The Dish

A reader writes:

As a UK-based subscriber, I am always interested when a post comes up about my home country. I was somewhat bemused and disappointed with your comments about the UK Independence Party (UKIP). It seems you are holding the European far right to different standards than those you apply to the American far right. If UKIP were a political party in the US, they would be, at the very most, a centre-left party. In the view of many in your country, Nigel Farage and his party are radical communist-socialists. UKIP advocates continuing the state-run healthcare monopoly and proposes only minor changes to an absurdly generous welfare rules and the enormous size of the state.

I’m disappointed you say Farage is an “opponent of all immigration.”

He is not. His party wishes to allocate work visas to those wanting to come to the UK. After five years of continual work, an immigrant would be able to settle here permanently and become a UK citizen with all the benefits and responsibilities that entails. Where would such an immigration policy put UKIP on the political spectrum in the US? Full citizenship after five years? Again, he’s a radical lefty.

I’m not sure your American readers quite understand what the free movement of labour from Eastern Europe has meant for the UK and other wealthy European nations. Imagine if the entire population of Mexico was given totally free access to the US labour market. No restrictions: an absolute legal right to work and live anywhere in the US.

There are undeniable economic benefits for the host country from all the cheap labour arriving, but there is also social unrest and disquiet about the societal changes that are happening. The problem – again, I’m not sure your US readers understand this – is that the UK cannot stop or even slow down the numbers of immigrants arriving to live and work here. We cannot vote on the matter. We cannot pressure our politicians on the issue because the decisions are taken supra-nationally.

UKIP is creating a debate that would otherwise not be happening. They are ridiculed and insulted incessantly by the mainstream media, especially the Murdoch press. I’m disappointed you so quickly jumped to the same conclusions as those media organisations you usually question.

Another sends the above speech from November 2010:

I thought you might find vintage Farage interesting.  You are British and probably know much more about him than I do. I’m a lefty, but I found his YouTube clips inspiring back in 2010-2012 because he was one of the only ones talking sense about the EU, particularly the way the EU bypasses democracy and imposes dangerous austerity on Southern Europe. To be clear, Farage is not a politician I support, but the fact that a xenophobic, pro-fracking, climate skeptic could get my ear for a time says something for sure.

It’s been difficult keeping up with the hundreds of emails responding to the highly-charged thread, and even more difficult finding ones that represent the many sides of the debate while moving it forward. But here is our final attempt to best represent the views coming through the in-tray:

There is something rich about a bunch of Dishheads diagnosing and psychoanalyzing a writer for getting too emotional, losing perspective, and listing toward despair. How overwhelming could the racial bias of stand-your-ground laws possibly be compared to the disappointment of Obama’s first debate performance? Or the creep of sponsored content? The thinly-veiled evil of Sarah Palin (or Hillary Clinton, depending on the year)? Hopefully these people writing in will give TNC the same courtesy that they’ve clearly given you, and keep reading even through the blue periods.

Another reader:

I liked the bit you wrote about gays moving on up, but I’d like you to consider something: A gay man or a lesbian woman can appear in any white family. They can appear in a Christian family, a wealthy family, a powerful family. In other words, being gay definitely puts you in a group that doesn’t have privilege, but it also can happen to people with remarkable sources of privilege. It can happen to the daughter of Dick Cheney and it can happen to a news anchor on CNN and it can happen to a fantastic blog writer capable of living well in PTown.

Being black, on the other hand? Well, not many families of extraordinary privilege can say that they have a black son. Not many white Methodists have a black uncle. Not many U.S. Senators have a black daughter, at least not one they acknowledge (looking at you, Strom).

In short, while the analogy works on one level, just remember that gay people largely were able to come out and succeed because gay experience cuts across huge demographic swaths.

