Sunday marks one of the key annual events in American mass culture: the Superbowl party. Less a football event than an occasion for gathering with friends, it nevertheless is a television party. No TV, no Superbowl Party. It is also the advertising event of the year.

Here's my question: what does the Superbowl Party mean to you? Is it about the people, the sports, or something else?

[photo credit: sxc.hu user sofijab]

So, now he’s in.

Having just inaugurated a new president, we in the United States are now just about the farthest we’ll be in time from another election. Nearly four years. I've had a growing suspicion, over the recent few years, that the politics of getting elected and maintaining power have a habit of distracting us from policy itself.

Which is to say: we've got at least a year without electoral politics, at least a significant level of them. So how should we best use the time?

It’s our opportunity to refocus, to think (at least for a few days) less about how to retain power or gain power next time, and to think more about who we are becoming.

So: how can we best make use of the Obama presidency to lay the foundations for cultural improvements that will last well beyond 4/8 years? Is there anything particular to this moment in time, this unique moment, which we can use to help our children’s children live in a better world than the one we have now?

Really. I’d love your thoughts.

Advertisers drop enormous sums of money, quite simply, because it works. More toy ads viewed, more toys bought. Usually quite soon. More car ads viewed, more cars bought.

And, of course, more beer ads viewed, more beer drunk.

A recent study by faculty at the Universities of Texas and Florida found that Youth attending schools with 20 percent or more Hispanic students see an average of seven times more alcohol ads each day than students at schools with a smaller Hispanic population.

My guess is that this is probably a function of urban design: highly Hispanic neighborhoods are quite likely going to be mixed-use neighborhoods, where commercial and residential properties are close to each other. Still:

"Alcohol advertising around schools with 20 percent or more Hispanic students used the culture of the community significantly more," said Dr. Kelli Komro, associate professor of epidemiology in the College of Medicine at the University of Florida. "Those ads employed visual elements like logos of local sports teams, Spanish words and symbols of Hispanic culture such as Mexico's national colors. This may build brand recognition early on, putting youth at even greater risk for early onset and long-term alcohol use. Previous studies have shown that Hispanic youth are at higher risk for starting to use alcohol at a young age and for high-risk alcohol use."

[photo credit: sxc.hu member wax115]

Persepolis works hard to make the Islamic Revolution seem an exotic imposition upon secular Iran (image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics).

Yesterday I looked at Marjane Satrapi’s marvelous Persepolis graphic novels, which tell the story of a childhood during the Iranian revolution and beyond. The story has also been adapted to film, now out on DVD (check your local library). I've got the trailer embedded below. Don't worry: the DVD has an English-language setting.

I loved the books and the film both. The film is visually far better than the books, but preserves the books’ Spartan feel. The film, however, makes a subtle editorial decision, that significantly changes the feel of the story; that decision is described in the special features—in a question-answer session in which French co-director Vincent Paronnaud speaks.

In order to make Marjane Satrapi’s story more understandable, they worked hard to make Tehran and Iran seem more universal, and less exotic. They wanted Tehran to look like anywhere—like San Francisco, or Cincinnati—those are the two cities Paronnaud mentions—or nowhere. Tehran has no mosques, no bazaars, and no strange music. It has anyplace high-rises, anyplace traffic jams, and so on.

Vienna, on the other hand, is other-worldly and fantastic, with haunting cathedral bells, beer halls (Paronnaud inexplicably calls them “Bavarian”), bourgeois punk anarchists, and coffee-houses. Listen to the opening few seconds of the trailer, below: those are European church bells. Vienna, in other words, is made to be the abnormal place, next to which Satrapi’s Iranian childhood seems normal. The intent is to help “us” better relate to her disorientation in Austria. (See Jesus, You Know, a movie I reviewed recently, for Austrian Catholics at prayer).

All this tells us that the subject of this movie is not Marjane Satrapi, but the European viewer, for whom a city like Vienna—with its high-context urban textures, from church bells to classical music to beer halls and bourgeois anarchists—is under normal circumstances “normal”. Non-Europeans wouldn’t need the touch: Europe is already a strange place. This is reverse orientalism.

