Asians are the new Jews?

According to neo-conservative mouthpiece The Weekly Standard, Asians are indeed the new Jews. I know what you are thinking. “Why are you quoting that neo-conservative garbage?” Well, because sometimes it’s funny to read what people who still hold on to an ideological stance beyond its welcome. Neo-conservatism is surely one of example of such. The Weekly Standard’s article is comparing Asians and Jews with college admissions in mind, suggesting that Asians are now discriminated against in the college admissions process because of affirmative action. This, they claim, is reminiscent of the type of discrimination Jews experienced in the admissions process in the middle of the 20th century. As anyone who knows a little bit of what neo-cons are generally about, they are blaming this on affirmative action’s preference for black and Latino students, which, in turn, the Standard argues, hurts Asian students because their “spots” are being taken up by “less qualified” black and Latino students. Oy.

This is, of course, a part of the classic argument against affirmative action that has been around since the creation of affirmative action legislation in work places and universities. It reads as such: affirmative action is “special treatment.” And “special” by definition, according to anti-affirmative action folks is unequal. Thus, it is a “civil rights issue.” So, in this case, Asians’ civil rights are being violated…SMH.

Here’s some of this right-wing talk:

…[S]omething is afoot at elite academic institutions that has adversely affected Asian admissions. On the basis of their academic performance and high school records, Asian Americans should be gaining admission in much higher numbers than they are. In his 2006 book The Price of Admission, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Daniel Golden called Asians “the new Jews, inheriting the mantle of the most disenfranchised group in college admissions.” Golden observed, “Average SAT scores for Asian Americans admitted to the Ivy Leagues are substantially above those for any other group, including whites; frustrated Asian applicants refer to any score below the maximum as an ‘Asian fail.’”

I’m Asian; I’ve never heard of this “Asian fail” business. But more to the point, I’m surprised by the recent publication of this article (it’s in the Weekly Standard’s most recent edition); as I’ve suggested, this is a very old battle, with old tactics. The old tactics that I speak of is placing one “minority” group (in this case Asians) as the victim of the special treatment of another (in this case African Americans and Latinos). It is the argument that one group’s reparative politics (affirmative action) is hindering another group’s civil rights.

Now, let’s just say what this is really is–anti-black racism cloaked as the pursuit of equality for all. It is the the code of racism in an era of Barack Obama, where racism takes on a less visible and different form, while maintaining its strength and vitality. Hence the Obama reference. We can have racism in a country that can potentially call a man of African and white American heritage President. (Please God, let this be.) But this racism can only exist counter-intuitively as the rectification of some kind of civil injustice, which in this case is the admission of Asian Americans into college. Historian Vijay Prashad at Trinity College has written on this quite extensive history of the political opposition (and effective separation) of black and Asian Americans in a book I highly recommend called The Karma of Brown Folk. In it, he argues that whereas black Americans were faced with the famous question first formulated by W.E.B. Du Bois–”How does it feel to be a problem?”–Asian Americans are today faced with a different, though related, question: “How does it feel to be a solution?” By this, Prashad speaks directly to this kind of attack on affirmative action in which the “model minority” status of Asians in America become the grounds by which white elites exert racism. (Again, not all whites but white elites. I have trouble thinking whites in Appalachia have as much a hand in this kind of debate than writers who publish in The Weekly Standard.) Asians then become the techniques by which racist legislation can be passed.

Sad thing is, many Asians, feeling very happy about the model minority status go along with it. And honestly, it’s very difficult to blame them. They’re not stupid. They see the racial landscape in the US. To be black or even be associated to blackness in any remote way puts you at an advantage. Thus, Asian immigrants are more than likely to reproduce extant American anti-black racism, which they previously did not hold, at least not in the same virulent way. To boot, this isn’t even a special case among non-black immigrants. Immigrants from the West Indies and Africa, who usually live in close proximity to black Americans (that is, those who find ancestry in the South), also hold deeply racist views towards black Americans. If you want proof, ask any older West Indian in Brooklyn this weekend what they feel about black Americans. (It’s Labor Day weekend, you CAN’T miss them.) You will find the experience to be akin to that Dave Chappelle skit in which the blind black man is the Grand Wizard of the KKK, but not as funny because it’s real life, not a genius comedy sketch. (I heard there’s another Block Party in the works. I hope that is true.)

But back to Asians being the new Jews, I think this may sadly be the case save for the fact that it will be a very long time until Asians get TV shows and are credited with conspiracy theories about running the world banks. (Come on, Margaret Cho, who I admire for being an out-of-the-closet lesbian Korean is no Larry David.) What I do think Asians and Jews now share is enough social capital where they will gain very high positions of political power, which in turn will only give rise to a new Asian conservatism just as neo-conservatism was in fact a particularly New York Jewish intellectual-oriented, anti-socialist conservatism. One sad example is John Yoo, a fellow Korean American, who is the mastermind behind the Bush administration’s torture tactics. (Maybe Koreans in particular should experience some discrimination in college admissions after this guy…I kid, but not really…)

Well, to answer Prashad’s question: It’s embarassing to be a solution.