That’s a truly important point, and it was in my first draft but I excised it for space and concision. And it means something else as well: history is therefore far more plastic for gay people than for African-Americans. One generation can experience growing up in an entirely different atmosphere than another. Not so with African-Americans, who are far more tied by the pull of history and the cultures that history spawned. And, of course, many gay people experience discrimination or judgment less baldly than African-Americans, because they can fly under the radar. That’s also a key difference. And it reinforces Coates’ larger point. Another:

Let’s turn “the culture of poverty” around and talk about “the culture of affluence” instead.

Belonging to the professional middle class, one knows many in our cohort who drink too much, or go through a messy divorce, or get laid off, or have a scrape with the law, or become mentally ill, or get unintentionally pregnant, or need emergency surgery. Yet these behaviors are not labeled as social pathology.

What happens to these people instead? They all too often have an affluent family safety net to lend them some money, or to put them in contact with a good lawyer, or to ensure the best possible medical care, or to offer a spare bedroom for a couple of months, or whatever. The reason that poor black people – even poor white people – are subjected to so many sanctimonious sermons instructing them to lead spotless, high-achieving lives is that they do not have such an affluent system of supports to prevent disaster when they do mess up. The thing about being poor (and especially poor and black) is that you pay a much higher price for failure.

On that note:

Regarding the ongoing TNC/Chait debate, I’d like to point out that the President discussed this very issue in David Remnick’s New Yorker profile “On and Off the Road with Barack Obama“:

He talked about a visit that he made last year to Hyde Park Academy, a public high school on Chicago’s South Side, where he met with a group of about twenty boys in a program called Becoming a Man. “They’re in this program because they’re fundamentally good kids who could tip in the wrong direction if they didn’t get some guidance and some structure,” Obama recalled. “We went around the room and started telling each other stories. And one of the young men asked me about me growing up, and I explained, You know what? I’m just like you guys. I didn’t have a dad. There were times where I was angry and wasn’t sure why I was angry. I engaged in a bunch of anti-social behavior. I did drugs. I got drunk. Didn’t take school seriously. The only difference between me and you is that I was in a more forgiving environment, and if I made a mistake I wasn’t going to get shot. And, even if I didn’t apply myself in school, I was at a good enough school that just through osmosis I’d have the opportunity to go to college.

“And, as I’m speaking, the kid next to me looks over and he says, ‘Are you talking about you?’ And there was a benefit for them hearing that, because when I then said, You guys have to take yourselves more seriously, or you need to have a backup plan in case you don’t end up being LeBron or Jay Z . . . they might listen. Now, that’s not a liberal or a conservative thing. There have been times where some thoughtful and sometimes not so thoughtful African-American commentators have gotten on both Michelle and me, suggesting that we are not addressing enough sort of institutional barriers and racism, and we’re engaging in sort of up-by-the-bootstraps, Booker T. Washington messages that let the larger society off the hook.” Obama thought that this reaction was sometimes knee-jerk. “I always tell people to go read some of Dr. King’s writings about the African-American community. For that matter, read Malcolm X. . . . There’s no contradiction to say that there are issues of personal responsibility that have to be addressed, while still acknowledging that some of the specific pathologies in the African-American community are a direct result of our history.”

Another digs up some of Ta-Nehisi’s writing:

No one is denying that there is still a lot of work to do and that racism and its ugly history still impact Black Americans, but the progress made is undeniable.

I’d like to bring up a few vignettes from Coates’ own life here to demonstrate this.  Coates grew up in inner city Baltimore, never finished college, but based on his talent and the recognition of that talent by a number of writers and editors in the “establishment” ended up writing for a premier establishment institution.  Through this work, he found a following among them an author living in Paris who started communicating with Coates.  The two eventually agreed to swap apartments for a summer, and through this arrangement last year, Coates and his family came to spend a summer in Paris, where Coates spent his time learning French, writing, and enjoying Parisian life.  I submit to you that the vast majority of Americans will never have the pleasure of this experience.

