September 11, 2001 was the kind of glorious, late-summer day that makes living in New England worthwhile. Its clear blue skies provided a flawless, natural canvas for the human atrocity that would unfold that morning. So it brings some relief to me that this year the spectacular September weather shifted by a day, and 9/11/2007 saw gray skies and much-needed rain.
The pathetic fallacy, indeed, fails. And maybe life goes on.
Singapore’s multiracial, multicultural population looks like a twist of the American kaleidoscope: East and South Asians predominate, while whites are a distinct minority. One morning, walking against the flow of rush-hour foot traffic in City Link Mall, I suddenly realized that I was identifying with the handful of Caucasian faces rather than the darker and flatter faces that resembled mine. I was traversing the strange intersection between race and nationality, exposing my unwitting association of “white” with “American” and “American” with myself – even though those white flecks in the muddy river were far more likely to be British or Australian than American.
Being American mattered (matters) to me. Perhaps I enjoy imagining myself part of the figurative and literal weight the United States throws around the world. I remember my twelfth birthday in Taiwan twenty years ago, soon to face a maelstrom of what we now call “identity issues.” In Singapore I felt an echo of the need I had back then to be American, different (better) than my parents’ countrymen. I had worn my Nike Air Jordans like gang colors, planting myself, for once, on the other side of the chink divide. Maybe that desire, globalized, explains the popularity of western “bling” – a word my middle-aged Taiwanese aunt let drop as we shopped in one of Taipei’s modern malls.
If Air Jordans symbolized my embrace of American-ness, then it’s worth noting that Michael Jordan himself did serve as an ambassador of non-white America to both the world and to his own country. “Be like Mike,” Nike encouraged back then; today, Accenture urges us to “Go on, be a Tiger.” It isn’t all just race or imperialism, even if sometimes it seems that way. Singapore doesn’t promote English so it can become white or to replicate British colonialism but because English is, for the moment, the international language of trade. Which makes it a practical middle ground for a polyglot people.
The migration of “bling” halfway around the world through boundaries of language, culture, and generation might bring dismay to cultural purists or hard-line Marxists, but for all the evils of consumerism, it’s nice to imagine that shopping malls provide some common ground across these places I’ve been. Walking the mall has always been a hobby of mine, a legacy of my Long Island heritage. Singapore is a mallrat’s paradise, especially the touristy area where I stayed. (No less than three malls connected directly with the hotel). One of my hosts believed that a relatively high standard of living, a low tax rate, and not many other choices combined to make shopping a national pastime.
Parts of Taipei have the feel of a kitchen sponge that never gets wringed dry, and so the refrigerated mall was a refuge of sort (such is the role they played for me in Honduras, as well as in Florida). The middle-class downtown mall lacked authentic snake-bile stalls and betel-nut girls, for sure, but they made up for in their own kitschy and Engrish way. They kept enough local character that I was able to find Japanese sport coats suitable for my scrawny frame. (By contrast, I recall one Brooks Brothers in the Midwest where the smallest waist size was 38). On the other hand, the Taipei 101 mall might as well have been airdropped duty-free from Hong Kong International. Bling indeed.
Ethan Zuckerman speaks fervently of the rise of the Fourth World – people who link the local with the global and skip the national altogether. I’m not sure if he considers the Mall of America part of that world: it’s no joke, of course, that many of the products there are made in the Third World, but isn’t consumerism the main driver of globalization today? Perhaps we are exchanging our chains of racism for a more insidious worship of faux-luxury goods, but for now, I welcome this proxy battle between our parochial and our universalist identities.
Over the past two months we’ve witnessed the ends of two cultural phenomena, the Sopranos and Harry Potter. Those of us with a melancholy bent towards nostalgia can already imagine looking back on these moments with hazy pleasure, remembering life Back When.
I know that I’m in the minority when I say that the Sopranos finale blew me away, and that Deathly Hallows ended with jarring satisfaction (though the book as a whole was far from perfect). It’s been a good year for endings.
It’s natural to consider endings like last words, providing insight into the essence of the work. In college we would speculate on how Calvin & Hobbes would end. The conclusion we came up with — in which an inert Hobbes is left alone in the final panel after Calvin goes off to play with a human friend — reflects our post-adolescent angst more than the strip. (In fact, the strip ended famously with “It’s a magical world, Hobbes ol’ buddy!”). Peanuts ended rather abruptly (and perhaps more typically) with the hastily-scrawled farewell of creator Charles Schultz, who died shortly thereafter.
In the world of moving pictures, Seinfeld copped out with the equivalent of an “it was all a dream” when nothing more than a bureaucratic legal system sends the characters off to Consequence. Some years later, “Revenge of the Sith” hammered a stake into the undead heart of the second Star Wars trilogy.
The endings that Matter, of course, are the ones that codafy the work and epitomize its relationship to us. Detractors of the final Sopranos episode, I think, probably didn’t understand that the series wasn’t really about gangsters but rather the struggle to be Someone in suburban America. The Journey lyrics to hear wasn’t the “Don’t stop” of the flash ending, but the story of two people desperate to find meaning and feeling in a colorless world. In some ways, Tony’s story reaches its logical conclusion in the preceding scene, when Junior’s lost identity demonstrate that the family project has all been vanity. The circle is complete, and the wheel turns.
