Humorous self-loathing

I will stipulate to having both French sea salt and a big bottle of extra virgin in my kitchen. And while the presence of both might go some small distance in pigeonholing me demographically, neither one of them makes me a good person. They are mute and useless indicators of the content of my character.

Or at least I used to think so. Since anyone with taste buds will respond to the trans-fat bells and whistles of a hot fudge sundae or super nachos, how better then to show a nobility of spirit than by broadcasting your capacity to discrern the gustatory equivalent of a hummingbird's cough as it beats its wings near a blossom that grows by a glassy pond on the other side of a distant mountain? No surer proof that one is meant for better things than an easily bruised delicacy. Such a perfectly tuned instrument can quickly suss out the cheap and nasty. So, the bitterness at the back of the throat; the polite refusal of the glass of whiskey marred by those (shudder) domestic ice cubes; the physical and psychic insult that are sheets of anything short of isotropic density. What is the thread count, Kenneth? We have become an army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses trying to make our way through a world full of irksome peas.

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Behind them, the two Hooters Girls, one blond, one brunette, emerge dressed in body-covering track suits in sherbet-orange viscose. This is their more modest walking-around-the-airport attire. They look like Olympic athletes representing the tackiest country on earth, which I guess they kind of are.

- Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff

Posted by Evan

Stand to the Right

The great public space of Washington might seem to be the Mall itself. The site of countless protest, celebrations, and pilgrimages, the Mall is indeed one of the world's great commons. But it is national space, not local space. In his book, The Debt, Randall Robinson images a District youth who feels unwelcome on the Mall, "surrounded by monuments and memorials" that "don't seem intended for him. They do seem, from the looks on their faces, intended for the white family of four from Nebraska standing near him." Robinson expresses the unease of an African American in a mostly white environment. But the boy's sense of trespassing might also reflect Washingtonians' displacement from the center of their city. Tourists from Nebraska and other distant locales do dominate the Mall, visually and functionally, just as federal functions dominate the city's core. In central Washington, the Secret Service can close off streets over the objections of local officials; the Wilson Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, the center of city government, is surrounded by federal offices.

At the bottom of a Metro escalator, however, the locals are clearly in charge.....

Locals do not keep out ordinary tourists, but they do put them in their place. The hazing begins at the station entrance, where visitors find automated fare card machines, complicated fare schemes, bus transfers, and the challenge of exiting with insufficient fare....

More noticeably, tourists do not know the unspoken etiquette of riding...Others suggest aggressive responses. "Crowd the stubborn stranger who will not allow you to cross the car width," counseled one magazine in 1978. "You must shout, 'GOING THROUGH,' 'MAKE WAY,' 'MUST LEAVE BY NEXT STOP,' 'I HAVE SIZE 13 FEET,' or, simply, 'PLEASE LET ME OUT, I AM AN OLD NATIVE RESIDENT.'"

Such advice might suggest that Washingtonians wish tourists did not ride, but the surface hostility may overlay a native satisfaction that Metro is one downtown environment in which residents can assert ownership. Although Metro riders rarely talk to strangers, reserved Washingtonians will sometimes give directions to an obviously lost tourist. In doing so, they perform a kindness, yet assume an air of authority.

- The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro by Zachary M. Schrag

Posted by Evan

How Soccer Explains the World

"..Barca doesn't just redeem the game from its critics; it redeems the concept of nationalism. Through the late twentieth century, liberal political thinkers, from philospher Martha Nussbaum to the architects of the European Union, have blamed nationalism for most of modernity's evils. Tribalism in a more modern guise, they denounce it. If only we abandoned this old fixation with national identities, then we could finally get past natsy ethnocentrism, vulgar chauvinism, and blood feuding. In place of nationalism, they propose that we become cosmopolitans - shelving patriotism and submitting to government by international institutions and laws.

It's a beautiful picture, but not at all realistic. And it turns its back on a strain of liberalism that begins with John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville and continues through Isaiah Berlin. This tradition understands that humans crave indentifying with a group. It is an unavoidable, immemorial, hardwired instinct. Since modern life has knocked the family and tribe from their central positions, the nation has become the only viable vessel for this impulse. To deny this craving is to deny human nature and human dignity.

What's more, this strain of political theory makes a distinction between liberal nationalism and illiberal nationalism. The Serbs at Red Star..practice the illiberal variety, with no respect for the determination of other nationalities. But there's no reason that nationalism should culminate in these ugly feelings. To blame the Croatian and Bosnian wars on excessive love of country drastically underestimates the pathologies in Serb culture. Besides, in theory, patriotism and cosmopolitanism should be perfectly compatible. You could love your country-even consider it a superior group-without desiring to dominate other groups or closing yourself off to foreign impulses. And it's not just theory. This is the spirit of Barca. I love it."

-How Soccer Explains the World: An unlikely theory of Globalization, Franklin Foer