Even more importantly, shortly before leaving, Coates was on a train to Boston where he ate a bad nut and went into anaphylactic shock. He wrote movingly of this experience in The Atlantic:

A doctor who happened to be seated nearby shot me up with an epipen. The train made an emergency stop in New London where the paramedics were waiting….The paramedics came in and took my blood pressure. They were moving to get me on a stretcher. I told them I could stand. They told me I could not as my blood pressure was such that I would likely faint. So they hauled me up and off, got me to the hospital, ran some oxygen through my nose and put an IV in my arm. When I got the hospital the doctors took great care of me.

Two points: First, my theory of assholes clearly should be revised; the kindness of strangers is always amazing. Second, America, whatever its flaws, is very often amazing in its efficiency and compassion. It did not escape my mind that in some other place I might have died. This is not chest-thumping or jingoism. It is a fact of my residency.

Something is happening in this world. I think of my grandfather, lecturing from the daily newspaper, drowning in alcohol, addicted to violence. I think of my father, working all summer as a child, saving his funds for a collection of recordings that promised to teach him French. He didn’t learn French, but he learned to compel his son to want to learn French.

I think of what these folks might have been had they not lived in world intolerant of black ambition. The world has changed. It has not changed totally, but it has changed significantly. When I fell out on the train, everyone on the car was white. So were all the paramedics and all the doctors and nurses. The challenge for someone trying to assess America, at this moment, is properly calibrating how far we’ve gone with how far we have to go. Too much optimism renders you naive; too much pessimism makes you cynical. What I know is I live in a time that people who made me possible only dreamed of.

Hate to use his own words against him, but it seems to me in calibrating how far we’ve gone with how far we have to go, he is definitely being too pessimistic.

One more reader:

I am 100% sympathetic with TNC. I am white, but went to a racially-mixed elementary school and high school in New York, and my current girlfriend is African-American.  I grew up being comfortable and exposed to black culture since the age of 5, and have been acutely aware of how black Americans are treated differently than whites in myriad ways and how it can affects one’s perspective. So I was good with both Martin and Malcolm.

It is very easy for me to imagine TNC’s experience with his children and the taxi cab happening every day. After a while  a black person has just had enough of it, as there is no morally justifiable reason or explanation for it. TNC is obviously aware that articulating this perspective can be a double-edged sword, that can exacerbate these problems makes it even more frustrating for both blacks and whites. But how frustrating is it when your white friends who mean well don’t understand what you go through. It is a lot like being Muslim or Arab in America. The pre-conceived notions held by kind well-intentioned white people in both cases is maddening and reflects an inability to understand what it feels like to live life in their skin. Whether it is dealing with the police, employers, store clerks and taxi drivers, the indignities never end.  TNC’s recounting of what kind-hearted white people in the 19th Century thought about black culture still exists today, and these were white people who volunteered to help and educate black people out of the kindness of their hearts and a sincere sense of mission and service to others. What could be more selfless and well-intentioned?  This conundrum is enough to move one to tears.

Look, Chait is great too and I can’t argue with his perspective either. I am reminded of the experience of reading a Brian Green physics book that addresses how the objective and scientifically verifiable truth of two individuals having different perspectives (e.g. if one is moving close to the speed of light) can be completely different yet each can still be objectively measured “truth.” That is the nature of the universe, whether it is physics or one’s political perspective. Understanding and respecting both Chait and TNC’s opinions and experiences is not that difficult for me, but the great sadness of racism’s persistent shadow does color everything for black person. It can be extremely difficult to calibrate how to express this reality to others. That doesn’t mean their perspective is incorrect, but it still may be better to train young blacks (or Muslims) that they do have to be supermen to overcome and deal with these recurrent upsetting experiences in order to overcome these obstacles.  Most white people can only quasi-experience this through movies like “12 Years a Slave” and “The Butler.”

