“It’s strange that a man can live with a woman for ten years and not know the first thing about her.” The Letter takes place on a rubber plantation on the outskirts of Singapore. Everything is ideal and serene until the night is ripped apart by a gunshot committed by Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis). Davis gives a stellar performance as the femme fatale with her complex portrayal of a passionate woman who kills her lover and torments her tycoon husband. Davis’s nails the noir genre conveying a character that is both a victim and malevolent wife.

.

.

.

.

.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962):

This film is infamous for serval reasons: one of them being that the film was the center of a massive feud between Bette Davis and her co-star Joan Crawford. Crawford and Davis could barely stand each other and continued to bad mouth one another to the press. The plot of the film revolves around a former child star who torments her paraplegic sister in their decaying Hollywood mansion. Davis created her own makeup for the lead role of “Baby Jane” Hudson, which perfectly highlighted the deranged nature of the character. Baby Jane sparked a genre of crazy lady psychological thrillers.

.

.

.

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950):

All About Eve is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. Bette Davis plays Margo Channing, who is a respected, aging, Broadway star. Channing’s career is threatened by an adoring woman named Eve Harrington, who is suspiciously trying to take Channing’s career and personal relationship. The film received a record 14 Academy Award nominations and won six, including Best Picture. It is still the only film in history to receive four female acting nominations. The nominees include leads Bette Davis and Anne Baxter, and best-supporting actors, Celeste Holm and Theresa Ritter

.

.

.

THE CATERED AFFAIR (1956):

Bette Davis stars as an embittered housewife named Agnes Hurley, who’s married to a Bronx cab driver. She’s a disheveled woman who thinks highly of herself and wants more for her daughter, played by Debbie Reynolds, who makes her on-screen debut in this film. The film deals with the ensuing money troubles and conflicts within the family, and Agnes is not connected with the reality of the situation and wants to focus on an expensive wedding ceremony for her daughter.

.

.

IN THIS OUR LIFE (1942):

This film was the third of six films that Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis starred in together. Davis plays Stanley, who rivals her sister Roy, played by de Havilland, in both romance and life. The night before her wedding, Stanley runs off with Roy’s husband, Peter. The two marry and settle in Baltimore, but she ultimately drives her sister’s husband to drinking and suicide. When she returns home, she finds out that her sister has taken up with an old flame of hers. Not one to be outdone, Stanley tries to steal her former flame back from her sister and continues to wreak havoc on her family.

.

.

.

.

.

.THE VIRGIN QUEEN (1955):

Bette Davis plays Elizabeth I at the height of her reign, conveying the middle-aged virgin queen as a brutal, manipulative, and terrifying monarch. This historical drama focused on the relationship between Elizabeth I of England and Sir Walter Raleigh and was also the second time Davis played the English monarch. The Queen falls for Sir Walter and doesn’t want him to leave even though he falls in love with the beautiful Beth Throgmorton played by Joan Collins.

.

.

.

.

.

.

NOW, VOYAGER (1942):

Bette Davis is a Boston heiress named Charlotte Vale, who is a neurotic mess, primarily because of her domineering mother. After a short time in a sanatorium, she receives the attention of Dr. Jasquith. The psychiatrist aids Vale’s recovery and transformation into a modern, attractive, and glamorous woman, thus freeing herself from tyrannical shackles of her overbearing mother. The film ranks at #23 in AFI’s 100 Greatest Love Stories of All Time. Davis’ closing line in the movie, “Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon… we have the stars!” is at #46 in AFI’s Greatest Movie Quotes of All Time.

.

.

.

.

JEZEBEL (1938):

This film would be Bette Davis’ second and last Oscar-winning performance, and this film may have made up for the fact that she missed out on the lead for Gone With the Wind. Davis plays a headstrong young Southern woman during the Antebellum period in 1852 New Orleans. Her character, Julie Marsden, is engaged to banker Preston “Pres” Dillard, and she sabotages the relationship with her behavior and spends the rest of the film trying to gain him back.