But just to end of a more hopeful note, in the case of Jewish intellectuals, there has been a kind of counter-current of left Jewish intellectuals. One can only hope that for every John Yoo, there’s a figure just as left-wing. Who knows though….

Fat Joe calls Daddy Yankee OUT

As my friends/fellow bloggers at Buggin’ Out and I Smell Like Money have already covered, Daddy Yankee, of “Gasolina” fame, endorsed John McCain for President, citing Old Man’s supposed to commitment to the immigration issue. I guess Daddy Yankee wants the Mexicans out because that’s the only reason why I think he would specifically cite immigration as the reason behind his endorsement.

Well fellow Puerto Rican Fat Joe has released a statement to MTV calling Daddy Yankee a sellout. Here’s what MTV says:

“Put this in the MTV News headline: ‘Fat Joe Says Daddy Yankee Is a Sellout,’ ” the MC said via phone from Denver, where he’s attending the Democratic National Convention. “Just like that! I gotta go in. I’m talking to little cousins that like [Yankee] and all that, and they’re starting to believe that John McCain is [the best candidate]. I can’t have that.

“I opened the newspaper and got sick to my stomach,” Joe continued. “I felt like I wanted to vomit when I seen that. The reason why I called him a sellout is because I feel he did that for a [publicity] look, rather than the issues that are affecting his people that look up to him. How could you want John McCain in office when George Bush and the Republicans already have half a million people losing their homes in foreclosure? We’re fighting an unjust war. It’s the Latinos and black kids up in the frontlines, fighting that war. … We over here trying to take the troops out of Iraq and bring peace. This guy immediately wants war. If not with Iraq or Afghanistan, he’ll start a new one with Iran. I feel real disgusted that Daddy Yankee would do that. Either he did that for a look, or he’s just not educated on politics.”

Peep the italics. Why doesn’t Fat Joe rap about this instead of the “make it rain” ish?

“I can’t QUIT you!”

NOTE: Beginning today, posts for Caught in the Web will slow down a bit since school starts up again. I may miss a day here and there, and the posts may be shorter, but I will definitely be blogging regularly.

Many readers of this blog live in New York City. If not, then you know about New York City because you’ve spent a good amount of time here. As members of both camps would agree, it’s not easy living in the city. I can run the list but why bother. It’s expensive, it’s dirty, yada yada yada. I’ve felt like this many times also. Is it really worth all of this just to say you live in the same city as Seinfeld? (That’s not really why I live in Manhattan although it’s not a bad reason.) But in all seriousness, in numerous conversations with my friends, I’ve heard a point that most people would agree with: living in NYC is great and all, but we wouldn’t mind if all of our friends lived in the same neighborhood in another city as long as that city was poppin’.

So where’s the new scene? New York Magazine says Buffalo, NY.

The article is quite good and entertaining since it profiles a few NYC exiles in Buffalo who really love it. And the main purpose of the article is much more about what kind of adjustments people had to make in order to live Buffalo to the fullest. As one could expect, they spill a lot of ink on size and price. That’s to be expected and all, but the numbers had me wowed.

So they [this couple from the article] traded their one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment in Sunset Park—the one they describe as “disgusting and so small and just awful,” and for which they paid $1,300 a month plus an extra hundred for a storage space because the landlady wouldn’t let them use their own basement—for a three-bedroom apartment on a tree-lined street with a living room, a dining room, a basement, a front and back porch, stained-glass windows, and a separate office for Herbeck [the wife]. All that goes for $795 a month, a price that, Herbeck points out somewhat sheepishly, as though she’s revealing a guilty indulgence, is at the top end of the rental market in Buffalo. But can you believe it—an actual office! With French doors that open out to the back porch that she can leave propped open all day.

That’s awesome. But really, what’s Buffalo like?

Here are a few things you probably don’t know about Buffalo: The city’s median income is $28,000, and with nearly 30 percent of its citizens below the poverty line, Buffalo is the second poorest city in America. (Number one: Detroit.) The median home price is just $60,000. (“And if you spent $300,000,” says Mayor Brown, “you’d be close to living in a mansion.”) In 2007, the American Planning Association named Elmwood Village in Buffalo one of America’s “Ten Great Neighborhoods.” (Also named: Park Slope.) In 1901, Buffalo was the eighth largest city in America, a booming industrial metropolis, and the site of the World’s Fair. By 2008, thanks to white flight and industrial decay, its population had dropped by half, from a mid-century high of 580,000 to about 270,000—fewer people, in fact, than lived there in 1901. As a result, large tracts of Buffalo are essentially abandoned, turned into “urban prairie,” full of boarded-up buildings and weedy vacant lots. The silver lining of this exodus is that you can drive anywhere in Buffalo in ten minutes or less, a fact that was repeated to me often by local boosters, including the mayor, which always struck me as odd—like claiming the best thing about living in a ghost town is that there’s never a line at the movie theater.