The saving grace is that many college-educated young Americans have no trouble absorbing these differing truths with a sensitivity that is also quite moving. Consider how so many  young people find denying marriage equality to all to be irrational and incomprehensible, and the opponents’ bigotry is self-evident to them. You can see this perspective at work with race; when a parent tells a positive story and mentions that the person is black,  the child immediately responds “why did you have to mention their race?” Even though it was in a very positive context. They get it more than most. They are the hope for a better future. Until then, the more one reads and absorbs what it feels like to be black, muslim, gay, latino etc the better.

In the end, Chait and TNC are on the same side, and so are good folks like you and I. Their different valid perspective and experienced truths better enrich all of us.

To continue the discussion, you can head to our Facebook page.

Rex Weiner makes the case for political pie-throwing, insisting that a “gooey face is an instant social equalizer”:

While I abhor pointless violence, I have long believed there are some people in this world who deserve to be smacked in the face with a pie. Vladimir Putin, for example, or my girlfriend’s ex-husband—anyone for whom a well-aimed pie could serve as a rebuke and a corrective measure. The legal code may define it as a violent act—when comedian Jonnie Marbles pied Rupert Murdoch, he earned jail time for assault—but to my mind, what motivates the striking thrust is not violence but idealism. Che Guevara once said, “The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” I say the tart’s trajectory is often guided by faith in humanity—or at least a sense of humor.

Just leave the glitter at home! It never leaves you. Weiner goes on to describe the rise and fall of Agents of Pie-Kill, a pie-for-hire collective he helped found in the 1970s:

At its peak, Agents of Pie-Kill’s roster numbered half a dozen agents. We pulled in a fair amount of cash revenue and inspired imitators worldwide. Time called us “the biggest fad since streaking.” Every day the news would report someone somewhere getting a pie in the face. Our own Agent [Aaron ] Kay scored headline-making hits against the conservative pundit William F. Buckley and antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly. …

It wasn’t long before we noticed Agent Kay had switched to autopilot. He couldn’t stop throwing pies at people: Watergate operative Gordon Liddy, New York City mayor Abe Beame, Senator Daniel Moynihan, and even rock poet Patti Smith. The list goes on. Agents of Pie-Kill had created a monster. And suddenly, the times were a-changin’ once again: Nixon was gone, the war was over, and a peanut farmer was president. Time to close the patisserie.

(Video: Kay comments on the 2011 pieing of Rupert Murdoch and details his own exploits)

Several readers sound off:

This thread has hit me a little close to home. I was misdiagnosed with ADHD when I was in preschool and was held back a year as a result. Because of the misdiagnosis, I’ve been a year older than most of my peer group for my whole life.

My parents sent me to a private Catholic school in suburban Philadelphia that required all of its kindergarteners to undergo a psychiatric screening for learning disabilities. I had previously been in the school’s pre-K program for a year. I remember the screening vividly. I was separated from my mom for what must’ve been a maximum of 10 minutes, and the doctor spoke to me for maybe half of that. He asked if I had a lot of friends, and I excitedly told him I did, and that I had memorized all of their phone numbers. I then went on to tell him each of those phone numbers for a minute or so.

Big mistake.

It turns out that in the report he filed with the school, and which my mom still has, he indicated that my hyperactivity was potentially indicative of ADHD, and recommended that I repeat pre-K. All based on the phone number recitation. Follow-up was recommended, but luckily my mom never had me go in for any prescriptions. I repeated the year because my parents thought it’d be too disruptive to force me to transfer schools, and the school wouldn’t budge on letting me go through.

So I was diagnosed as potentially hyperactive based on a 10-minute conversation with a psychiatrist who was paid on contract by my private school, and my parents were essentially forced to pay another year’s worth of tuition or transfer me to a different school. I’m not saying he probably had an incentive to diagnose kids coming to him from my school, but it certainly worked out for both him and the school. He’d get a lot of potential patients, in addition to whatever contract he had with them, and the school would get a few easy grade-repeaters.

I can say comfortably that the only net positive I ever got from the situation was being able to buy beer for my friend when we were sophomores in college. Aside from that, I’ve felt a year behind since I was a toddler, all because of this ridiculous over-diagnosis trend among the white upper class.

