American Civilization

 And, no, the answer is not McDonald’s or KFCs or Burger Kings. In fact, the most numerous places to eat in the U.S. are not fast food spots. They are Chinese restaurants!

New York Times reporter Jennifer Lee has a new book called « The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. » Her research has concluded that in the U.S. there are more Chinese restaurants than McDonald’s, Burger Kings and KFCs combined. That’s a bit of a shocking number to me.

Lee points out that there are about 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., « more than the number of McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined, » Chinese food might be our national cuisine. « Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie, » she writes. « But ask yourself. How often do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food? »

There is also a bit of irony to her investigation. Much of what Americans think of as Chinese food isn’t Chinese at all. Chop suey is an American creation. Fortune cookies were invented in Japan. And get this: Kari-Out, the largest Chinese restaurant supplier in the United States, uses no soybeans in its soy sauce.

A lot of what are considered as delicacies in Chinese cooking (bony fish, innards) are rejected by the American eater.

Lee also reports that Thanksgiving is the only slow day in the Chinese-restaurant business, which is why so many waiters and cooks use that day to get married.

The Chinese restaurant, too, serves an additional purpose. Today, Lee writes, if the immigrants are here illegally and cannot speak English, there’s a good chance they’ll wind up in New York’s Chinatown, where employment agencies post listings from Chinese restaurants around the country.  » http://credit-n.ru/zaymyi-next.html http://www.otc-certified-store.com/asthma-medicine-usa.html https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-in-america.php

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One important woman in American history is Harriet Tubman. While she was born into slavery, she was able to escape to the North in 1849. Despite the risk to her own life, she made more than a dozen trips back to the South to help guide other slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad.

She later helped John Brown recruit men for his Harper’s Ferry raid, and during the Civil War, Tubman served as a Union spy.

Watch this short film about Harriet Tubman’s life here. Merci d'activer Javascript et Flash pour voir cette vidéo Flash. http://credit-n.ru/zaymyi-next.html https://zp-pdl.com/how-to-get-fast-payday-loan-online.php

One of my favorite television shows will end this coming Sunday night when
”The Wire” completes its fifth season.

The show is set in Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore, not too far from Washington D.C., is a mid-size American city. Baltimore, in the show, represents a number of cities which have suffered the fate of many urban centers: economic decline, a changing population, sometimes ineffective leadership. One of the aspects of the show that I really like is that the city itself seems to become a character in the series.

Each year of the program has had a different focus. The focus of the first season (2002) was on the efforts of the police to infiltrate a West Baltimore drug ring. Those efforts – which involved using a “wire” and trying to “catch” the dealers via their calls – were mostly unsuccessful. The next two years continued with the attempts to break up the drug rings, but also added other background plots, the one involved dock workers and unions and the other examined political leadership. The 4^th season focused on several students in the public school system, as they tried to struggle with their problems at home and the lure of selling drugs “on the corner.” The focus of the 5^th season is on the media – that’s the show which will end later this week.

However, since I don’t have cable and can’t get HBO, I’ve only seen through the 4^th season on DVD. So far, though, it’s my favorite. As a teacher, I can easily understand the failings of the schools and the part played by politically motivated testing which doesn’t necessarily care about student learning. I feel angst for the four middle school boys who have to live in such difficult circumstances.

I understand that not everyone likes the show because of its hard edge and unwillingness to become sentimental. I like it for just those reasons. However, keep in mind, if you try to watch it, that the English language in the series may be very difficult to understand. I even have friends who are native speakers of English have to use the subtitles!

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Every year a U.S. periodical, Parade Magazine, publishes a list of the year’s top ten dictators. The author,David Wallechinsky, considers everything from torture to press freedom when he writes the top ten list every year.

Here’s this year’s list:

1. Kim Jong-Il, Korea
2. Omar Al-Bashir, Sudan
3. Than Shwe, Burma (Myanmar)
4. King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia
5. Hu Jintao, China
6. Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe
7. Sayyid Ali Khamenei, Iran
8. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan
9. Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan
10. Isayas Afewerki, Eritrea

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It may be a bit odd, but one way America celebrates a group or individual is to designate a particular time to focus on that group or person.  That’s why February is designated as Black History Month.  Often, that simply means a lot more images of Martin Luther King, Jr.  But, this year there’s an important addition:  the publication of a new eight volume set of books, the African American National Biography.  (AANB) Within these volumes are the stories of 4,080 African-Americans. 

