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?

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.

When I worked in a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan rather than on my couch in Pennsylvania, I used to go skating in Bryant Park on clear winter mornings, for the fresh air and light exercise. A troupe of figure skaters claimed the center of the ice in the pre-tourist hours, commanding everyone’s admiration: they used the tight space to execute tidy jumps and corkscrew spirals without crashing into graceless pedestrians-on-ice like me. Now COVID-related restrictions have left me with buckets of free time where commutes and happy hours used to be, and I’m looking to learn a new hobby.

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.