With the start of a new congressional season, a proposal has been made by Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) to change the rules about how the filibuster can be used in the Senate. Over the past fifty years there has been a gradual increase in the use of filibusters to bring legislative progress to a halt. Filibuster use (as represented in the chart below showing the frequency of cloture votes to end a filibuster) has skyrocketed in the past decade.
The Senate’s history as a calmer, more deliberative body than the House of Representatives is an important one to preserve, but filibusters have become more of a stalling tactic than a deliberative one and instead of protecting the interests of the minority, serve instead of hijack the interests of the majority to accomplish what they were elected to do: legislate.
Doing my duty as an actively engaged citizen, I emailed my senators to let them know I am in favor of the proposed changes.
One, Pat Roberts (R-KS), responded with a virtual filibuster. His email response explained that as a member of the Senate Rules Committee, he held hearings on this topic last year and is not in favor of any changes. “My statements are available on the committee’s website,” he wrote. On that page I found the link to download the 666-page Publication on the Filibuster Hearings Series.
I’m glad Senator Roberts feels that the clearest and most effective way to summarize his objections to changing the Senate rules is to direct me to a 666-page document. And one wonders why so few Americans participate actively in civic life.
New York is a city that holds a special place in the imagination of many people around the world. So it is no surprise to see the mystique of New York used to sell everything from condos to makeup here in Bangkok. The most recent addition to this “Big Appleing” of Bangkok is a small restaurant at the Crystal Design Center: NYCC – New York City Cheesecake.
Located in a rapidly expanding strip mall in the suburban outskirts on the northeast flank of the city, NYCC claims to offer a real taste of New York with not only authentic New York style cheesecakes but also pastrami sandwiches. Being a lover of pastrami, I had to go out and try this for myself.
The restaurant is really more of a shack or hut, located between other buildings at the Crystal Design Center. CDC is a design-oriented strip mall located on Ram Intra Road, an already overcrowded road that extends from Ekkamai Road out to the suburbs. Despite the overcrowding, the past five years have seen an explosion of businesses and housing this direction. Perhaps the good news is that with these new shopping centers on the periphery of Bangkok, the traffic on the streets in the core of the city will not get any worse.
The interior of NYCC looks more like a noodle shop with stools and small tables. It isn’t much of a surprise then to learn that NYCC has a sister shop behind it that sells – wait for it – noodles. Framed posters of Broadway shows lines the windows and various New York theme tchotchkes sit for sale on a side shelf. The friendly staff take the orders and deliver the foods. On a weekday afternoon around lunchtime, the place was not very busy.
NYCC’s motto is “cheese will never cease” – I’m not sure what that means. For some reason, it makes me think of an alternative definition of the word “cheese”.
After a few minutes longer than I thought it would take, our sandwiches arrived. I ordered the pastrami and Tawn ordered the chicken club. The sandwiches are monsters, shooting for the “mile high” measurements for which New York deli sandwiches are know. Let’s take a closer look at what we really have, though, from the toothpick down:
The bread was actually pretty good, although it would have been a bit nicer lightly toasted. It wasn’t a nice dark rye but was slightly more substantive than the wonder that passes for bread all too often here in Bangkok.
In the middle, which is where most of the bulk is in this sandwich, is a stack of two types of lettuce, a stack of raw onion, and a stack of tomatoes. The problem here (other than whether or not there should be any vegetables on a pastrami sandwich) is that everything is stacked, so you get a lot of onions in one bite, for example, and no onions in another bite.
At the bottom is the pastrami. I’ll give them credit for tasty pastrami, albeit sliced a little thicker than I like. It was tender and smoky. There was also not much of it, especially when compared with the bread and vegetables. As for the sauce, the sandwich was over-sauced – which is not unusual here in Thailand, with brown mustard (nice) and Thousand Island (wrong – this isn’t a Reuben).
How to rate it overall? Well, for a sandwich that carried a price tag around 340 baht (about $11.40), it was mighty short on meat and might high on everything else… except a pickle, which would have been a nice touch. Now, I’m not a New York, just a frequent visitor. But from what I know of New York pastrami sandwiches, this is what my expectation looked like:
This is a pastrami sandwich from the Carnegie Deli. We can debate which deli is the best, but in my mind, this is a good example of what a pastrami sandwich should be. Lots and lots of pastrami with little or nothing else between the bread. Now, I understand that beef is expensive here and I’m not opposed to paying a good price for something that approximates a real New York style pastrami sandwich. But if I’m going to pay that much money, let’s lose the salad, add a little more meat, and put the sauce on the side.