A similar story from another reader:

I have a 12-year-old son who is very bright and easily distracted. We have to stay on his butt about getting his homework done and being prepared for school, but we work hard at that, and he has gotten mostly straight-As this year, with no chemical assistance. It could have been a different story.

When he was entering third grade, he was assigned a teacher who I had heard wonderful things about, but when I went to parents’ night before school started, she scared the crap out of me. Within the first week of class, I’d already heard from her twice about how my son seemed distracted and had not gotten some assignment done. She treated it like a major crisis, so we set up a meeting with her. She said she’d looked through all his academic records and was surprised to see that he had not had academic problems in the past. She never used the words ADHD, but she strongly implied it. (My son had once had a preschool teacher who had implied something similar.)

I freaked out and we took our son to see his pediatrician, who after spending less than five minutes talking to us and to my son, offered to write us a prescription for Ritalin. Just like that. No recommendation for any further analysis or therapy, no discussion of the pros and cons. We said “No thanks.” Over the course of the next few weeks, everything settled down for my son, and by the time of our first parent/teacher conference his teacher seemed almost to have forgotten what she put us through in the first weeks of the school year.

I think boys and girls learn differently, and teachers are pressured to fit so much into every school day to keep up with all the standardized tests and so forth that they don’t have time to devote to different learning styles. So a lot of boys are drugged to make the day go more smoothly. It sounds harsh, but I believe it to be true.

A psychologist in training offers a different perspective:

As a third-year doctoral student in counseling psychology, I have some experience with testing for ADHD. I have spent two years working in my campus disability services office with an ADHD caseload, and I spent two semesters actually performing ADHD testing for a local medical school in my city. I realize what you posted was about children, but I think the overprescribing of ADHD meds to children is a symptom of a much larger cultural shift among their parents.

I was shocked when I started working at the medical school at how many students came in wanting to be tested for ADHD (and many were seeking meds). These were high-achieving students who had mostly sailed through private high schools and rigorous undergrad programs. A lot of them already had master’s degrees in things like biology and public health, but suddenly when they entered medical school they thought they might have ADHD. Why? Because medical school is hard. It is nearly impossible, and for the first time in many of their lives, they were being challenged. And they had no idea how to do it. So obviously they must have ADHD.

My caseload also includes a lot of students who do genuinely have ADHD, and they really, really struggle. If you truly have it, it is going to show up in your life long before you hit college, and it is going to be obvious. Those students deserve our compassion, and the accommodations they seek just to level the playing field.

But when I see (mostly privileged) medical students trying to game the system to gain a competitive edge, it makes me furious. But even worse, most of them truly believe they have it! Because suddenly something is difficult for them. This is the generation where everything is supposed to be easy, and if it’s not, there must be a problem.

Amazonian tribes tend to die off not long after being introduced to the modern world:

It’s still happening today in Brazil, where 238 indigenous tribes have been contacted in the last several decades, and where between 23 and 70 uncontacted tribes are still living. A just-published report that takes a look at what happens after the modern world comes into contact with indigenous peoples isn’t pretty:

Of those contacted, three quarters went extinct. Those that survived saw mortality rates up over 80 percent. This is grim stuff. “Our analysis dramatically quantifies the devastating effects of European colonization on indigenous Amazonians. Not only did ~75 percent of indigenous societies in the Brazilian Amazon become extinct, but of the survivors, all show evidence of catastrophic population declines, the vast majority with mortality rates over 80 percent,” writes Marcus Hamilton of the University of New Mexico in a paper published in Scientific Reports. …

Sure, people don’t go in and kill entire tribes directly, they offer indigenous people the chance to assimilate into modern culture. But, as Hamilton notes, the trappings of modern society—access to better healthcare, technology, and education—haven’t improved tribes’ overall outcomes.