.

.

.

.

THE WHALES OF AUGUST (1987):

Bette Davis and Lillian Gish play elderly sisters near the end of their lives who never really grew close. At a seaside house in Maine where they annually spend their summers, the setting allows issues that took place in their youth to resurface, and open up jealousies and misunderstandings that slowly festered over the years. This film would be the second to last of Davis’s career, and when it screened at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, which Gish attended, she got a 10-minute standing ovation.

.

.

.

.

.

DECEPTION (1946):

Bette Davis stars as a piano teacher who believes that her fiancé was killed on the battlefield. When her dead lover miraculously returns, they decide to marry, but a rebound love affair hinders her during his supposed death. For Davis, Deception marked the end of her Golden Age and was the last of the great Bette Davis/Warner Bros.collaborations.

.

AALIYAH—TRY AGAIN
With a rising musical career since she was a teenager, Aaliyah Haughton got her first major movie role in Romeo Must Die. Praised for its futuristic production by her mentor, Timbaland, “Try Again” reached number one on the Billboard charts on the week of June 17, 2000. It was the first song ever to take the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 based solely on the strength of its radio airplay. Unfortunately, her untimely death in 2002 put an end to the megastardom that awaited the beloved 22-year-old singer.

.

.

.

.

.

.

LISA LOEB – STAY (I MISSED YOU)
Lisa Loeb released “Stay (I Missed You)” in 1994 as the lead single to Reality Bites. Loeb’s neighbor and friend, actor Ethan Hawke, submitted “Stay” to cast member Ben Stiller, who was directing the film’s soundtrack—the single landed Loeb a major record deal. However, her career never surpassed her smash single, but we will forever revere her as one of the queens of Gen X.

.

.

.

.

.

 WHITNEY HOUSTON – I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU
It was a song that defined the 90’s. Originally written by Dolly Parton, Houston Whitney Houston adapted the song her first feature film, The Bodyguard. The single spent 14 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and is one of the best-selling singles of all time. Out of all of her career hits, “I Will Always Love You” surpassed her previous record of three weeks at number one in 1986. The song remains as the longest-running number-one single from a soundtrack album

The Constitution was and is an excellent foundation for the stability and well being of the nation and its citizens. However as the first ten Amendments to the original, the Bill of Rights, and the seventeen additional changes show, it wasn’t and isn’t cast in stone. Former US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens outlines its formation and framework and proposes six ways to save the United States of America… before we have a catastrophe.

The 28th Amendment by Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens

According to its preamble the Constitution of the United States was established by “the People” — not by the states — “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity . . .” As Abraham Lincoln perceptively observed, it created a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

The Union created by the Constitution was unquestionably “more perfect” than the one formed by the states when they signed the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles there was no central government authorized to resolve disputes among individual citizens, to tax or to impose any direct obligations on individuals, or to regulate commerce between or among the separate states. Like a treaty among multiple sovereigns, the Articles defined obligations that the former colonies assumed in their dealings with one another.

That article authorizes two methods of proposing new amendments — by two-thirds of both houses of Congress or by a convention for proposing amendments called by the legislatures of two-thirds of the states; and two methods of ratifying amendments — by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states, or by conventions in three-fourths of the states (this latter method has never been successfully used). Article V also prohibited two kinds of amendments. One of those prohibitions — the total ban on any amendment that would deprive any state, without its consent, “of its equal Suffrage in the Senate” — reveals that the framers viewed that body, rather than the executive or the judiciary, as the primary guardian of the sovereignty of the smaller states.

The second llimitation on the power to amend the constitution  highlights the importance of the compromise that appeased the slave states. That limitation prohibited any amendment prior to 1808 that would allow Congress to regulate the importation of slaves. Article V did not, however, mention the bonus provided to the slave states in Article I’s formula for granting them representation in Congress. Even though slaves were not allowed to vote in any state in the South, three-fifths of them were counted for the purpose of determining the size of a state’s congressional delegation and the number of its votes in the Electoral College. In 1800 that slave bonus gave Thomas Jefferson more than the eight votes that provided his margin of victory over John Adams in the Electoral College. Not only did that bonus determine the outcome of that presidential election, but it also affected the work of Congress in the ensuing years when the interests of slave states and free states differed.