Doesn’t really sound sexy, does it? So the question is in the balance. With New York getting more expensive by the minute, where will we (the cool people I mean) all go? Is that the choice that people face? Not now obviously but when people start wanting to settle down a little something. Can people just leave New York? I think Joan Didion put it right:

But the problem is, you can’t simply leave New York—you have to quit New York. You have to admit to yourself and the world that you’re packing it in, calling it a day, turning out the lights. You have to walk away from, as Joan Didion put it, “the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.”

Is there such thing as real estate rehab?

Every Music Nerd’s Wet Dream

Okay, not exactly but this is noteworthy. I’m sure everyone is familiar with what “open source” is. Well, to put it in a nutshell, it is the opening up of source code of various applications, allowing for its users to make improvements and changes to their liking. Hence, the old distinction between “inventor” and “customer” is flattened to a large degree. One of the most popular example of the Open Source movement is Mozilla Firefox, but there are many others, including Wikipedia.

The chatter about the Open Source “movement” has simmered down in recent years due to the rise in Web 2.0-talk for many reasons, one of which has to do with the rise in popularity of open source software in lieu of hardware (Again, look at Mozilla’s rise). This makes a lot of sense since hardware on some level has always been open source, if you wanted it to be. What I mean is that anyone can modify and tweak a guitar amp for example by opening it up with your hands and rewiring various things or replacing this or that part. I say this with a smirk on my face since I know that messing with hardware requires a huge degree of specialized knowledge whereas making a change on a Wikipedia entry, for example, is comparatively easier.

The divide that kept the terms “hardware” and “open source” far away from each other as the two halves of Moses’ Red Sea is slowing recuperating with the advent of this baby.

This is the Open Stomp Coyote-1, which is being branded as “the world’s first open-source digital guitar effects processor.” How this works is that the Coyote comes with software that allows for customization of effects and patches as well as an online community which of course promotes the sharing of said effects and patches with other users of the Coyote. Here is what the software, called the Workbench looks like:

Looks pretty promising but I have two potential criticisms (which mind you are completely unwarranted since I’ve yet to get my hands on this thing nor will I ever). The first, which I think is what many companies fall prey to, is that OpenStomp relies too heavily on people purchasing enough of their products to form the database of effects and patches that will be freely shared. In other words, if I’m one of the 10 people that have purchased this thing, half of the entire novelty of this product has been erased. Secondly, it is not really open source hardware in the sense that the basic hardware components cannot be manipulated. Now that may be asking for a lot but to advertise this thing as open-source hardware is a bit misleading. With the advent of MIDI and digital sampling, we’ve had assignable hardware, which allows users of a keyboard sampler, for example, to load whatever sounds they want to various “banks” and play them back by hitting the keys of the keyboard. It is basically the same principle employed by any cheap Casio, which, with a click of a button, changes the sound of the instrument that you are playing, despite the fact that you are playing the same set of physical keys. Quite simply, it is the ability to assign a different effect to the same cause. In my mind, this pedal is just an extension of that logic placed onto an effects pedal context with the added bonus of creating your own presets and storing them onto the pedal (which, although may not be a big deal in terms of media and technology studies, is admittedly a big deal for musicians who play live often). Let’s see if this thing takes off but, for me, what is far more innovative is what musicians like electronic musician Daedelus and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello do, which is literally construct their own hardware.

Daedelus’ renowned “bit box” aka monome. If you don’t know him, check him out. He’s that FIREEEE:

XLR8R TV Episode 71: Daedelus from XLR8RTV on Vimeo.

Old White People at the Movies

This weekend I went to see the film “Elegy” at a theater on 62nd Street and 1st Avenue around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. I was excited to see this film ever since I had seen a segment of Charlie Rose devoted to it. I didn’t want to get screwed out of a good seat, which explains my rather early trip to the movie. The whole experience was somewhat disastrous because I had not received a memo that the early afternoon was the prime time that every person above the age of 70 went to the movies.

