How We Remember War

There's really no objective reason to connect these two things I'm about to compare. It might be nothing more than an accident that I happened to, on the same day, read a The New York Times story on the day after it was published and watch an Israeli documentary first released in June 2008. But the topics are similar (and, more important, distinct) and I'll take advantage of the happy coincidence of running across them on the same day, in order to think through how we remember war.

I find war monuments to be just about the most interesting things in the whole wide world. They reveal in a very tangible, very visible way how these major human events are thought of, in retrospect. That would be interesting enough in its own right, but, I posit, war memorials do more than that. As times passes and first-hand knowledge of these wars fades, these memorials play a huge role in determining how the wars themselves are remembered. That's why I found this The New York Times article about a dispute over the inclusion of a bronzed representation of a South Vietnamese fighter in the Veterans Memorial Park of Wichita, Kansas so interesting. Some American veterans want to maintain the American identity of the Park. Some Vietnamese-Americans want to have their cooperation in the war effort remembered. And according to The Times, "after long, tense talks, a compromise emerged last month at City Hall: the monument will sit just outside the John S. Stevens Veterans Memorial Park (named for a former local official and veteran), set apart from the rest of the memorials by a landscaped, six-foot earthen berm, with no sidewalk between."

I'm not sure which side is in the right here. The important point is that this decision matters, and that the players involved (in addition to Monica Davey and the editorial staff of The Times) recognize that, more than 34 years after the last of the American personnel was evacuated from Vietnam, we're still struggling to come to terms with how our official memory of this event will be formulated.

The 2008 Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir follows director Ari Folman as he attempts to overcome the official memory of Israel's 1982 Lebanon War. This film has gained a measure of notoriety for being an animated documentary. The animations and illustrations are routinely breathtaking--especially the repeated use of a toxic yellow, hinting equally at the trauma of the original event and the danger in remembering. But the documentary is important for reasons far beyond the decision to offer the tale in an animated form. At the start of the film, Folman finds himself unable to recall his involvement in the war. His memory is stirred through conversations with friends and fellow-soldiers, and he slowly pieces together what happened in Lebanon and what he did or did not do. The film contains conversations with psychologists and trauma experts who explain that the human brain can turn off, in a way, certain disturbing memories. The psychological basis of Folman's memory outage is fascinating, but I can't help but think that the official Israeli policy of embarrassment and silence contributed to the difficulty with which an individual soldier finds himself able to remember what happened. This is a case of an individual digging through the standardized national memory, in order to arrive at a more personal--and, perhaps, more authentic--memory of an important event.

Food should be true to itself

As you know, I have changed the way I eat, so I really eat fruits, vegetables, meats, and some dairy.
Eating like that really gives me options and I get to taste food that I have never been able to before.

But I will tell someone now that I want an apple. They always give me this type of answer:

"I love apples also! Have you ever tried it with Fat Free Cool Whip, a dash of cinnamon, a touch of maple syrup and three packets of Splenda. It tastes like an apple pie!!!"

This is where I have to be different now. I do not want something that tastes like something else. I do not want to fool myself anymore. If I wanted an apple pie I would make one.

A really good one! I do not want to dress up food anymore.

--Tony Posnanski, The Anti Jared

Today is the ninth day of Av, a month of the Jewish calendar. It has all sorts of historical significances, because this is the date traditionally remembered as the day on which both Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and its sequel were destroyed. There are a whole host of traditions and laws which govern behavior during the twenty-one days leading to this date, and many Jews have a custom to refrain from eating meat during the last nine of these days. Under normal circumstances this temporary vegetarianism wouldn’t affect me much—I’m more likely on a day-to-day basis to eat grilled cheese sandwiches or breakfast cereals than I am to eat meat. But I’ve been working in a Jewish camp for part of this summer and they, I suppose, consider it inappropriate to repeat meals. This has led to some inspired choices by the kitchen staff along with some real head-scratchers (English muffins, scrambled eggs, tater tots, and broccoli—just about the weirdest combination of foods you can imagine).

But I want to focus on one lunch. This lunch consisted of fake sloppy joe meat, fake schwarma meat, and a selection of rolls and wraps. The fake meat wasn’t at all offensive; it was even pretty good, although the sloppy joes basically tasted like tomato sauce. But the decision to serve fake meat just called further attention to the fact that we weren’t eating the real thing. Even though the food tasted fine, the meal failed because the food tried to be something it wasn’t.