The procedures for amending the Constitution set forth in Article V have been successfully employed only eighteen times during the nation’s history. On the first occasion, the ten amendments, often described as the Bill of Rights, were all adopted at once; they placed specific limits on the powers of the new central government. Thus, the First Amendment begins with the command that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” the preamble to the Second Amendment states that a “well regulated Militia [is] necessary to the security of a free State,” and the Third Amendment protects homeowners from the quartering of soldiers in time of peace. The Fourth Amendment protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures. The Fifth Amendment, appropriately, includes five separate guarantees: (1) the right to indictment by a grand jury in felony or capital cases; (2) protection against self-incrimination or (3) double jeopardy; (4) the right not to be deprived of  life, liberty, or property without due process of law; and (5) the right to just compensation when property is taken for public use. The six amendment protects the right to a prompt and public trial, the right to confront hostile witnesses, and the right to a lawyer. The seventh Amendment protects the right to a jury trial in civil cases, and the Eighth Amendment prohibits excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishments. The Ninth Amendment provides that the enumeration of specific rights in the Constitution “shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” And the Tenth Amendment provides that the “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It is undisputed that when they were adopted, the first ten amendments applied only to the federal government and placed no limits on the powers of the states.

Only two additional amendments were adopted prior to the Civil War. The Eleventh Amendment was a response to the Court’s decision in February of 1793 to accept jurisdiction of an action against the state of Georgia brought by a citizen of South Carolina named Chisholm to recover the price of military supplies sold to the state during the Revolutionary War. The amendment precludes federal jurisdiction over cases against a state brought by citizens of another state. Some critics of the Chisholm decision who believed that the common law doctrine of sovereign immunity should have foreclosed the suit have argued that the fact that the amendment was adopted so promptly proves that the Court’s decision came as a “shock” to the nation, which believed that the framers had left intact the sovereign immunity of the states for these types of suits. In fact, however, the amendment that was ultimately adopted was not proposed until March 4, 1794, more than a year after the Chisholm case was decided and more than eleven additional months elapsed before it was ratified. In contrast to that two year deliberative process the interval between the proposal on December 9th 1803 of the Twelfth Amendment which significantly revised the Electoral College procedures used to elect the president — and its ratification on June 15, 1804, was just a few days more than six months. President Abraham Lincoln played a major role in persuading Congress to propose the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865. That amendment, which abolished slavery, was not ratified by the states until December 6, well after his assassination on Good Friday in 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment, which awarded citizenship to the former slaves, was opposed by President Andrew Johnson and not ratified until July 9, 1868. That amendment was immensely important, not only because it granted African Americans citizenship, but also because it imposed on the states a federal duty to govern impartially. It provided that no state may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Ulysses S.Grant was president on February 3 1870 when the Fifteenth Amendment which granted the former slaves the right to vote, was ratified. By maintaining federal troops in the Southern states, Grant made it possible for the new class of voters to affect the results of a number of state elections. At the end of his second term, in 1877, however, presumably as a result of the compromise that settled the dispute over the outcome of the presidential election of 1876 by awarding the victory to Rutherford B. Hayes, the federal troops were withdrawn and white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan effectively put an end to African American voting in the South for the next eighty years. During that period, while the three-fifths slave bonus had been eliminated by Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Southern states’ congressional delegations were enlarged by counting 100 percent of their African American populations, even though the discriminatory administration of local election laws combined with the terrorist tactics of the Klan prevented all but a few of them from actually voting. Thus, one could argue, the Southern states went from having a three-fifths bonus before the Civil War to having a five-fifths bonus during this period.

