The Freedom to Build
Spending more than ten minutes discussing the non-issue of Manhattan’s Cordoba House is an unimaginable waste of time. It is the greatest farcical discussion of this year, stupefying in its vapidity and breathtaking in its intolerance. It shows nothing more than a terrifying lack of understanding of and respect for the Constitution, despite what the House’s critics have claimed. It is insulting, it is baseless, and it is, worst of all, wrong.
The address of the House is 45-51 Park Place, two blocks north of the former World Trade Center (and formerly a Burlington Coat Factory). The building will soon function as an Islamic community center, complete with worship room, auditorium, and pool.
First, 45-51 Park is private property, owned by privately-owned Soho Properties. Since they own the land, this company has the right to build on that land as they—and their respective community board—see fit. The company first decided to use this location for the House. The Downtown Community Board later approved the proposed usage. As such, the center enjoys the Constitutional right to be built on that property. Case closed.
Next, as many have already noted, the center is more or less an Islamic YMCA. So to call Cordoba a “mosque” is equivalent to calling every YMCA in the United States a “church.” Which is wrong. Furthermore, the House’s owners have just as much a right to build a place of (partial) worship as the owner of any already-built YMCAs, since the beginnings of those buildings were originally aimed at bible worship. More on this right can be found in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
As for all those who claim that Park51 is no more than a “victory mosque” built on “hallowed ground,” a modest suggestion: Stop. You are embarrassing to America and its rich tradition of religious freedom. You claim you are “offended” and “insulted” by this center. But in doing so, you are equating a world religion with Islamic terrorism. Which is racist. Your intolerance does not supersede the Constitution. You, in the end, are wrong. So please, please, please go find another document to tear up in the name of your degenerative version of freedom.
History shall be kind to me, for I intend to become a Wikipedia editor.
The Cosmopolitist
Opportunity Costs
David Frum is probably the best Republican strategist that Republicans aren’t listening to. Which, for them, has proven to be a devastating mistake.
From “Waterloo”:
I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.
This is right.
Republicans had a difficult challenge from the start. As a party, they are positioned against universal health care. But saying “We’re against universal health care” is politically untenable. So, they took a different approach, involving “death panels,” complaints about the bill’s length, and a mish-mash of other red herrings. As Mitch McConnell himself has explained:
…As the year unfolded — whether it became the stimulus, the budget, Guantanamo, health care — what I tried to do and what John [Boehner] did very skillfully, as well, was to unify our members in opposition to it.
The Republican’s plan became “block any legislation”—at the risk of ignoring an excellent opportunity to advance their own party’s interests regarding health care, including tort reform, intrastate insurance competition, etc. Now, complete opposition is a fair risk to take—if you can win. But if you can’t, you lose twice: once legislatively, and once in the benefits you could have gotten from having so many potential votes to leverage. And that’s exactly what happened.
Given the magnitude, and symbolic nature, of health care, maybe such a tactic from the Republicans would have been better suited to a different bill. Regardless, Frum sees Health Care as Republican’s “most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.” Democrats will still lose seats in the Fall. But what’s a Fall, compared to forever?
Weekend Reading
“Americans start out at a young age learning classic adages like “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Our time-honored golden rule has worked in every situation for me - until I got to Afghanistan. In Afghanistan the rule should read, “Do unto the Afghans as the Afghans do unto each other.” We should not expect them to embrace our approach simply because we believe we are efficient problem solvers. They see our approach as hasty and arrogant. We encroached on their culture so we must adapt and learn to collaborate in a more personal way. Our cultures are disparate but we can do this. My men and I have done it.”
“I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life. Such places once abounded. Well into the twentieth century there were many cities comprising multiple communities and languages—often mutually antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow coexisting. Sarajevo was one, Alexandria another. Tangiers, Salonica, Odessa, Beirut, and Istanbul all qualified—as did smaller towns like Chernovitz and Uzhhorod. By the standards of American conformism, New York resembles aspects of these lost cosmopolitan cities: that is why I live here.”
“A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals. They’re also less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda. If secular liberals can give up some of their snootiness, and if evangelicals can retire some of their sanctimony, then we all might succeed together in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity, like illiteracy, human trafficking and maternal mortality”
“Despite the occasional principled libertarian such as Ron Paul, a Christian who equates the Federal Reserve with Satan, the marriage of religious fundamentalists and market fundamentalists is holding. Why? Because, in the favorite word of Church Lady, it is so convenient. The Christian far right hates big government, and so does the commercial right. It may be annoying to socially moderate financial elites that the religious right is so crazed on the subject of gays, guns, and God, but these views do not affect the business elite where it lives.”