I can’t help but think of all the sugared candies and beverages we consume which masquerade as fruit. It sometimes feels as if we’re much more likely to wash down our cherry candies with orange soda than we are to, you know, eat cherries and oranges. Let’s go back to eating food that is real.

Postmodern, Contemporary Food

I don't have tons of blogging time available, but I do want to reward your reading commitment by passing along three recent links I really enjoyed. Here they are, with the briefest of introductions:

• A wonderful and sad excerpt from Frank Bruni's soon-to-be-published memoir. Bruni, the The New York Times food critic, delves into a childhood of overeating and bulimia. I'm fascinated by autobiography--and, really, any instance of conscious remembering--and this piece is particularly rich because the childhood remembrances are so obviously related to Bruni's career. Bruni's a fantastic writer, writing about his passion and his relationship to his passion. Really strong stuff.
• Wired magazine's compendium of etiquette for the contemporary age. A lot of this has to do with basic rules of social networking civility, but I was most impressed by the recommended healthy media consumption pyramid.
• The Los Angeles Times' Jacket Copy blog's list of 61 essential Postmodern works of literature. I've read 9 from this list. It also includes a helpful key of defining postmodern characteristics, including "author is a character," "disrupts/plays with form," "comments on its own bookishness," and "blurs reality and fiction." I have some nits to pick with the list (I think Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 needs to be included in any list of this type), but I appreciate the effort that went into compiling what may turn into the reading list for the next several years of my life.

This Is Why We're Fat

One of the real pleasures of reading The New Yorker over the past two months has been a string of excellent articles written by Elizabeth Kolbert, including the story of James Hansen (abstract only, except for subscribers), a NASA scientist so concerned with climate change that he attends protests and rallies, and an appraisal of the fact that we're living through--and possibly causing--a mass extinction (also, abstract only, except for subscribers) the likes of which the Earth has not seen in the past 65 million years.

Her latest effort, "XXXL," is a focused review of seven books published in the past six years that all attempt to explain why humans, including but not limited to Americans, are gaining weight. You should read the article to learn what these books and Kolbert theorize, but here are some scary highlights:

• American "[m]en are now on average seventeen pounds heavier that they were in the late seventies, and for women that figure is even higher: nineteen pounds."
• "Today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States (!), making them 'the number one food consumed in the American diet.' If, instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water, [health economist Eric] Finkelstein calculates, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less."
• We eat just about whatever food is in front of us, without, it would seem, taking into account how hungry we are: "In another experiment, [director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, Brian] Wansink invited participants to cook dinner for themselves with ingredients that he provided. One group got big boxes of pasta and big boxes of sauces, a second smaller boxes and smaller bottles. The first group prepared twenty-three per cent more, and downed it all."
• "According to the federally supported National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the bagels that Americans eat have in the past twenty years swelled from a hundred and forty to three hundred and fifty calories each. If, as Wansink argues, people are relying on external cues to determine their consumption, then the new, bigger bagel is sneaking in an additional two hundred and ten calories. For someone who is in the habit of eating a bagel a day, these extra calories translate into a weight gain of more than a pound a month."

Yikes.

[Update: Though Kolbert addresses a similar movement in her article, I found it interesting that The New York Times yesterday published a piece titled "Tossing Out the Diet and Embracing the Fat."]

Tour de Midwest

As I see it, it probably really is a good thing for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way--hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

--David Foster Wallace

Well OK, that's one way to think about being a tourist. And it is, I believe, an interesting way to begin a post that is largely focused on my experiences driving nearly half-way across the country to watch baseball games. Because I agree both with DFW in both theory and practice about tourism and the effect that being a tourist has on me. And yet, I didn't feel any of this humbling angst on my baseball trip.

I think this may be true for at least two reasons:

1) This baseball trip was not undertaken under any pretense of broadening horizons. Just about the only places we went were baseball stadia and a beer ad masquerading as a beer factory. (There seems to be a lack of consensus on this, but some media experts estimate that the average American is exposed to as many as 5,000 ads per day; this figure always seems way too high to me, except for those days when I visit a stadium which hosts a Major League Baseball team.) So yes, we went to visit places that are already--and, in a way, need to be--spoiled. Case in point: the thing in Cleveland which excited me most was this Nike ad.


So my expectations were set appropriately.