In 1913 two amendments to the Constitution were adopted. The sixteenth Amendment overruled the five-to-four decision of the Supreme Court in Pollock v Farmers Loan and Trust Co which held that a federal statute imposing a tax on income violated the constitutional prohibition against unapportioned “direct taxes”; that amendment is the source of the federal power to impose an income tax. The Seventeenth Amendment replaced the practice of having United States senators chosen by state legislatures with direct elections by the people.

The Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors, became effective in 1919; it was repealed by Section 1 of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933. Section 2 of that amendment prohibited the transportation of intoxicating liquors into any state that prohibited their use. While nationwide prohibition, the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, and the Twentieth Amendment advanced the commencement of the president’s term in office from March 4 to January 20.

The Twenty-second Amendment adopted in 1951, when Harry Truman was president, formally endorsed George Washington’s decision that two terms as president were sufficient and rejected the possibility that a candidate as popular as Truman’s predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who had been elected four times), might be elected more than twice. The Twenty-third Amendment gave the District of Columbia representation in the Congress and in the Electoral College. The ratification of the Twenty-fourth Amendment in 1964 finally abolished the poll tax in federal elections. The Twenty-fifth Amendment, which became effective in 1967, specified for the first time the procedures to be followed to fill a vacancy in the office of vice president and to respond to the temporary or permanent incapacity of the president. Those procedures were followed by Richard Nixon when he nominated Gerald Ford to become vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned. That amendment also provided that Ford should become president when Nixon resigned. In 1971, the Twenty-sixth Amendment gave citizens who are eighteen years or older the right to vote in both federal and state elections.

In the past forty years only one amendment has been adopted: the Twenty-seventh, prohibiting Congress from changing its salary between elections. It was first submitted to the states in 1789 but was not ratified until two centuries later, in 1992. In those forty years, however, rules crafted by a slim majority of the members of the Supreme Court have had such a profound and unfortunate impact on our basic law that resort to the process of amendment is warranted. One of those rules has changed the character and increased the cost of campaigns for public office, a second has changed the composition of the Congress as well as that of many state legislatures, and two others have unwisely curtailed the powers of Congress. Moreover, the Court’s death penalty jurisprudence, while improperly enhancing the risk of executing an innocent defendant, has simultaneously removed the principal justification for retaining that penalty. And the Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment has given federal judges, rather than the people’s elected representatives, the final authority to define the permissible scope of civilian regulation of firearms.

I propose six amendments to the Constitution; the first four would nullify judge-made rules, the fifth would expedite the demise of the death penalty, and the sixth would confine the coverage of the Second Amendment to the area intended by its authors. The importance of reexamining some of these rules is already the subject of widespread public debate, but others have not received either the attention or the criticism that is warranted. For that reason, I shall begin with a discussion of the “anti-commandeering rule,” which prevents the federal government from utilizing critical state resources, thus impairing the federal government’s ability to respond to problems with a national dimension, and explain why it would be prudent to eliminate the rule before a preventable catastrophe occurs.

Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution by Justice John Paul Stevens  Published by Hachett Books 2014

ALGORITHMS  of   OPPRESSION    How Search Engines Reinforce Racism  by Safiya Umoja Noble

This book is about the power of algorithms in the age of neoliberalism and the ways those digital decisions reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling, which I have termed technological redlining. By making visible the ways that capital, race, and gender are factors in creating unequal conditions, I am bringing light to various forms of technological redlining that are on the rise. The near-ubiquitous use of algorithmically driven software, both visible and invisible to everyday people, demands a closer inspection of what values are prioritized in such automated decision-making systems. Typically, the practice of redlining has been most often used in real estate and banking circles, creating and deepening inequalities by race, such that, for example, people of color are more likely to pay higher interest rates or premiums just because they are Black or Latino, especially if they live in low-income neighborhoods. On the Internet and in our everyday uses of technology, discrimination is also embedded in computer code and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not. I believe that artificial intelligence will become a major human rights issue in the twenty-first century. We are only beginning to understand the long-term consequences of these decision-making tools in both masking and deepening social inequality. This book is just the start of trying to make these consequences visible. There will be many more, by myself and others, who will try to make sense of the consequences of automated decision making through algorithms in society.