I should have anticipated something was up when I had seen the throng of walkers and West Indian women (the caretakers of the 70 and above crowd)  standing in line for tickets. After waiting a really long time to get my tickets (this wasn’ t the fault of the old people moving slowly, the theater staff sucked), I sat down in a reasonably good seat on the right side of the theater. Everything was cool up until then. Shortly after the previews, trouble began to brew. I noticed small red lights above the heads of several older members of the audience. What the hell were they? Upon stealing a few more glances during the opening credits, I realized that they were the lights from headsets that they were wearing. I guess the theater gets SOOO many old patrons that they provide hearing devices for them. At that point, I should’ve known that my movie-going experience would be compromised in some way. But even then, I didn’t think that would intrude upon my situation.

I like old people. I was raised by my grandmother and the Korean-Confucian ethic makes it very difficult for me to swallow how poorly Americans treat their old people. Old folks in America are always viewed with the utmost contempt. They raise us and then we ship them off to Florida. But I guess in spite of all this, I’ve truly assimilated since what would happen next during the film would really just solidfy that fact.

The way that these hearing aid headphones were, I suspect, is through a radio feed. Radio feeds, if people have forgotten, operate through certain channels determined by frequency. If, however, there is a slight issue with the tuning of the frequency, there is a terrible sound made which we call “static.” Now, something with the setup was messed up as I was interrupted several times throughout the film with 20 or some odd headphones with volumes set at 11 that would emit a loud STATIC sound every other minute. Now, of course, this is not the fault of the older people who need these devices. But if that’s not bad enough, the woman who was sitting in the same aisle but further down from me started to yell at these helpless people, “Can you stop that please!?” I look over; she’s not exactly young either (My guess is that she’s in her 60s). And to cap it all off, with about 10 minutes left to go in the film, during a pretty KEY emotional moment, here’s the exchange:

“Move your head!”

“SHHHHHHHHHHHH”

“Well I can’t see and the movie’s about the end!

What’s this crap about black people being loud in movie theaters? Not for me on Saturdays.

Giving out iPods is perfectly fine

Why are so many academics–especially the tenured ones–so cranky? They have what Stanley Aronowitz once called the “last good job in America” and they still complain. The latest fodder for complaints among the academic class (which of course I’m in the process of attempting to gain membership) is the new wave of universities giving out iPods to all of their incoming freshmen students. Some schools have been doing this for a while. One summer I worked with someone who told me that Duke gave out a free iPod to her and her fellow incoming freshmen. That was around 2003.

So why is the New York Times now raising the question of the impact of the iPod into the college classroom? Well, one reason is that more universities have started to do this. But the other, more important reason, is that the iPod has evolved. The first generation iPod did not have wireless Internet access. But even then, one can ask: Haven’t students been able to bring in their laptops to class for some time now? What makes professors more worried that, because of a smaller mobile device with Internet connectivity, students are more inclined pay less attention?

Students already have laptops and cellphones, of course, but the newest devices can take class distractions to a new level. They practically beg a user to ignore the long-suffering professor struggling to pass on accumulated wisdom from the front of the room — a prospect that teachers find galling and students view as, well, inevitable.

“When it gets a little boring, I might pull it out,” acknowledged Naomi J. Pugh, a first-year student at Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, Tenn., referring to her new iPod Touch, which can connect to the Internet over a campus wireless network. She speculated that professors might try harder to make classes interesting if they were competing with the devices.

This is I think the main misgiving that professors have; yet another device that will distract students from their lectures.

“I’m not someone who’s anti-technology, but I’m always worried that technology becomes an end in and of itself, and it replaces teaching or it replaces analysis,” said Ellen G. Millender, associate professor of classics at Reed College in Portland, Ore. (She added that she hoped to buy an iPhone for herself once prices fall.)

The schools, on the other hand, emphasize their pedagogic potential.

While schools emphasize its usefulness — online research in class and instant polling of students, for example — a big part of the attraction is, undoubtedly, that the iPhone is cool and a hit with students. Basking in the aura of a cutting-edge product could just help a university foster a cutting-edge reputation.

Experts see a movement toward the use of mobile technology in education, though they say it is in its infancy as professors try to concoct useful applications. Providing powerful hand-held devices is sure to fuel debates over the role of technology in higher education.

“We think this is the way the future is going to work,” said Kyle Dickson, co-director of research and the mobile learning initiative at Abilene Christian University in Texas, which has bought more than 600 iPhones and 300 iPods for students entering this fall.

One thing that I think is particularly interesting for someone like me who teaches sociology is the ability to take live polls. Now, this is easily done in class. I do it all of the time but manually–literally. I say something akin to “Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a job” to talk about Marx and the elementary labor process. (Or, sometimes I say something like “You got a hundred dollar bill throw your hands up!” But that’s Fatman Scoop’s random party break.) It works for me still to do this manually because my actual purpose is not so much to show how to do statistical analysis; it’s do have a theoretical discussion about the labor theory of value. But for those teaching statistics in really any of the social sciences could generate sample data nearly instantly.