I actually found the ending of Deathly Hallows far more jarring. By “ending” I mean the epilogue, nineteen years after the close of the main story, and as the last line suggests, nineteen years after the End of (Wizarding) History. In a series notorious for inventing new rules to break old ones, this breaking of a core narrative rule — the year-by-year passage of time — comes as a bit of a shock. The text provides no physical clues as to how our protagonists look, and so one can only imagine a teenage Rupert Grint in thirtysomething clothing (sorry, Ms. GrandPré, but I’m afraid the movie actors have robbed me of your side of the story). For those of us who look back fondly on our teens or college years, jumping through all those years — to a point, for me, just a few years from now — with so little of Consequence happening in between suggests that the best years of our life have indeed passed. (Not so for Ms. Rowling, who started writing Philosopher’s Stone at 25). Indeed, the epilogue purposefully puts the new batch of children right back in the shoes of their parents. And so the wheel turns again.
I must be watching shows that target their demographic, because I’m constantly seeing 3M’s commercials for their computer privacy filter. One commercial shows a guy using his laptop from an airplane middle seat as his neighbors on either side try to see what he’s typing; the other commercial shows the same guy (or at least he looks the same to me) now at a cafe, beseiged on everyside by other customers (and one elderly lady looking through the window) attempting to read his screen. I find these commercials irritating for the way they’re produced and the itchy musical score, but more interesting, they reflect a growing culture of self-absorbed paranoia.
3M’s website explains that “3M™ Privacy Filters help block the screen view from anyone viewing the computer from a side view. 3M’s unique microlouver privacy technology allows persons directly in front of the computer to see on screen data clearly.” The reviews of the filter I found online are dead serious about stopping “snooping” of other people on “sensitive data.” I’ve never heard of any kind of identity theft from having used a computer casually in public. Look, obviously the 3M commercials are meant to be amusing over-the-top versions of the actual threat to privacy. And also obviously there are people who both (a) frequently view or produce sensitive data of some kind on their computers and (b) from time to time do that in public. I get it. (Although, if you work for the CIA, are you going to bring your work to Starbucks?) However, I simply don’t believe there are anywhere near that number of people to warrant multiple national television commercials that, at least to me, seem to be aired all the time. There are an infinite number of niche products that are never advertised on television or even in print for that matter–they’re niche enough that the customers who need them seek them out–and this filter seems like it should obviously in that category. Especially for 50 bucks! (hey, microlouver privacy technology isn’t free)
As I say, the reviews online are very striaght-faced about the need for this. One blog review warns, “While at the local coffee shop, sipping a latte and crunching sales projections, you may get that uneasy feeling that you might not be the only one crunching your numbers.” The reviewer concludes, “The filter does an excellent job of concealing the screen data,” but wait: “However, do not expect the Privacy Filter to work with individuals directly behind you!” Another reviewer reminds us that “People are nosy. They’ll look at what you’re eating for lunch, peer into your grocery cart to see what cereal you’re buying and they’ll most definitely shift their eyes to read what’s displaying on your notebook screen.” Yeah, I’ve “shifted my eyes” (sounds so nefarious) to someone’s laptop next to me on an airplane, but that’s because airplanes are cramped and if someone has a relatively large laptop it’s right in front of your face. Like the previous blogger, this one is satisfied overall: “this filter just plain works if you don’t want people to see what’s on your screen while out in public. Unless they’re looking directly over your shoulder that is, you’d have to grow eyes in the back of your head or put a rear view mirror on your notebook to detect for those types of snoops.” Good idea, 3M should market a laptop rear view mirror.
The commentators on the second review’s post are a little more realistic (honest?) about why they’d use the filter. “Cool, useful at times(Like surfing while at work or in class),” says Coriolis. Chaz chimes in that “I find it really annoying when people crowd around me while I’m surfing or gaming…this might be a worthwhile investment.” (Really? For $50?)
They’ve recently completed studies that younger generations have a dangerously inflated self-esteem with feelings of such self-importance that they can’t handle criticism or instruction. I think 3M is semi-cleverly exploiting a related American impulse, that everything we do is so important that other people must want to see it. Watch that commercial set on the airplane again–it’s fascinating that they choose to have the computer user more interested in the “snoopers” than in his work on the computer. It’s just funny to me that 3M’s product coexists in a world where people scream their professional and personal stories and information on their cell phones, making sure anyone in earshot can hear. It seems to me that a kooky product like 3M’s filter is much less about privacy than about the desire to think that you need the privacy–the hope that everyone is trying to get that one desperate peek at your email. I like Umberto Eco on this aspect of culture: “People right now are encouraged to live a more public, fictional life than their own and you realize that when they are alone, they are compelled to talk on their cell phone to be in contact with somebody else, because they are unable to appreciate silence and solitude. I think it’s a dangerous risk of our time.” (Eco also says that, while people feel important when speaking on their cells, truly important people don’t have to use cell phones in a crowded airport waiting area, whoever it is who wants to speak to them can wait.)
I get the Bush warrantless wiretapping scandal from legal and political perspectives, but I also laughed at the man-on-the-street reactions in news stories, essentially “They shouldn’t spy on me!”
The funny thing is I’m always complaining that I can’t use my laptop outside on a nice day because of the glare of the sun. Apparently the “privacy” filter also is meant to keep out glare. Now wouldn’t that be a much more useful way to market it? I guess everyone fantasizes they are a spy, and spies don’t worry about glare.
…Argus