Spectator Life

As America itself chokes to death on debt, drugs, and deep-fried Oreos, as its military trades war-fighting for wokeness, its culture still spreads across the globe inexorably. In years past, complaints about American culture dominance focused on its music, its movies, its fast food and its hyper-capitalist economics. But America has now adopted a radical new ideology that it is exporting worldwide with vigor. Belgium has Black Lives Matter riots. Romania has church vandalism in the name of progress. And now, Australia has America’s particularly malignant approach to sexual disharmony.

Wheaton College will be removing and replacing a plaque honoring a group of alumni who were murdered by an indigenous tribe during a missionary trip to Ecuador. Why? Because it uses the word 'savage', the school's president announced in an email Wednesday. 'Recently, students, faculty, and staff have expressed concern about language on the plaque that is now recognized as offensive,' president Philip Ryken said in the email. 'Specifically, the word "savage" is regarded as pejorative and has been used historically to dehumanize and mistreat indigenous peoples around the world.

For a thousand years, Western universities were the champions and guardians of reason. Now, they know better. Such is the lesson from the sorry tale of Georgetown University Law Center professor Sandra Sellers, whose career abruptly ceased to exist Thursday for the crime of being able to observe patterns. Of course, Sellers’s remarks aren’t a shocking revelation. They’re common sense. Georgetown proudly maintains an 'Office of Affirmative Action Programs'. What is affirmative action, if not a pledge to admit less-qualified students for identity reasons, even if it means watching them struggle in class? Any poor soul who has hit the rock bottom of applying to law school knows that 'Under-Represented Minority' (URM) status is a boon for law school applications.

You’ll find them all over the boroughs of New York City. Multiple-dwelling buildings, usually large apartment blocks, slapped with a faux-Tudor façade defined by fake gables hiding a flat roof. They aren’t particularly attractive buildings. Even 100 years after most were built, they come off as self-conscious, a bit tacky, imparting to the viewer a dreaded feeling of secret working-class shame — a befuddling reproduction of a reproduction. They say New Yorkers never look up. But even during short journeys through Queens or parts of Brooklyn, New Yorkers are bound to have noticed examples, even if they don’t give it much thought.

‘What a loss is the excellent Humboldt. You and Berlin will both miss him greatly,’ Prince Albert wrote to his much-beloved daughter Vicky, Crown Princess of Prussia, on news of the death of the author, explorer and celebrity Alexander von Humboldt in 1859. ‘People of this kind do not grow upon every bush [‘an den Blumen’] and they are the grace and glory of a country and a century.’ After some delays and bad luck, the grace and glory of the Humboldt name flourishes once again with the opening of the Humboldt Forum. Annoyingly digital to begin with, the launch in January of the Forum signaled the culmination of Berlin’s Museum Island restoration program and, with it, the crowning of the capital’s place within contemporary European culture.

One feels for the olds who birthed this cancer. They just wanted to placate the youngs. They had no idea they were disemboweling the same institutions they were charged with safeguarding against the idiot-children. The olds, the so-called progressive elites (so-called because they lacked any sense of noblesse oblige), were scared of being ‘on the wrong side of history’. They wanted the youngs — the new radicals — to like them, to follow them on social media. They wanted to hold onto their power, and they were shallow, and they were vulnerable to their own spinelessness. Blinded by it.

Growing up in a mixed American household of Indian, Italian and Puerto Rican descent, I never questioned the varying menu each night for dinner. Until I was a teenager, I hadn’t realized my family’s weekly meals were different from those of my friends — until they began begging me to eat at my house on weekends after I told them what was being cooked. For me, dietary normalcy meant chicken curry on Mondays, arroz con habichuelas on Wednesdays and lasagna on Fridays. My Puerto Rican and Italian American mother Loretta had married my father Roop, an Indian immigrant, in 1981. I always admired my mother for her fearlessness in crossing cultural lines during an era when interracial marriage was less common than it is today.

Conservatives like feeling outraged, but they don’t often like to earn their outrage. For most, it’s enough to wait for the AP to mention Dr Seuss getting canceled, briefly become upset, then return to waiting for the next setback to kvetch about. This passivity has created an excellent opportunity for one Christopher Rufo. In the past year, Rufo has carved out a career niche by adopting the novel strategy of actually finding all the poisonous propaganda embedded in America’s schools and government departments, and suggesting that, just maybe, these insanities should actually be tackled instead of being the subject of an instantly-forgotten Fox News segment. Rufo’s latest find is from Arizona, where the Department of Education has crafted an 'equity toolkit'.