Part of the challenge of understanding algorithmic oppression is to understand that mathematical formulations to drive automated decisions are made by human beings. While we often think of terms such as “big data” and “algorithms” as being benign, neutral, or objective, they are anything but. The people who make these decisions hold all types ofvalues, many of which openly promote racism, sexism, and false notions of meritocracy, which is well documented in studies of Silicon Valley and other tech corridors.

For example, in the midst of a federal investigation of Google’s alleged persistent wage gap, where women are systematically paid less than men in the company’s workforce, an “antidiversity” manifesto authored by James Damore went viral in August 2017,1 supported by many Google employees, arguing that women are psychologically inferior and inca- pable of being as good at software engineering as men, among other patently false and sexist assertions. As this book was moving into press, many Google executives and employees were actively rebuking the assertions of this engineer, who reportedly works on Google search infrastructure. Legal cases have been filed, boycotts of Google from the political far right in the United States have been invoked, and calls for greater expressed commitments to gender and racial equity at Google and in Silicon Valley writ large are under way. What this antidiversity screed has underscored for me as I write this book is that some of the very people who are developing search algorithms and architecture are willing to promote sexist and racist attitudes openly at work and beyond, while we are supposed to believe that these same employees are developing “neutral” or “objective” decision-making tools. Human beings are developing the digital platforms we use, and as I present evidence of the recklessness and lack of regard that is often shown to women and people of color in some of the output of these systems, it will become increasingly difficult for technology companies to separate their systematic and inequitable employment practices, and the far-right ideological bents of some of their employees, from the products they make for the public.

My goal in this book is to further an exploration into some of these digital sense-making processes and how they have come to be so fundamental to the classification and organization of information and at what cost. As a result, this book is largely concerned with examining the commercial co-optation of Black identities, experiences, and commu- nities in the largest and most powerful technology companies to date, namely, Google. I closely read a few distinct cases of algorithmic oppression for the depth of their social meaning to raise a public discussion of the broader implications of how privately managed, black-boxed information-sorting tools have become essential to many data-driven decisions. I want us to have broader public conversations about the implications of the artificial intelligentsia for people who are already systematically marginalized and oppressed. I will also provide evidence and argue, ultimately, that large technology monopolies such as Google need to be broken up and regulated, because their consolidated power and cultural influence make competition largely impossible. This monopoly in the information sector is a threat to democracy, as is currently coming to the fore as we make sense of information flows through digital media such as Google and Facebook in the wake of the 2016 United States presidential election.

I situate my work against the backdrop of a twelve-year professional career in multicultural marketing and advertising, where I was invested in building corporate brands and selling products to African Americans and Latinos (before I became a university professor). Back then, I believed, like many urban marketing professionals, that companies must pay attention to the needs of people of color and demonstrate respect for consumers by offering services to communities of color, just as is done for most everyone else. After all, to be responsive and responsible to marginalized consumers was to create more market opportunity. I spent an equal amount of time doing risk management and public relations to insulate companies from any adverse risk to sales that they might experience from inadvertent or deliberate snubs to consumers of color who might perceive a brand as racist or insensitive. Protecting my former clients from enacting racial and gender insensitivity and helping them bolster their brands by creating deep emotional and psychological attachments to their products among communities of color was my professional concern for many years, which made an experience I had in fall 2010 deeply impactful. In just a few minutes while searching on the web, I experienced the perfect storm of insult and injury that I could not turn away from. While Googling things on the Internet that might be interesting to my stepdaughter and nieces, I was overtaken by the results. My search on the keywords “black girls” yielded HotBlackPussy. com as the first hit.

Hit indeed.

