. Americans of Asian descent running for political office in the United States is old news. But Mr. Bianchi is believed to be the first native of the United States to run for elective public office in Japan … If elected—and he is given a strong chance—the boy from Bensonhurst promises to do his best to introduce some American-style politicking to City Council meetings. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/international/asia/24JAPA.html*

SPOT CHECK

Although computer editing tricks have given us the specter of Fred Astaire as posthumous pitchman for vacuum cleaners and John Wayne shilling beer from beyond the grave, we have yet to see Abbie Hoffman pop onto the screen and put in a good word for the Banana Republic. The day seems less distant, however, after observing one of the strangest advertising trends of the last couple months. Icons of the 1960s counterculture have fallen into the hands of its sworn enemy—consumer culture, as major advertisers commodify sixties classics for television commercials. And so Simon and Garfunkel's "Feelin' Groovy" is the soundtrack for a Gap spot for its new Stretch pants. Claritin's slogan for its latest allergy relief is "Flower Power." Sandals Resorts borrows Jackie DeShannon's "What the World Needs Now [Is Love]" to coax people to its beaches.

A couple caveats before baby boomers cry sacrilege over these tunes from their coming of age. First, you can say boomers themselves sold out long before this latest wave of commercials—they vowed to avoid the mindlessness of consumerism, only to fuel the "Me Decade" of the greed-drenched 1980s. And while you can admire boomers' idealism, you can't get too nostalgic for a social movement which, while culturally refreshing after the stale 1950s, was nonetheless behind a lot of damaging drug use and loveless sex (although cultural historians distinguish between the counterculture and hippies, pointing out that the former was politically oriented while the latter were stoned and politically apathetic). And the artists themselves had to hand over the rights to these two songs before the ads could go on. Besides, this trend has a long and complex history, as documented in Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism.

Still, the clash in ethos between the original songs and their current use goes beyond postmodern irony (in which cultural objects are seen to have no inherent meaning) to the point of disorienting incongruity. In the Gap Stretch ads, slender, elegant models blithely bound down the street to a cooing remake of Simon and Garfunkel. The background is washed out with a yellowish hue, portraying a sterilized world in which the consumed good is the only distinguishing characteristic. No one's saying "Feelin' Groovy" was sophisticated social discourse, but the relative profundity of the lyrics' call to stop and smell the roses rather than settle for superficiality in life doesn't fit with Gap's shallow task of selling slacks. Similarly, the Sandals Resorts spot shows luxurious vacationers in a postcard-meets-soap-opera setting with a syrupy remake of DeShannon's song in the background. It's a far cry from DeShannon's original complaint against prejudice and discrimination in the heyday of the civil rights era. Again, no one would nominate it for a Nobel Prize, but the reduction of these anthems to commercial soundtracks is a discouraging sign of how our culture prioritizes consumption over social idealism—which should alarm Christians called to live in the world with alternative consciousness. But that's not the real question, according to the ad exec behind the Stretch pants spot. "The real question," she said, "is whether it will have an impact in terms of unique product positioning."

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China puts the rest of the world to shame when it comes to family values (for older family members, that is—not for infants). The Western world has comparatively little respect for tradition and reverence for elderly relatives and ancestors, and few are able to observe this as poignantly as John Pomfret, Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post. Participating in the funeral customs for his Chinese wife's grandmother, he reflects on her life and the cultural shifts she witnessed in her lifetime.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39952-2003Apr25.html

Related:Materialism has proven a more potent revolutionary force than politics, writes one Western professor in the Post.
Does this qualify as marine terrorism? Killer whales are on a rampage off American shores of the Pacific Ocean, says the Washington Post. Eleven orcas popped up in Puget Sound recently and had their fill of hundreds of harbor seals, halving the population in the Hood Canal. The poor seals were afraid to go in the water, marine biologists reported. A patron saint of environmentalists, the killer whale is doing its own damage to ocean ecosystems. In Alaska, it has evaporated certain populations of sea otters and sea lions.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10506-2003Apr11.html
The latest housing boom looks nice, but it has a dark structural secret-metaphorically and literally. Shoddy construction of the latest wave of new housing has led to a rise is lawsuits against builders, and a hike in insurance premiums for builders, says Business Week online.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash …
As Ukranians remembered the horror of Chernobyl on Saturday's anniversary of the disaster, a chilling fact loomed: Chernobyl is alarmingly unstable. The sarcophagus sealing the wounded reactor risks collapsing before construction begins on a new one next year. The crisis calls for new international cooperation, writes Bennett Ramberg, author of Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy, in an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/oped … *
We crave sensible, scientific explanations for social phenomena. This Washington Post column contains two cause-and-effect scenarios that are farther off the beaten path. A recent paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that certain failing schools in Virginia boosted the sugar and calorie counts on their lunch menu during standardized testing periods. What's more, the gluttonous gambit seemed to work, bumping test scores up by 6 to 11 percent. Meanwhile, Wall Street seems prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder, a form of depression related to lack of sunlight during the winter months. A paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that stock bargains are most prevalent in fall and winter, when winter blues leave moody stockholders more likely to dump high-risk stocks at low prices. Prices rise and bargains are harder to find in the spring, when people cheer up, the paper says.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39958-2003Apr25.html

Related:
Read the NBER's summary of its sugar-in-schools study
For more surprising social explanations, see Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point.
Before you scoff at conventional scientific study based on the above, take note of researcher John Gottman, who says he's found mathematical explanations for marital quarrels. He's spent years of research translating transcripts of married couples' fights into code and finding statistical patterns, says the Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been published as a book from MIT Press: Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models.
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i33/33a01401.htm
One marital issue unlikely to make Gottman's book is the recent wave of military husbands keeping families' home lives running while wives go off to war. Raul Ayala Jr. of Hinesville, Georgia, profiled in yesterday's Chicago Tribune, is one of the roughly 30,000 civilians married to American servicewomen. He has found that army bases have been slow to adjust their spousal support programs to include men.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld … *

Related:

From last week's weblog: the sudden rise of women in combat (second item here)

Also:The Tribune's Steve Johnson says it's back to inanity on TV*

Browsing: After months of magazine covers on Iraq, other subjects are beginning to show up on newsstands. This week the New York Times Magazine tells the story of North Korean teenagers assimilating into South Korea; Time runs a health cover, seemingly its first non-Iraq cover of the year, and the Lifetime network launches a magazine. More from Slate's "In Other Magazines."

http://slate.msn.com/id/2081742

Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.

By Nathan Bierma

Content & Context

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November/December 2016