Geography is just physics slowed down,
with a couple of trees stuck in it.
In Defense of “Funny” Cultures
Tim Rogers’ take on contemporary Japan over at Kotaku is a great example of how people should not write about foreign cultures: with near-total subjectivity.
The piece is a laundry list of things Rogers, having lived in Japan for several years, dislikes about the place. A sampling:
Once, shortly after getting a new job, a coworker announced he was getting up to smoke a cigarette. He asked if I wanted to join him. I said I didn’t smoke. He was surprised. “I thought you said you were in a band?” Just like that: You’re in a band. You must smoke. Well. My excuse that I was just the vocalist, so I needed to keep my throat pure. He mentioned how Kurt Cobain apparently smoked five packs a day. Well. A couple years later, another person learned I didn’t smoke, and acted surprised. “I figured you must smoke because, you know; you play video games.” That’s a real stereotype, man. It exists. In Japan, gamers are smokers. Maybe this impression is born from the fact that breathing in Japanese arcades is pretty much exactly like dunking your head in a bucket of hot water and dead cigarettes. Don’t let the hype fool you: Japanese arcades are great because, you know, video games, though man, there is a hell of a lot of smoking going on in those places, man. Maybe the arcades only exist because people need some excuse to get away from their smoke-averse significant other and puff away.
Later, we read:
Chances are, if you’ve only spent a short time in Japan, you might have found it endearing. You really came to feel like you were in Asia, what with people screaming everywhere, like they would in an epic Chinese marketplace scene in an adventure film. This atmosphere is completely manufactured. Like, the biggest electronics stores actually keep ladders on hand so that certain employees can climb the ladders and scream indecipherable words down at the customers, through megaphones.
I do not use the word “indecipherable” lightly. Very seldom are the words actual words. A friend let me in on this secret. “You know, aside from ‘irasshaimase’, they’re not using actual words, most of the time.” He had prior job experience, see. Apparently, some stores actually demand that employees enlisted as barkers absolutely refrain from using actual words. That’s a little weird. I don’t like knowing things like that.
Look. There are a lot of legitimate cultural complaints one can have about Japan (or any other foreign culture)—specifically ones regarding negative social practices. And Rogers does touch lightly on a few of these, including the destructive drinking habits of salarymen, the social dysfunctions of the young hikikomori, and the domestic subordination of Japanese women. In all these areas and more, Japan has a lot of work to do.
But on the other hand, tradition is tradition. “That’s just how they do things” may sound like a cop-out, but its also a justification for bits of rituals that have slowly materialized over the course of years, decades, or centuries. And these bits, when brought together, make up a unique culture that is objectively different from other cultures. Yes, your cube-mates may chafe when you don’t say “Hello” in the morning. Yes, customer service may seem overly aggressive. And yes, people may smoke more in Tokyo than on Telegraph Hill.
But listen, that’s their culture. It’s different. It’s not “creepy” or “idiotic”, and certainly not “terrifying”. Please. Cannibalism is terrifying. Making a scene in public for the sake of office solidarity is, at least, jarring, and at most…Japanese. “I don’t like pachinko” is not legitimate cultural criticism.
Other parts of this article aren’t even remotely unique to Japan. You’re going to find tons of people who “agree to do things that they obviously hate doing” all over the world. American popular music is arguably equally as repetitive—and its subject matter much more offensive—than J-pop. And copy-cats, imitators, and up-givers are a dime a dozen in our contemporary society.
One advantage of a globalized world is the opportunity to celebrate different cultures while working to improve our own. This article, on the whole, simply denigrates one culture while imagining others’, including our own, as unquestionably superior. Which, as the world grows closer, is exactly the wrong way to look at things.
Rising in the East
Articles and commentary touting the accelerated rise of Asia in the face of global economic calamity are easy to find. But this WSJ piece in particular tucks away a crucial, nuanced point:
The global financial crisis has accelerated Japan’s increasing orientation toward Asia, economists say. High unemployment and personal debt have made typical American consumers less of a focus for Japanese companies, compared with their increasingly wealthy Asian peers.
Granted, as James Fallows has pointed out, there is lingering uncertainty about China’s true heft due to the inconvenient fact that most Chinese lack basic domestic necessities (running water, for instance) enjoyed by the entire developed world, most notably their South Korean and Japanese neighbors. Regardless, the slow turn of the world’s third-largest economic power towards a billion new consumers is really a huge change worth acknowledging, if not only in the beneficial short-term for China, but also in the detrimental long-term for the United States. If there was ever a way for Japan to avoid another lost decade, this could very well be it.