As for Tawn’s chicken club, it was a similar tower of salad but had a very substantial amount a chicken at the base – probably two breasts’ worth. The meat was bland and instead of being thinly sliced was more slab-like. It was about 250 baht and, from Tawn’s perspective, overpriced.
As for the eponymous cheesecake, a recent dining companion (at another meal) told me she thinks the cheesecakes are flown in from the Cheesecake Factory in the United States. I don’t think that’s the case, but the potion sizes are enough to make you believe it!
We ordered a slice of regular cheesecake with strawberry topping, more than ample for two (or four!) to share. I’ll give them credit for making a pretty passable New York style cheesecake. The consistency is smooth, solid but not too dense, and nicely flavored. It had obviously been frozen previously as the center of the slice was still icy – a faux pas when service cheesecake – but it was better than a lot of the overly airy cheesecake I’ve had in Bangkok.
We ended up with a bill of about 850 baht for two sandwiches, one slice of cheesecake, and two bottles of water. For Bangkok, that’s a pretty pricey meal, especially for a lunch. It was fun to try and NYCC had some things going for it, but not so many that I’d be easily tempted to make the trek out Ram Intra. Instead, I’ll just save my pastrami cravings for my new trip back to the real New York.
This afternoon I had to go to a photo shoot. I’ve been invited to publish some of my entries from this blog on another site, one that is Thailand-specific. To keep a consistent look and feel, the editor asked me to stop by the office and have their photographer shoot a new head shot for my profile. No worries – I’m not going anywhere, just broadening my audience.
On the way home, I noticed that we were in for a gorgeous sunset. The weather has been cool thanks to a system dropping in from China and the breeze, which had been strong the past few days, was very calm today leading to hazy but cloud-free skies. I stopped by Benjakiti Park next to Queen Sirikit Convention Center and shot this picture. It was a beautiful sunset.
Every time I have to make as mundane a choice as what type of toothpaste I should buy, I’m overwhelmed and momentarily freeze with panic. Even in Thailand, my local grocery store or Tesco Lotus has at least a few dozen different combinations of brands, flavors, and types of toothpaste. Citrus, citrus-herb, salt-herb, mint, cool mint, bright mint, gel, paste, fluoride, whitening, stain-removal, super-whitening, etc. The mind spins at such options.
You can imagine my fascination then to listen to a talk by Sheena Iyengar at a TED conference about the art of choosing and cultural bias in beliefs about choice. Ms. Iyengar is a professor at Columbia Business School whose research focuses on choice and how people choose.
In her speech, she examines a trio of American assumptions about choice and discusses studies she has done in various parts countries comparing different cultural reactions to these assumptions. The assumptions are:
Make your own choices.
More options lead to better choices.
Never say “no” to choice.
I’m embedding the speech here, which is worth the 22 minutes of your time it will take to watch. But for those of you who cannot watch the video or do not wish to take the time, I’ll summarize her observations. My own conclusions are all the way at the bottom.
Assumption 1: It is best to make your own choices
If a choice affects you, then you should be the one to make it. This is captured in the American concept of “being true to yourself.” Ms. Iyengar and a colleague performed studies to test this assumption.
In one study, she brought 7 to 9 year old Anglo-American and first generation Asian-Americans into the laboratory, dividing them into groups. The first group was given a choice of six sets of word puzzles to complete and also a choice in the color of pen with which to complete the puzzles. The second group was show the same six sets, but “Ms. Smith” told them which set they would perform and which pen color they would use. The third group was shown the same six sets, but Ms. Smith told them their mothers had chosen which puzzles and color of markers they would use. In reality, the second and third groups performed the same set of puzzles and used the same pen color the first group had chosen.
The results differed markedly depending on how the activity was administered. Anglo-American children in the first group completed two and a half times as many word puzzles as in the second and third groups. It didn’t matter who did the choosing – Ms. Smith or their mother – if their task was chosen by another person, their performance suffered. In contrast, Asian-American children performed best when they believed the task had been chosen by their mother, second best when they chose for themselves, and worst when Ms. Smith chose their task and pen color.
Ms. Iyengar’s conclusion is that the first-generation Asian-American children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents’ approach to choice. Choice was not just a way of defining and asserting themselves, it was also a way to create community by deferring to the choices of those whom they trusted and respected. The assumption that we do best when the individual self chooses, only holds when that “self” is clearly divided from others. If the individuals see their choices as intimately connected, they may amplify one-another’s success by turning choosing into a collective act.