Furthermore, by sterilizing Tehran, they’ve made the Islamic revolution come off as a foreign imposition—something certainly un-Persian (hence the title Persepolis, the ancient—pre-Islamic—imperial capital). Islam and Islamic revolution are conflated, and alien to “real Iran,” which is a nominally Muslim, thoroughly modern place.

Sandra Mackey, in her book The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation, argues that an important sub-plot in Iranian history is the tension between ethnicity (Farsi, or Persian—an Indo-European ethnicity and language) and religion (Islam, a religion with a universal claim, but which originates in Semitic Arabia). Iran, after all, is one of two countries in the world named after the proto-Indo-Europeans, the Aryans.

Persepolis is a story, told by a non-devout Iranian expatriate/exile. It is now a movie intended for a European audience that, noisy multi-ethnic debates aside, is still quite uncritically unaware of its particularity.

I knew this girl. Or at least people just like her. Or maybe that’s just a sign of a good story. Marjane Satrapi is the Iranian—now French—author of Persepolis, a series of delightful autobiographical graphic novels, that had me trying to remember and relate.

Satrapi lived through the fall of the Iranian monarchy, the rise of the ayatollahs, and the Iran-Iraq war—before her middle class parents sent her to a boarding school in Austria. After returning to Iran for college and a little beyond, she leaves for Europe, this time for good.

Her four comics, published in English translation as two volumes, were minor sensations a few years back, and have been recently adapted to film, now out on DVD. I am looking at the books today and the film tomorrow, because there is an important subjective difference between the two—worth a whole discussion of its own.

As to the books:

Satrapi’s story is cute and moving and quite smart, as she discusses global events though the eyes of a little girl: the revolution is initially interpreted for her by her liberal, Europe-vacationing, wine-drinking parents (see below).

As the years proceed, she gains more independent insight into the violent changes in society—witnessing Iraqi bombs; being scolded for immodesty by older women, and so on.

Eventually her big mouth gets her in trouble at school, and her parents decide to send her overseas for high school—for her own safety’s sake. At this point her story becomes part of my story.

Marjane Satrapi is six years older than me, and moved to Austria at just about the same year I moved to Switzerland: different stage of life, similar moment. My parents were working with the Swiss IFES movement, helping develop international student ministry. Especially in the early years, we met quite a few Iranians. By and large, the seemed a lot like Satrapi’s family: modern, far more stylish than my missionary family, polyglot and not at all like the mobs we saw on the evening news.

Satrapi struggles through years of high school in an Austria not inclined to view her as part of the modern world. She’s an exotic creature, even as she slowly adapts many Austrian ways of living.
When she returns, after reaching a crisis point, she has become a “third-culture kid,” belonging nowhere, with a unique culture of her own.

While Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s story, and a singular one at that, Satrapi tells the story in terms intensely familiar to anyone who has grown up between worlds. The search for home is probably the central unifying theme in the lives of thousands of such people, torn between cosmopolitan, child-of-all-nations tendencies, and a deep longing to have somewhere to fit in.

The print news are in trouble, we all know that. But is it a good idea for the government to prop them up by buying their product?

I just saw in Le Monde that the French President is proposing giving a one-year newspaper subscription to each 18 year old citizen. It's being talked about on two fronts: fostering citizenship and as a bailout for struggling old-media.

Le Monde, of course, is highly in favor. But certainly not because of the hordes of money they'd amass, as one of the biggest dailies in the country. No--and here they sound as self-important as the mainstream papers in the US--their pleasure is entirely altruistic. They wish for greater societal glue, by which they mean greater integration of the young into the worldview of the French elites.

The French media are notorious for groupthink with the entire intellectual establishment, what the left call Pensée unique or single-thought. As an example, the Le Monde editorial approvingly quotes Bernard Spitz, an economist and secretary general of a think tank, former presidential cabinet member, media mogul, government researcher, and so on--an example of revolving doors between various elite establishments.

If the forty-fourth president of the US accomplishes nothing else than generating a sense of citizenship among those who (rightly or wrongly) haven’t acted on their rights—who haven’t previously owned their citizenship—he will have enriched the country beyond measure.