I wish I had that during my boring ass year of stats in the first couple years of my PhD…

And lastly, maybe some of these devices will force professors step their damn game up.

Black Republicanism vs Hip Hop Republicanism

Is it even possible? Well I can tell you absolutely. We have had several high-profile black Republicans in recent American political history–Alan Keyes, former footballer-turned-conservative JC Watts, and of course the venerable Clarence Thomas (whom Obama cited during the Faith Forum with Rick Warren as someone he would not have nominated as Supreme Court Justice [Go to ~2:16]). Nas and Jay-Z even came together to do a song called “Black Republicans.” So it’s definitely out there, this concept, this seemingly contradictory term, seemingly oxymoronic and impossible. So, why not then, hip hop Republicanism?

At The Root, a collective blog started in part by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard’s Afro-American studies department, Lenny McAllister, a self-described “hip-hop Republican” has written a bit of a manifesto for Gen-Y black Republicanism.

So, what’s the difference between a Hip-Hop Republican and a black Republican?
Hip-Hop Republicans grew up with the influence of hip-hop culture and, unlike their peers over age 50, are able to see how Republican values and policies should be applied to urban issues. And while black Republican is a label based solely on race, ”Hip Hop Republican” speaks to the existence of a group that has transcended race in many ways.

If Black Republicanism is about assimilating into old-school GOP culture, then Hip-Hop Republicanism is about changing GOP culture to look, feel, and sound more like us.

Fair enough. Here is some more:

Democrats are not the only ones concerned about the legacy of civil rights. And young Democrats are not the only ones trying to influence a changing of the guard in terms of black leadership. As the children and grandchildren of civil rights patriots, Hip-Hop Republicans embrace cultural diversity and cultural integrity. We are connected to our communities; we are connected to our blackness. We are connected to the post-civil rights generational struggle. But we believe that we have reached the point in American society where blacks must be active across the political spectrum in order to achieve true equality.

I do accept one point of McAllister’s, which I unfortunately find to be hidden in a bit of conservative euphoria regarding the future of post-civil rights black politics that seeps throughout the rest of his piece. It is the last few lines, especially the bit about reaching a point in American society where blacks can, in fact, be conservative.  I would agree that an America that allows for minorities to become members of the Grand Old Party is a fairer America. That is to say, equality existed to the point where individuals begin making decisions regarding their political affiliations based on world-view as opposed to economic or social condition. That would be nice. But come on, when and where has that ever happened? It seems that McAllister aims to do everything to suggest that hip-hop Republicanism is the actualization of American political evolution. The fact that there are members of the hip hop generation (who, by the way, are not in the least bit all black) that choose to be Republicans, for McAllister, exemplify a step towards the ever-perfection of American democracy.

Yet, he, wittingly or not, excises one crucial reason for why there aren’t more black Republicans–the economic and social subjugation of black Americans, which the Republicans back in the time of Lincoln (Sidebar: The GOP loves to remind everyone that they are the “party of Lincoln.” Okay…and?) have done nothing more than the proclamation itself without any kind of federal support to follow through. Anyone interested in the complete botching of an entire peoples, please see W.E.B. Du Bois’ classic Black Reconstruction. But it seems to me that McAllister is more enthralled with the very fact that he can be young, black and male and STILL be a Republican! But isn’t it more shocking that a young black male, who has been effectively the target of America’s disdain and animosity or as Du Bois once put it, “the object of contempt and pity,” can be a member of any political party–Democrat or Republican. It was under Clinton that jobs left the cities for good and welfare became a joke. There is however one important development with the rise of hip hop Republicanism, which is the leveraging of power by the black left to push the Democrats further left. In America, there will undoubtedly always be a version of the two-party system, which is in large part responsible for the stagnation of ideas among American leftists. What the politicization of young black conservatives may force the weak Democrats to do, is to scramble to grab the voting bloc that they have taken for granted and have done very little for.

Here’s the Daily Show’s take on this very issue. Better said than any analyst.

Maddow gets her own MSNBC show

Maddow on MSNBC

The New York Times reports that Rachel Maddow, the object of many profiles this political season including one in The Nation, in The New York Times itself and also on this blog, will replace Dan Abrams on MSNBC for the 9PM hour starting September 8th. I’ve already expressed my bewonderment and admiration of Maddow before so I won’t go much into detail on that but I do think this confirms what a lot of media critics have been saying for the past couple of days about MSNBC’s move to the left in its programing. I smelled something afoot when I first wrote about my semi-obsession with MSNBC, noting that Phil Griffin, who had been general manager of MSNBC, was promoted to president of the network recently. Griffin was one of the chief supporters of Keith Olbermann becoming the star of the network, and seeing that Olbermann has been carrying the network up until the Olympics started(which has helped NBC quite a bit), Maddow, whom many have been demanding to be given her own show, will be another addition in a leftward direction.