“People who have grown up in [the American paradigm of choice] might find it motivating.” notes Ms. Iyengar. “But it is a mistake to assume that everyone thrives under the pressure of choosing alone.”
Assumption 2: More options lead to better choices
Ms. Iyengar traveled to locations in Eastern Europe where people had had to adjust to the transition from a communist to capitalist society. She discovered that many of the perceptions Americans have of choice are often trivial (my choices of toothpaste, for example). She stumbled upon this when offering interview subjects a choice of beverages before the interview – seven different types of soda – only to discover that to the interview subjects, she wasn’t offering seven different options but only one: soda. If she offered juice, water, and the seven brands of soda and she asked how many choices they had, they uniformly identified three choices.
Americans have been conditioned to see each of these little choices as significant and as a representation of who we are. “Coke or Pepsi?” becomes a lifestyle and identification choice rather than a meaningful distinction between beverages. A Polish interview subject summed it up well when saying that he didn’t need the choice of twenty different types of chewing gum. “I don’t mean to say I want to have no choice,” he said, “but many of these choices are very artificial.”
“The value of choice,” notes Ms. Iyengar, “lies in our ability to see the differences between the options. Americans train their whole lives to play ‘spot the difference.’ … Though all humans share a basic need and desire for choice, we don’t all see choice in the same places or to the same extent.”
Ultimately, too much choice can lead to “suffocation by meaningless minutiae.” Ms. Iyengar has observed in her studies that when people are given more than ten choices, they generally make poorer choices. And yet many Americans believe they should make all their own choices and seek out more of them.
Which leads to the third assumption:
Assumption 3: Never say “no” to choice
Ms. Iyengar interviewed parents whose infants had developed cerebral anoxia (a loss of oxygen to the brain) and had to be placed on a ventilator. The decision had been made to remove the infant from the machine, letting it die within a few hours, instead of keeping the infant on the machine in a permanent vegetative state.
Ms. Iyengar interviewed parents in France and in the United States in the months following their infant’s removal from the life support machine and subsequent death. The difference was that in France, the decision to remove life support had been made by doctors whereas in the United States, the parents made the final decision.
Ms. Iyengar wondered whether this decision affected the way the parents coped with the loss of their infant. Ms. Iyengar and her researchers found that it did. Even up to a year after the loss, approximately 90% of American parents were expressing negative emotions about the event compared to only about 67%* of French parents. French parents’ comments were characterized by statements like, “He was here for so little time, yet he taught us so much.” American parents were characterized by statements like, “I feel like they tortured me; how did they expect me to make that choice?”
Yet, when American parents were asked if they would rather have had the doctor made the decision, they said no. Some 75% of them couldn’t imagine turning that choice over to someone else, despite the negative repercussions of having had to make that choice themselves. Among French parents, only about 33% of them indicated they would rather have made the choice instead of the doctor.
*I’m estimating percentages based on the graphs. In her speech, Ms. Iyengar doesn’t provide specific numbers.
Ms. Iyengar concludes:
“The story Americans tell, the story upon which the American dream depends, is the story of limitless choice. This narrative promises so much: freedom, happiness, success. It lays the world at your feet and says, ‘you can have anything, everything.’ It’s a great story and it’s understandable why they would be reluctant to revise it. But when you take a close look, you start to see the holes and you start to see that the story can be told in many other ways.
“Americans have so often tried to disseminate their ideas of choice, believing that they will be, or ought to be, welcomed with open hearts and open minds. But the history books and the daily news tell us, it doesn’t always work out that way. The … actual experience that we try to organize and understand through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone, everywhere. Moreover, Americans themselves could benefit from incorporating new perspectives into their own narrative, which has been driving their choices for so long.”
For me, this speech was thought-provoking, a reminder of something I know experientially to be true but which slips to the back of my mind all too often: There is no single right way of looking at the world. Our values and frame of reference through which we see the world are tremendously dependent upon our culture, background, experiences, and upbringing.
The fact there is no single right way is the source of so much conflict and miscommunication in the world. If we really want to understand other people in this world, we have to check our assumptions and be prepared to see the world in radically different ways.
As our Nissan Cefiro passes eleven years old, Tawn and I keep thinking about a replacement car. In his mind, the perfect car would be something unique and stylish, maybe a classic instead of a new model. A few Sundays back, he announced that he wanted to visit a used car dealer on Vibhawadi Road near the old Don Meuang Airport as he had spotted a cute car there and wanted to know what it was. Turns out, it was a Nissan Figaro.
The Figaro was a limited-edition retro car released by Nissan in 1989 only in Japan. Some 20,000 were made. It was built by Nissan’s special projects group known as the Pike Factory. The car is a popular one for collectors, especially in the UK.