A nation’s greatest resource is its citizens. Sure. We say that all the time. But what is a citizen?

As envisioned by liberal democracy (small L; small D), citizens are participants. Citizens are distinct from consumers and tax-payers. Democracies prosper when warm bodies (who may be citizens in a strictly legal sense) become citizens in deed, by their actions. Citizenship is performed. In strict economic terms, creating citizens out of bystanders is only a long-term investment, but it is sustainable and creative.

Last week’s barrage of government rituals had one overarching purpose: to generate a sense of awe and legitimacy to the presidency and the constitution that creates it.
That legitimacy is asserted on two fronts:

• By reference to the timelessness of the constitution, with its enlightenment-era universal statements (“all men are created equal” and similar); and
• By reference to the historical lineage of the new president (how often did we hear the number 44?)

This latter point is hugely important for the direction of our culture: Obama has been placed, and has placed himself, into the lineage of American history. And since he seems to think of himself in part as a history teacher, we can expect more of this throughout his years in office.

Here’s why this is important: for a variety of reasons, some imposed and some self-imposed, there are many, many Americans who feel no particular ownership of their citizenship, but who feel great ownership of Obama. These people occupy all rungs of society, but I am thinking of one particular set: the urban underclass, those who are most likely to exhibit the full gamut of social pathologies, and who are most isolated from citizenship—whether by choice or not.

These people tend to view American history as someone else’s (white man’s) history. If Obama’s legacy consists of nothing else than in opening these lost millions’ eyes to the possibilities of citizenship, he will have served his country better than a thousand new deals.

[photo credit: flickr user mamamusings]
 

Why do we take the oath of office with a hand on the Bible?

One side-story this week was the Bible Obama used for his oath: the same one as used by Abraham Lincoln in 1861. The Library of Congress blog tells that book’s story—which is interesting enough, but the tradition itself seems theologically suspect to me.

I’m really not sure. Does the hand-on-Bible practice honor or dishonor scripture? I’d love your insight. Specifically:

1. What is the religious thinking behind the tradition—in its origins?
2. The use of Lincoln’s inaugural bible: how does this change the oath Obama took?

[photo credit: Library of Congress]

If we’re going to spend a trillion dollars “stimulating” the economy, can we at least think outside the twentieth century?

As the government gets serious about debating a package intended to create jobs through infrastructure projects, all the ideas seem suspiciously familiar. It’s all about more highways, instead of truly sustainable cities, with local food and energy supplies, jobs closer to home, etc. 

A trillion dollars should be occasion to re-imagine our economy, perhaps as one which makes simpler living possible, or at least less costly, this is a big disappointment in the works. Highways create jobs, sure. But they also function as rivers, making it impossible to move around on human-powered machines (bikes or feet).

If we cannot imagine going to the grocery store, or to our jobs, without getting behind the wheel, we’re probably just going to continue with inefficient and wasteful lifestyles for decades to come.

[photo credit: Chicago, Illinois by sxc.hu user igowerf]

I just stumbled upon a remarkable editorial in the Times of London while googling for something entirely different. But the headline drew me in:

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

The article is by Matthew Parris, an English writer (and former MP) who grew up in Africa, and who returned last month for a journalistic assignment with an NGO—forty-five years after leaving.

The Christianity he remembered from childhood, and re-remembered during his visit, is a dignifying, empowering African faith. It gives freedom from fear of demons and other evils; it gives meaning to individual actions (encouraging initiative and rule of law, i.e. dissent from “Big Men”); it lets Africans look white foreigners in the eye, “man-to-man,” as Parris puts it, “without looking down or away.”

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

If Parris’ story partially answers the question “Why have so many Africans become Christian,” it also begs the question, “Why have so many Europeans/English walked away from Christianity?” At the very least this story needs Parris' own testimony.

There are, of course, many answers to that question, but they’re rarely asked in cross-cultural context—it’s as if European post-Christianity takes place in an environment in which Christianity is an entirely Western story.

[photo credit: flickr user Beyer Shawn]