Ron Charles reviews Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Treasure, the writer’s first novel about the Holocaust:

Waldman is a wonderfully imaginative writer, but she’s drawn the central event of her absorbing new novel directly from history. The Hungarian Gold Train, as it came to be called, carried a trove of stolen goods worth millions of dollars. The Allies intercepted the train before it reached Germany and promised through various international agreements to return the property. That pledge to the dead Jews and their families was gradually thwarted by politics, postwar chaos and, yes, the victors’ avarice.

In its geopolitical scope, this crime is so encyclopedic that it could easily overwhelm a novel’s boundaries. But Waldman has devised a multi-part structure that allows her to focus on several distinct moments during a 100-year period. As with the painting in Susan Vreeland’s “Girl in Hyacinth Blue ” and the manuscript in Geraldine Brooks’s “People of the Book,” the link between these separate stories in “Love and Treasure” is a pendant decorated with the picture of a peacock. In Waldman’s exceedingly clever treatment, this piece of jewelry is not intrinsically valuable; it accrues value only as it passes from one unlikely hand to another, demonstrating the curious and tragic ways that history binds us together.

Adam Kirsch reveals more of the novel’s rich detail:

Drawing on what was clearly extensive research, Waldman brings to life the world of the Central European Jewish haute bourgeoisie, reveling in its textures, exposing its hypocrisies, and cheering on the incipient feminism that Nina represents. We enjoy the chance to scoff at Dr. Zobel as he insists that Nina’s menstrual cramps must have a psychological origin and when he blindly follows Freud in insisting that there must be some sexual trauma in her past. In fact, Nina is as healthy as can be—she is the third and best in the series of Waldman’s idealized heroines. This section also makes clear that Waldman’s Jewish ideal is neither hard and calculating, like Israel, nor soft and bland, like America, but excitingly, romantically, idealistically European.

It is easy, of course, to celebrate a paradise that is lost. But it is this third section of Love and Treasure, this fantasia on historical themes, that allows Waldman to write most freely and fully. Perhaps this is because, in 1913, the insoluble moral and political dilemmas raised by the Holocaust are not yet on the horizon. Like a film played backward, the possessions fly off the Gold Train and back into the hands of their owners, who march back home from the death camps and resume their comfortable lives. This is the kind of restitution we dream about, rather than the a partial and compromised kind the courts offer. Naturally, we can only achieve it in a work of the imagination.

Carolyn Kellogg describes how Waldman chose her subject:

She had already set herself the task of writing about visual art, something she knew little about, so researching the novel would allow her to learn something new. And when her friend Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis was named ambassador to Hungary, Waldman wanted to go visit her and make it a business trip. “So I Googled the words ‘Hungary,’ ‘Holocaust’ and ‘art,’ I kid you not, and I found the Hungarian Gold Train. That is how I chose what to write.”

Serendipity aside, a real sense of political engagement runs through “Love and Treasure,” particularly in the form of an Israeli war hero, an American soldier managing the spoils of war found on the Hungarian Gold Train and women in 20th-century Budapest fighting for the right to vote. “I don’t believe in political novels – I think they’re bad,” Waldman says. “But I can’t help myself. That’s the way my mind works. I dig my teeth into an idea, and it’s an idea that inspires me and excites me, and then I find myself writing about it.”

Ilene Prusher adds:

There is something about this multi-period Jewish novel, taking the reader on a journey through time in America, Europe and Israel, that feels imminently familiar. The overall arc of the plot, with its objets trouvés that span generations, feels similar to the blueprint of other contemporary novels by major Jewish American female writers, such as Nicole Krauss’ “History of Love” and “Great House,” and Dara Horn’s “In the Image.”

In each of these, a mysterious found object – a desk, a book, a set of photographic slides – provides a labyrinthine link between past and present. And whether in the foreground or in the backdrop, there is always a Holocaust angle present. The more one unpacks the past, these stories all suggest, the more one understands the present. There is something about this path that feels slightly timeworn.