The used car dealer had a half-dozen units in stock. They specialize in importing classic cars and refurbishing them for resale. They choose only low mileage (about 55,000 km on average, about 35,000 miles) cars that have never been in accidents.
The cars are then completely gutted and rebuilt. Engines, air conditioning, and all other systems are thoroughly overhauled and the interior is reupholstered. They are very thorough and invited us to walk through their garage so we could see the work in progress.
The result is spectacular, lovingly restored. Before I went back and did some research, I didn’t understand that the car was actually 21 years old and thought it was a more recent model intentionally made extremely retro.
It turns out that the design of the Figaro echoes the Datsun Fairlady from the early 1960s. Beautiful car in the sporty color scheme, isn’t it? (Picture from Wikipedia)
Ventilation system (including air conditioning) is appropriately retro and refreshingly manual. Nice to have actual levers rather than buttons.
The stereo system (notice the cracked laminate on the dials) features a CD player, something that was quite cutting edge in 1989. And a cassette player for you cats who aren’t up to date with the latest technology! Sorry, no MP3 input.
The Figaro was also an open roof style convertible. Completely and utterly impractical in Thailand but really cute and the best way for me to sit up straight in the driver’s seat.
The car was originally offered in just four colors – Topaz Mist, Emerald Green, Pale Aqua, and Lapis Grey – but the restorers offer a few additional colors including the pink you see here.
My assessment of the car? Well, totally and utterly impractical but very, very cute. If we wanted a second car to drive for weekend getaways at the beach, this would be it. Unfortunately, there wouldn’t be any room for a suitcase or overnight bag, but we could drive to the beach and then drive back the next day wearing the same clothes.
So how much for this beauty of a rebuild? 900,000 baht (US$30,000) for a 21-year old car. Now, cars in Thailand are more expensive than in the US, but to give you a bit of a comparison, I could buy a top of the line Nissan March, a contemporary (and larger) version of this car, for less than 570,000 baht. And I think the March is a cute car, too.
So I guess we’ll put this on the “Sunday afternoon daydream” list!
The dealer is also restoring a Nissan S-Cargo, another 1989 release from Nissan’s Pike Factory. Inspired by the French Citroën 2CV camionette (small truck), the name was a double entendre meaning both “small cargo” and “escargot”. Clever, huh?
The dealer also has one more product from the Pike Factory: the Nissan Pao. Released at the same time as the Figaro and S-Cargo, the Pao was also retro-inspired and had amazing fuel economy: 51 mpg (5.5 L/100 km) in the city and 79 mpg (3.4 L/100 km). Prius-like mileage almost two decades before the Prius.
Reflecting on the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and eighteen other people on Saturday morning in Tucson, Arizona, an attack that appears to have political motivations, I’m concerned that not only is the political discourse in the United States growing increasingly shrill, but that in the past several years it has also become increasingly violent.
Threats of violence as well as cases of vandalism and assault have become more frequent, especially in the wake of significant legislative battles such as those over health care reform. Sadly, we can look at some talking heads in the media, commentators whose motivations are rating (and thus, earning) driven more so than purely ideological, as well as politicians who stir the pot (Sarah “lock and load” Palin) to see who fans the flames of political passion.
There is nothing wrong with passion in politics. It speaks to a robustness in our society. But that robustness unravels when disagreement can no longer be had with civility. All of us, regardless of our political stripes and partisan beliefs, need to condemn politically-motivated violence.
To that end, we need to remove the rhetoric of patriotism and Americanism from our vocabulary. While we may be at odds about the role of our government and the best way to address various problems in society, none of us is more or less patriotic or American than the others.
Addendum January 14: While we don’t know the motivations of Representative Gifford’s shooter, whether they were political or not, I still stand by my statement that we need to condemn politically-motivated violence and bring the level of rhetoric down, especially casting others as unpatriotic.
The other night, I had an odd dream. I was at a restaurant. While I couldn’t identify which restaurant it was, I somehow knew that it was my friend’s restaurant and he or she was short-staffed so I offered to help. In what felt like a several-hour shift, I ran around taking orders, serving food, and clearing tables – although since I have no prior experience working in a restaurant I kept making mistakes that caused trouble that exceeded the amount of help I provided.
If I’m not mistaken, the dream was near the end of my night’s sleep. When I awoke, I was exhausted as if I had been working all night long. Weird, huh?