Now, let’s be easy. MSNBC is “left” for US television, but not really on the global scale; it’s still quite liberal. Nevertheless, to have an out-of-the-closet lesbian leftist on primetime is a HUGE deal.  Furthermore, someone with such sharp wit, who can take the likes of Pat Buchanan to task amid his shrieking and yelling is something SORELY needed. But as for the prospects of Maddow’s show being a lefty show (more so than Olbermann’s I hope), we will have to wait until after the election. Until then, we will pretty much see her take on McCain and other right-wingers, along with Obama but with far less fire. But, if and when Obama becomes President (Please, God?), Maddow’s show will have to prove to me whether it will be just another left-leaning punditocratic show, which act as apologists for the Democrats. I have a hunch she will not.

Plus, 30 Rock is coming back soon. NBC is kind of my favorite network right now…

(Don’t worry ABC, you guy still got me hooked on that TV crack AKA Lost.)

“Multisite” Churches

Buckhead Church. Atlanta, Georgia. The home church of one of the biggest multisite churches.

Slate.com’s Andrew Park has recently written on what are now being branded “multisite” churches. They are megachurches that expand not through physical construction and holding multiple church services on Sundays (sometimes, if the membership is big enough like at Rick Warren’s Saddle Back Church, worship services begin on Saturday night) but through media–usually video. Using Starbucks as a model (I don’t know why since Starbucks did themselves in financially earlier this summer by having too many real estate investments; in other words, there were just too many of them), these churches are renting out small spaces with seats and a projector to create a “video venue” a place where worshippers congregate to hear the sermon via Web stream or other forms of live feed. It’s not exactly “church online,” of which LifeChurch.tv and Church of Fools is another. It differs because there are more “live” elements than “mediated” elements (I’m betraying my own disdain for such dichotomies but work with me here). There are ushers and also “campus pastors” that are in charge of that particular location and also preach as well. According to Park, approximately 2,000 to 2,500 U.S. congregations now operate multiple campuses (not to mention the numbers that must exist globally), most of them using this “video venue” method.

So what does the “video venue” method do for these churches?

With video venues, ambitious pastors can think beyond their current geographic boundaries, whether it’s across town, across the country, or even across international borders. Oklahoma City’s LifeChurch.tv, which also holds services online, has churches in six states. Fellowship Church in Dallas bought out a struggling Baptist church in Miami for its first off-site location. Andy Stanley’s North Point has 16 video venues, including a church whose members voted to defect from the Presbyterian Church of Canada last fall. He’s gunning for a total of 60 by 2010.

Okay, okay, clearly this method is good at getting people in the pews. I mean this is America after all. But isn’t there something different about going to church only to see the pastor preach as a hologram from the projector to the screen? Park astutely agrees that this particular experience of going to church in a room which basically amounts to a crappy home theater is different than watching the weird looking guys on TV.

While anyone can watch Joel Osteen or T.D. Jakes on TV, few would call that “going to church.” Can a digitally projected pastor lead a congregation, shepherd believers, create and expand a community?

Good question. A lot of Christians in fact don’t think so. One such church leader in Atlanta got pummeled on the Internet for doing something this, one commenter even calling him the anti-Christ. Ah, so here’s the juicy part. The contradiction for many Christians will be the use of technology itself. (This is really what I’m interested in for my own research.) This technophobia, for these particularly Luddite pastors, has theological grounds.

In fact, says Shane Hipps, author of The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church, using video goes against a critical tenet of Protestant faith: the priesthood of all believers. Instead of a real experience, it offers a mediated one that inherently puts the pastor in a position of greater power over the masses. “It’s actually undermining their theology,” he told me recently. Hipps, who worked in advertising for Porsche before entering the seminary, says the small Mennonite community he leads in Glendale, Ariz., asked him to consider “going multisite,” as it’s called. He refused. Even podcasting his sermons makes him uncomfortable. He started doing it for the benefit of elderly members who couldn’t make it to church, but a year later, his own minor celebrity has helped him acquire 6,000 subscribers.

I know what you’re thinking. This guy is basically another hypocritical Bible thumper who has written a book against using new media but then also has gained celebrity status through podcasts. Yes, that is all true but it’s not the most interesting to me. What is interesting is the rather selective reading of the Gospel, in particular another crucial tenet of Protestantism, which is the Unity of the Trinity–Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The last term–Spirit–is a medium. Additionally, to bring it back to the Old Testament, isn’t something like Moses’ staff or the Burning Bush a media technology, acting as conduits for God? To use a more contemporary example, hasn’t Christianity and in fact all Axial religions used another technology–the written word–to spread their ideas?