This week, Matt Meyer did what many parents long to do. He dropped off his kid at school. That’s unusual in Berkeley, California, where he lives, because the schools there have been closed for a year, and the teachers’ union adamantly opposes their reopening. Parents like Mr. Meyer who can afford private schools, which are mostly open, send their kids there. His child has been there since last June. So he dropped off his child and drove off to his job. His job is head of the Berkeley teachers’ union. His main task there is to keep the public schools closed for everyone else. Matt’s job and that of other teachers’ union bosses is getting harder — and not just because the hypocrisy is so obvious. It’s getting harder because parents and kids across the country are fed up.

The decline and fall of the New York Times, like that of the Roman Empire, did not happen overnight. Believe it or not, by 1970 the rot had already set in at the Times and rank error was being peddled as fact to a trusting public. I have proof. In August of that year, the paper ran a review of a Canadian theatrical production just arrived in New York called ‘Love and Maple Syrup’ (a reference to a Gordon Lightfoot song). The show was panned — so far, so par for the course — but the review ended on a shockingly error-riddled and un-factchecked note: ‘Love, incidentally, is great, but have you actually tasted maple syrup? Ugh! Only a nation with built-in insecurities and a dire need for blood sugar could have chosen it as its national drink.

Are you white? If so, how white are you? Or to put it another way, where would you place your 'whiteness' on a scale of one to eight? This might seem like an odd question for those who still see whiteness as mere skin pigmentation. For many progressives however the term has come to mean a form of bigotry inherent in, but not exclusive to, white people. In other words, you don’t have to be white to suffer from the affliction of 'whiteness' but it certainly helps. To clear up any confusion, Mark Federman, principal at the East Side Community High School in Manhattan's Lower East Side has sent parents a handy pamphlet. It ranks, in graphic form, eight color-coded 'white identities' with 'white supremacist' at one end and 'white abolitionist' at the other.

President Joe Biden, in defiance of his pro-science mantras, is not going to pressure teachers’ unions to reopen schools and get kids back into the classrooms. This week CDC director Rochelle Walensky said that schools are now safe to reopen. Yet press secretary Jen Psaki is notably unwilling to directly answer questions about the nationwide reopening of schools. The Biden administration is not going to push back on the unions’ demands until a substantial relief package is passed with specific assistance for teachers’ unions, who are some of his most fervent supporters and donors.

One takes the chance, in writing about al fresco dining during winter, of getting pigeonholed as that guy who always goes on about how cold it is in Chicago. But if I’m to write about food and drink at this time of year, there’s no attractive alternative, unless you want to hear about my puttering in the kitchen making spaghetti, and how exciting is that? With indoor restaurant dining forbidden due to the pandemic, the remaining choice is the outdoors — the ideal setting, in this challenging time, for the intrepid individual to demonstrate boldness without being a complete idiot about it, always a fine line. The question is, how?

Hwæt. In British and American universities, fewer and fewer students are studying English, history and other humanities. That’s a job killer for the faculty. It’s time for quick answers — and the English faculty at Leicester University has come up with a beauty. The problem with their curriculum, they have decided, is that it is just not left-wing and anti-Western enough. They must figure students want to study English mostly to learn more about imperialism, capitalism and social theory, not to read and interpret great novels and poetry or to read modern works against the background of a great tradition. So, out with the old, in with the new. In this case, ‘the new’ reflects the tendentious political preoccupations of the faculty and their most agitated students.

Raclette is the ultimate comfort food. From the French word racler, to scrape, this simple, hearty dish is all Swiss. There isn’t a village in Switzerland, in the Alps, the Jura or the Engadine, where you can’t have raclette. There are even restaurants, called carnotzets, just for raclette, although they usually serve fondue, as well. Many Swiss homes have their own raclette-designated space, often in the basement, sometimes doubling as bomb shelter, featuring fireplace and wooden table, with cozy banquettes. It’s where the Swiss go when they want to soak up carbs for comfort. In the film Heidi, you’ll watch the orphan’s uncle serving her raclette in the rustic chalet during a cold winter’s eve.