This series is edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who is director of the Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard.  Recently, Gates was interviewed by Raina Kelley, a Newsweek reporter.  She asked Gates about his favorite entries in the set.  He identified:

• Richard Potter, a ventriloquist and magician, who became a millionaire in the 19^th century
• George Washington Bush, a frontiersman who settled in Washington Territory and who “was so respected by his white neighbors that they petitioned Congress to allow him to own land, which they did”
• Onesimus, a slave, who told his master, Cotton Mather, that in Africa they take a little bit of smallpox and scratch it into the skin – that saved Mather’s colony
• Henry (Box) Brown, a slave who mailed himself in a crate to freedom
• Cathay Williams, a woman, who cross-dressed and enlisted as a soldier
• Alice Dunks Ferry, who took the tolls in bucks County, Pa. and actually lived in three different centuries

According to Gates, the interaction between black and white people in America has always been complicated.  These volumes help to show these complicated relationships and to show that from the very beginning blacks and whites were living outside of the “slave-master paradigm.”

Read more about this new set of books here.  

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Continuing with my previous theme, I’ve just read an interesting overview of the « superdelegate » issue. Listen or read about it here.

And, how many « superdelegates » are there?  796 

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Much of the recent conversation I’m hearing has to do with various questions and predictions about the presidential election. 

Now that Mitt Romney has withdrawn from the campaign to be the Republican nominee, does that mean that John McCain will be the nominee?  But, what about those who label themselves as more conservative?  Romney bowed out in an effort to unify the Republican Party – no dirty mud-slinging for the Republicans. 

But, will that noble gesture implode when the very conservative Huckabee supporters refuse to support McCain?  Huckabee had a strong showing this past weekend, beating McCain in Kansas and Louisiana.  Or, could there be a McCain/Huckabee ticket – with McCain as the presidential nominee and Huckabee as the vice-presidential candidate?  If that’s the case, what common ground would those two share? 

The Republicans do follow a “winner take all” system, so whichever person has the most delegates before the summer convention will be the nominee.  That’s the rule, period. 

It’s a bit more tricky with the Democratic Party and many Democrats are concerned that the Hillary/Barak contest could shatter any unity within the Democratic Party.  Hillary has a few more delegates right now, but Barak seems to have the momentum, with major victories in primaries and caucuses this last weekend.  (Nebraska, Washington, Louisiana, the Virgin Islands, and Maine)  When the Democratic Party holds its nominating convention this summer, though, it’s not just about which candidate has the most delegates. 

Because there is a category called “super” delegates. 

These “super” delegates are party leaders not chosen at primaries or caucuses AND they are free to change their minds once at the convention.  So, a “super” delegate could arrive from a state where Barak or Hillary had won and cast a convention vote for the other candidate.  One concern is that voters in that state could be quite angry and feel as if their democratic right had been violated.  That would not help to unity the Democratic Party at all. 

Of course, many voters are hoping that both candidates maintain their civility and engage in some “backroom” politicking which would eventually result in their running on the same ticket, one as the presidential candidate and the other as the vice-presidential candidate.  That could very well create party unity and bring a lot of enthusiasm to the November election. 

All I can say, though, is that it’s a long time until November.

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John Edwards has announced that he’s dropping out of the race to become the Democratic nomination for president.

Now this upcoming presidential election will truly be historic. The Democratic nominee will be either Hillary Clinton, America’s first female candidate for the presidency, or Barak Obama, America’s first African American candidate for the presidency. This election cycle just keeps getting more and more exciting!

And, it looks like the Democratic nominee will be running against either John McCain or Mitt Romney, the two major players still in the race for the Republican nomination. BTW, I haven’t been hearing very much about Ron Paul these days, but I gather he’s still in the race, too – as is Mike Huckabee. http://credit-n.ru/zaymyi-next.html http://www.otc-certified-store.com/antiallergic-medicine-usa.html www.zp-pdl.com

A colleague just showed me this site. Someone has taken important presidential speeches from 1776 to the present and made « tag clouds » for each. It’s an easy way to get a visual snapshot of which words the various presidents used frequently in their speeches. It’s also an effective way to check an individual president’s priorities. It’s interesting to note that a favorite word for Clinton was often « economic » and for GW Bush, it’s usually « terrorist. »

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