But to consider the effect on the landscape of American religion, will the death of mainline Christian denominations (e.g., Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalian) come quicker because of the rather slow response to the technological change that has already taken place in the world? Politically, this has at least one big potential effect. Since the Christian Right has been slowly losing its grip (in part, because they are dying….and not TOO soon) since their younger Christianist (Andrew Sullivan’s word) fellows like Rick Warren are far less concerned about politicizing gay rights and abortion, will their willingness and openness to new media technologies finally do away with the liberal Christanity of yesteryear? As far as I can see, the denominations that constituted the Christian liberal-left and were the congregational homes of many of the civil rights leaders in the 1950s are committing suicide. And that, according to the Bible, is a sin, right?

Wallerstein on Georgia

After watching a few of the Sunday morning news shows (Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week and Late Edition), I’ve come to realize that my avoidance of the situation in Georgia was not going to be respected by members of news television. Come to find out, watching Condi Rice, Bill Richardson or the Prez of Georgia Mikhail Saakashvili didn’t really add much to my understanding of the Georgian conflict. Rice says the US didn’t give Georgia a blank check to invade South Ossetia. Richardson says we haven’t respected Russia and had actual dialogue with them. The Georgian Prez says Russia and Putin are a bunch of thugs. Yawn…

According to common knowledge, to hear news from the source is the best bet. It’s pure, unadulturated and “first hand.” I remember when I first learned the difference between first and second hand sources. I drank the Kool Aid and thought to myself, Why would anyone use second hand sources? Well, only later did I come to realize that analysis or a critical perspective does not come from first hand sources. For the most part, they are reliable for ranting and raving, nothing else. Too bad the Sunday morning shows haven’t learned that. Meet the Press for example is the worst culprit. They pose as if they are bringing in experts of some kind, but the table on Sunday mornings is full of their own in-house NBC journalists. It’s not a panel; it’s a talent show.

So for my Georgia/Russia analysis, I was waiting on one of the few people that I actually rely on for foreign affairs analysis–the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. He is one of the giants of social thought and also the founder of an entire field called “world systems analysis.” You know you’ve done good when someone creates a field of study. He writes a column on foreign affairs that is syndicated in various publications including Agence Global, which

is a specialist news, opinion and feature syndication agency. The magazines and authors we syndicate are leaders in their fields or areas of expertise, and offer points of view that are often at variance with the mainstream of U.S. and international media. Think of it as “Uncommon Commentary.”

Anyway, back to the Georgia/Russia conflict, Wallerstein offers a lengthy overview and analysis, which begins with a bit of history of the Cold War and, more importantly, takes on a line of argument which I think is overshadowed too often–the Clinton years. Even before Slick Willy began to compare Obama to Jesse Jackson and said borderline racist things to compensate for cheating on his wife (with Gina Gershon as the most recent rumors have suggested), the MSM (mainstreat media) could not get enough of him. He was “the best politician of our generation.” Obama has even said something to that effect. He is given “great president” status for the economic boom years of the 1990s, during which the US did exceptionally well, but did it leave the rest of the world as well off? No, of course not, not in the zero sum game that we play in capitalism. Wallerstein makes some pointed arguments about foreign policy decisions that the Clinton administration in the wake of 1989-91 (when the Cold War effectively ended) made that directly link to the present botched take over by Georgia of South Ossetia, and the reactionary military strikes by the Russians.

First, here’s Wallerstein on Cold War history:

From 1945 to 1989, the principal chess game was that between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was called the Cold War, and the basic rules were called metaphorically “Yalta.” The most important rule concerned a line that divided Europe into two zones of influence. It was called by Winston Churchill the “Iron Curtain” and ran from Stettin to Trieste. The rule was that, no matter how much turmoil was instigated in Europe by the pawns, there was to be no actual warfare between the United States and the Soviet Union. And at the end of each instance of turmoil, the pieces were to be returned to where they were at the outset. This rule was observed meticulously right up to the collapse of the Communisms in 1989, which was most notably marked by the destruction of the Berlin wall.

Yes, so the situation was flipped during those years of 1989-1991, when those of us in school came back to school on September only to find the number of countries in the world had DOUBLED, or so it seemed. But Wallerstein argues that the US made a critical mistake at that time, mistaking its role in the world.

The major problem since then is that the United States misunderstood the new rules of the game. It proclaimed itself, and was proclaimed by many others, the lone superpower. In terms of chess rules, this was interpreted to mean that the United States was free to move about the chessboard as it saw fit, and in particular to transfer former Soviet pawns to its sphere of influence. Under Clinton, and even more spectacularly under George W. Bush, the United States proceeded to play the game this way.

Under Clinton and later Bush, the geopolitical game of chess was playing for keeps. But as Wallerstein notes, the US wasn’t exactly right on this note of being the sole superpower in the world after the fall of Communism.