Earlier this week, the San Francisco school board voted to scrap the names of 44 schools. It turned out America’s most liberal city had been a hotbed of racism all along. How odd. Last summer’s 'reckoning' of several statues and automobile windows wasn’t enough, so now the 'reckoning' must come. CNN’s Nathan McDermott discovered the Google Doc which the board used to log all the sins of the city’s school namesakes. The document makes it clear that, while the city may be happy to disown Thomas Jefferson, its activist class doesn’t exactly match his mental horsepower. Most of the names stricken have a direct or tangential relation to slavery, so you might expect Abraham Lincoln to be well-regarded.

I miss my shvitz. At least once a week before the shutdown, I went to the Russian & Turkish Baths on 10th Street in Manhattan’s East Village. I saw it as my connection to the ancients. Here was a tiny remnant of classical bath culture surviving in the modern city. Or so I liked to believe. Like much else in New York, I now sweat for its return. Back when I was studying classical archaeology, I spent a week or so crawling through the ruins of the public bath house of Ostia, Italy. Even in that Roman port town, something like the Brooklyn of the empire, bath design exceeded anything in the post classical world. Each room had its own distinct shape and purpose.

If this were a normal January, free from the specter of COVID-19, Davos would be bracing itself for an invasion by several thousand of the world’s most self-important people: pompous politicians, slick CEOs and — worst of all — freeloading journalists. Normally this pretty Alpine town is the venue for the World Economic Forum in the last week in January, but this year that annual schmoozefest is safely confined to the internet. ‘Key global leaders will share their views on the state of the world in 2021,’ forewarns the WEF website but, for the first time in the WEF’s 50-year history, they’ll be doing it remotely. Due to the pandemic, Davos rests in peace.

Moving back from New York City to Central Pennsylvania has been like the Five Stages of Grief, if only the last stage were eating hot soup with a hard-boiled egg in it on a 90 ̊F day in August, which is what I’ve been doing. In other words, I’m becoming a native again. Moving back to a place as particular as my hometown of York, Pennsylvania appealed after rootless years in a coastal city. From our rich colonial history to our high concentration of snack manufacturers and the pack of wild turkeys that patrols the bike path along the old railroad, York may not be an elite metropolis, but it’s no anonymous suburban wasteland, either. We owe some of that specificity to the Pennsylvania Dutch.

It’s hard to keep up with the French. First they invent a perfectly good culinary term, hors d’oeuvre, which as everyone knows refers to the bite-sized appetizers served at cocktail hour. We Anglos, in keeping with our ancestral custom, duly pirate the word and put it to work in kitchens on three continents. But barely have we wrestled the silent h into submission and gotten the vowels in oeuvre sorted out (is that ue or eu?), when the French — who had permitted their attention to wander for a brief space — deign to take note of our efforts, lifting a single languid eyebrow: ‘What? Hors d’oeuvres? Oh, you mean amuse-bouches?’ Stop the presses, everyone; cancel the cookbooks; send the menus back to the printshop. It’s an amuse bouche now...

Is your January still dry? Many of us begin a new year with the best of intentions and make resolutions in the hope of improving ourselves. Giving up alcohol for a month is a popular one — goodness knows why — but 'Veganuary', when you take up veganism until February 1, is an equally trendy option. Veganism is ‘cruelty free’ and is good for both you and the planet. What’s not to love? Support for the diet has gone mainstream with the US seeing a 600 percent increase in people identifying as vegan over the past three years. But just how ethical is it? We're always told that high consumption of meat and dairy is fueling global warming.

I often feel conflicted around this time of year: can Christmas food be justified in January? I’m quite strict on when the Christmas feasting begins: I’m not interested in beginning the festivities until everyone has finished work (even when that working takes place at home), so that usually means halfway through Christmas Eve. But, the end is less defined, and often has a long tail, especially this year. Culinarily (or greedily), I have no problem with it: I love Christmas food. I’m quite happy to stretch Christmas out for as long as I can: leftover sandwiches never lose their appeal, stuffed with all manner of cold cuts and root veg, bathed in medieval-tasting bread sauce, and occasionally boasting a pig in blanket.