2) Maybe more than being excited about going to Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, etc., I was excited about getting away from the day-to-day of New York/Jersey. I remember not much about the actual games we saw (I remember Joel Zumaya throwing smoke, the Royals late-inning defensive replacement at shortstop booting a play, the Mexecutioner, Albert Pujols being pitched around, and a nice double play in Chicago, and that might be about it). But it was great to be unable to check the ~dozen of job boards I check every day. (Upon checking these websites after a week away, I learned that I had missed maybe one relevant job.) The general idea of going away and keeping a full schedule (complete with a rarely referenced itinerary!) and basically skipping sleep for two out of five nights and not sitting around waiting for someone from HR to call me, felt great. I recommend it.

A few leftovers.

• We drove 1913 miles over the course of a bit more than four days. This means we averaged 19 miles per hour. For more than four days. Including the times we were sleeping.
• I slept in a different city seven consecutive nights.
• I think because I felt nervous about being disconnected from the internet, I binge-tweeted from my cell phone. If you want to read those tweets, you should follow me on twitter here.
• We took many pictures. You can view the ones I decided were worth saving here.
  
• We saw this:
  
  
  
  

[Update: My friend The Midnight Toker reminded me of this cool graphically enhanced video thing of DFW reading the excerpt quoted above:



]

Happy 3rd Through 9th of July

July 3rd is today. July 9 is the day I shall return from watching baseball games in four midwestern cities. I won't be blogging again until at least that date. It's sad, I know.

In the meantime, you can celebrate this extended holiday weekend by watching this video of Mike McCready of Pearl Jam play the national anthem before a Seattle Mariners game.



And for the record, I told the man who seeks to unite troubled souls about this video and he did not already know about it. If knowing first about this video was the only measure of a Pearl Jam fan's devotion, then a delicate apartment hierarchy just became upset.

Ad Alert

Hello and welcome to Ad Alert, a possibly recurring feature of this blog in which I list instances of advertising that freak me out.

Let's start with the story that's received probably the most attention, that of the M.T.A. selling the naming rights to a Brooklyn subway station to the London-based bank, Barclays. I think I'll let The New York Times raise a few questions:

This raises a few questions. An academic might talk of the intersection between public and private space. A straphanger may ask how all those names can fit into one announcement.

And if a company can pay to get its name on any station, a New Yorker might wonder what’s next: Coca-Cola Presents 59th Street-Columbus Circle?

The answer is maybe. Once upon a time, geographic relevance determined a station’s name, but now, the authority says it is open to any naming agreements that can raise revenue for its transit system, including ones not directly tied to location.

[snip]

Still, while selling station names could bring the authority revenue it needs, advertising experts say companies may not be as well-served.

“To be effective, the viewer needs to understand the relevance of the ad,” said Allen Adamson of Landor, a branding firm. “To rename the 59th and Lex stop the McDonald’s stop — it ain’t going to work. I don’t think it will stick.”

So not only is the M.T.A. possibly betraying its stewardship for $200,000 annually over the next 20 years (this might sound like a decent chunk of change, until you remember that the M.T.A. is facing a $1.2 billion deficit in 2009; yikes), but the plan might not even be effective. Alrighty.

On a related note, I was thoroughly confused by the new subway turnstiles at Penn Station's A Train stop, sponsored by H&M. Unlike the subway station naming rights, this idea actually makes some sense--it's a way to cover some of that $1.2 billion deficit without being too intrusive. Except the execution is horrific. Via the DesignNotes blog, here's what this bad boy looks like:

Double yikes. The alternate price listing is confusing as hell, especially in light of of the new subway fares, but I was more annoyed by the bright red coloration; as I first approached this new revenue model, I grew concerned that the subway station was closed and that I'd have to find a different train. Did H&M agree to this deal only if the finished product would be guaranteed to confuse subway riders?

Lastly, because I'm cool like that, I spent last Saturday night playing Guitar Hero with a few friends, and I noticed one similarity in all the disparate guitar hero venues: the conspicuous presence of Coca-Cola bottles and KFC containers sitting on a table. So there are now product placements in a video game that my friends paid for. This is quite a bit more disturbing than product placements in, for example, 30 Rock; that is a show that is, for the most part, provided free of charge, whether on Hulu or regular TV. If traditional advertising rates no longer can cover the costs of the show, then I understand the need to seek out alternative options. But Guitar Hero isn't something that is distributed free of charge--my friends had to pay money for it. And you can be sure that the video game isn't any cheaper because of the ads. What's next? Are we going to have product placements in novels? That possibility makes me nervous.