Before doing a final back-up of my November 2010 photos and videos and removing them from my laptop’s hard drive, I realized I had an unfinished project from my most recent trip to Hong Kong. I was in the Tsim Sha Tsui MTR station on a Friday evening during rush hour and shot some video of the mass of humanity.
At the same time, I had just completed the third season of the Glenn Close TV show “Damages” and they have an interesting effect in the title sequence that I wanted to try to recreate: they show a crowded intersection in New York in fast-motion and then suddenly cut the clip to slow-motion. (If you want to see the original, a link to it is here. The shot I’m talking about lasts all of one second and takes place at about 0:08.)
As an homage to my inspiration, I “borrowed” the same title song, “When I Am Through With You” by The V.L.A. It is an energetic, guitar-driven song which I crudely edited to just over one minute. I hope you enjoy it.
I’ve been making an effort to post on a daily basis. Right now I have a backlog of several entries and am trying to work through them.
Okay, since I did a long, thoughtful, political analysis as yesterday’s post, I just need to write about something fun and easy: lunch. Have I ever mentioned how much I enjoy Japanese food? It’s healthy, balanced, attentively prepared, and artfully presented.
Japanese make up our largest group of foreigners living here in Thailand, which isn’t so surprising when you trace history back to Japan’s invasion (note: they didn’t colonize, it was just an invasion!*) of Siam in World War II. They have had a close relationship ever since.
Because of the large presence of Japanese, we enjoy an abundance of good and affordable Japanese restaurants. The other day I stopped at one for this set lunch:
Working clockwise from the upper left: Katsu – pork loin breaded in Japanese-style breadcrumbs served with a salad of shredded cabbage and sesame dressing; a boiled egg custard (savory); stewed vegetables and chicken; another small salad; miso soup; pickled radish; steamed rice; and katsu dipping sauce in the center.
All this for 230 baht, about US$7.00. For Bangkok, that’s a relatively pricey lunch but it was still a very good value in my eyes.
*As for the asterisk, the Thais are very proud that their country has never been colonized by a foreign power and this is drilled into young Thais’ heads from the earliest age. Is it true? Well, you have to add some caveats: Significant portions of the Kingdom of Siam (as Thailand was formerly known) were ceded to foreign powers to avoid a war or potential colonization. Also, Japan occupied Siam during World War II, ostensibly at the “invitation” of its government. An invitation at the point of a sword, if you will. So if you set aside those exceptions, then Siam/Thailand has indeed never been colonized.
While waiting in a hotel lobby to meet a friend for lunch, I read a front-page article from USA Today: “Obama and America’s Place in the World.” The article talks about the way President Obama addresses questions of American exceptionalism and Republican attempts to capitalize on this in order to paint the President as un-American, without having to use those words.
American exceptionalism, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a belief that the country is unique and exceptional in comparison to other countries. Historically, it did not mean that America was better than other countries, but in the past few years the term has been coopted by those who would like to give that meaning to the phrase.
British writer G.K. Chesterton noted in a 1922 essay, “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence…” The Declaration’s introduction defines this ideology as liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire.
The ammunition used by those who believe that President Obama is un-American doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, is his response in April 2009 (his opponents have to go back twenty months to dig up dirt on him, it seems) to a question by a British journalist about whether America is uniquely qualified to lead the world:
“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
This strikes me, a passport-holding American who has traveled widely and has spent more than five years living overseas, as a tremendously reasonable, level-headed statement.
What also strikes me, as an American who has seen the way many countries in the world are rapidly moving from “developing nation” to “developed nation” status, is that no amount of arguing how exceptional we are or aren’t is going to help us compete in the 21st century.
Discussing the growth of China with a friend who recently spent two years working in Shanghai, he noted that in just the past few years, China has built the world’s largest high-speed rail network (already some 4,600 miles), and they are on track to have as much as 16,000 miles built by 2020. Compare this to America’s infrastructure, which the American Society of Civil Engineers currently grades as a “D” and will require more than $2 trillion to repair.
Is America exceptional? No doubt it is. But the issue isn’t whether we are exceptional or not, it’s whether we are willing to do the work necessary to remain exceptional in the century to come.
I think all of our mothers taught us that it is immodest to brag. We may well be the smartest kid in class (or at least want to think we are), but announcing it to our peers rather than spending our time studying for the next test is the surest way to become the schoolyard dummy. That’s a form of exceptionalism, too, but not one that I suspect any of us want to bequeath to our future generations.
What say you?
Related to this: do you remember the bruhaha surrounding a photo of President Obama reading a copy of the very insightful book “The Post-American World?” Blog entry from September 2009 about it.
christao408 