The United States was not the lone superpower; it was no longer even a superpower at all. The end of the Cold War meant that the United States had been demoted from being one of two superpowers to being one strong state in a truly multilateral distribution of real power in the interstate system. Many large countries were now able to play their own chess games without clearing their moves with one of the two erstwhile superpowers. And they began to do so.

On Clinton:

Two major geopolitical decisions were made in the Clinton years. First, the United States pushed hard, and more or less successfully, for the incorporation of erstwhile Soviet satellites into NATO membership. These countries were themselves anxious to join, even though the key western European countries — Germany and France –were somewhat reluctant to go down this path. They saw the U.S. maneuver as one aimed in part at them, seeking to limit their newly-acquired freedom of geopolitical action.

The second key U.S. decision was to become an active player in the boundary realignments within the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This culminated in a decision to sanction, and enforce with their troops, the de facto secession of Kosovo from Serbia.

And obviously Russia, under Yeltsin was NOT pleased. Why would it be? But could it do anything about it? No. It had not developed into a player in the global oil market nor did it have any pipelines running through it for leverage in demands to Western Europe and the US.

So now that Putin has been running Russia, why does it push back so hard against the West? Our Prez Dubya didn’t exactly help:

Bush decided to push the lone superpower tactics (the United States can move its pieces as it alone decides) much further than had Clinton. First, Bush in 2001 withdrew from the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Then he announced that the United States would not move to ratify two new treaties signed in the Clinton years: the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the agreed changes in the SALT II nuclear disarmament treaty. Then Bush announced that the United States would move forward with its National Missile Defense system.

But as if the pulling out of several treaties weren’t enough:

And of course, Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. As part of this engagement, the United States sought and obtained rights to military bases and overflight rights in the Central Asian republics that formerly were part of the Soviet Union. In addition, the United States promoted the construction of pipelines for Central Asian and Caucasian oil and natural gas that would bypass Russia. And finally, the United States entered into an agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic to establish missile defense sites, ostensibly to guard against Iranian missiles. Russia, however, regarded them as aimed at her.

Oh yeah, the War in the Iraq…Forgot all about that(as has the coverage of this conflict on TV). Fast forward to today, in which Russia not only has beefed up its military and its oil production, not to mention the strategic alliances with China and Iran, we have all the ingredients for what Wallerstein has called a “mini war.”

Here’s a timeline:

1990-

When Georgia in 1990 sought to end the autonomous status of its non-Georgian ethnic zones, they promptly proclaimed themselves independent states. They were recognized by no one but Russia guaranteed their de facto autonomy.

February 2008-

Kosovo formally transformed its de facto autonomy to de jure independence. Its move was supported by and recognized by the United States and many western European countries. Russia warned at the time that the logic of this move applied equally to the de facto secessions in the former Soviet republics. In Georgia, Russia moved immediately, for the first time, to recognize South Ossetian de jure independence in direct response to that of Kosovo.

April 2008-

[T]he United States proposed at the NATO meeting that Georgia and Ukraine be welcomed into a so-called Membership Action Plan. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom all opposed this action, saying it would provoke Russia.

August 2008-

Georgia’s neoliberal and strongly pro-American president, Mikhail Saakashvili, was now desperate. He saw the reassertion of Georgian authority in South Ossetia (and Abkhazia) receding forever. So, he chose a moment of Russian inattention (Putin at the Olympics, Medvedev on vacation) to invade South Ossetia. Of course, the puny South Ossetian military collapsed completely. Saakashvili expected that he would be forcing the hand of the United States (and indeed of Germany and France as well).

Instead of an easy win, he got his ass kicked by the Russians. Duh. The French and Germans had already warned us months before. So having raised the stakes and gone all in, the Georgian Prez didn’t get the US support he needed. Why? Wallerstein again:

What, after all, could Bush do? The United States was not a superpower. Its armed forces were tied down in two losing wars in the Middle East. And, most important of all, the United States needed Russia far more than Russia needed the United States. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, pointedly noted in an op-ed in the Financial Times that Russia was a “partner with the west on…the Middle East, Iran and North Korea.”

And Western Europe?

Russia essentially controls its gas supplies. It is no accident that it was President Sarkozy of France, not Condoleezza Rice, who negotiated the truce between Georgia and Russia. The truce contained two essential concessions by Georgia. Georgia committed itself to no further use of force in South Ossetia, and the agreement contained no reference to Georgian territorial integrity.

And for good measure, not only did the US come out looking kind of silly in all of this. It lost the 2000 Georgian troops it had in Iraq, who were mostly in Sh’ia areas according to Wallerstein.

As the color commentator in an old video game called NBA JAM used to say, the US “can’t BUY a bucket.”