Since that time, I have spent innumerable hours teaching and re-searching all the ways in which it could be that Google could completely fail when it came to providing reliable or credible information about women and people of color yet experience seemingly no repercussions whatsoever. Two years after this incident, I collected searches again, only to find similar results,

In 2012, I wrote an article for Bitch magazine about how women and feminism are marginalized in search results. By August 2012, Panda (an update to Google’s search algorithm) had been released, and pornography was no longer the first series of results for “black girls”; but other girls and women of color, such as Latinas and Asians, were still pornified. By August of that year, the algorithm changed, and porn was suppressed in the case of a search on “black girls.” I often wonder what kind of pressures account for the changing of search results over time. It is impossible to know when and what influences proprietary algorithmic design, other than that human beings are designing them and that they are not up for public discussion, except as we engage in critique and protest.

This book was born to highlight cases of such algorithmically driven data failures that are specific to people of color and women and to underscore the structural ways that racism and sexism are fundamental to what I have coined algorithmic oppression. I am writing in the spirit of other critical women of color, such as Latoya Peterson, cofounder of the blog Racialicious, who has opined that racism is the fundamental application program interface (API) of the Internet. Peterson has argued that anti-Blackness is the foundation on which all racism toward other groups is predicated. Racism is a standard protocol for organizing behavior on the web. As she has said, so perfectly, “The idea of a n*gger API makes me think of a racism API, which is one of our core arguments all along—oppression operates in the same formats, runs the same scripts over and over. It is tweaked to be context specific, but it’s all the same source code. And the key to its undoing is recognizing how many of us are ensnared in these same basic patterns and modifying our own actions. Peterson’s allegation is consistent with what many people feel about the hostility of the web toward people of color, particularly in its anti-Blackness, which any perusal of YouTube comments or other message boards will serve up. On one level, the everyday racism and commentary on the web is an abhorrent thing in itself, which has been detailed by others; but it is entirely different with the corporate platform vis-à-vis an algorithmically crafted web search that offers up racism and sexism as the first results. This process reflects a corporate logic of either willful neglect or a profit imperative that makes money from racism and sexism. This inquiry is the basis of this book.

In the following pages, I discuss how “hot,” “sugary,” or any other kind of “black pussy” can surface as the primary representation of Black girls and women on the first page of a Google search, and I suggest that something other than the best, most credible, or most reliable information output is driving Google. Of course, Google Search is an advertising company, not a reliable information company. At the very least, we must ask when we find these kinds of results, Is this the best information? For whom? We must ask ourselves who the intended audience is for a variety of things we find, and question the legitimacy of being in a “filter bubble, when we do not want racism and sexism, yet they still find their way to us. The implications of algorithmic decision making of this sort extend to other types of queries in digital media platforms, and they are the beginning of a much-needed reassessment of information as a public good. We need a full-on reevaluation of the implications of our information resources being governed by corporate- controlled advertising companies. I am adding my voice to a number of scholars such as Helen Nissenbaum and Lucas Introna, Siva Vaid- hyanathan, Alex Halavais, Christian Fuchs, Frank Pasquale, Kate Craw- ford, Tarleton Gillespie, Sarah T. Roberts, Jaron Lanier, and Elad Segev, to name a few, who are raising critiques of other forms of corporate information control (including artificial intelligence) in hopes that more people will consider alternatives.

Over the years, I have concentrated my research on unveiling the many ways that African American people have been contained and constrained in classification systems, from Google’s commercial search engine to library databases. The development of this concentration was born of my research training in library and information science. I think of these issues through the lenses of critical information studies and crit- ical race and gender studies. As marketing and advertising have directly shaped the ways that marginalized people have come to be represented by digital records such as search results or social network activities, I have studied why it is that digital media platforms are resoundingly characterized as “neutral technologies” in the public domain and often, unfortunately, in academia. Stories of “glitches” found in systems do not suggest that the organizing logics of the web could be broken but, rather, that these are occasional one-off moments when something goes terribly wrong with near-perfect systems. With the exception of the many scholars whom I reference throughout this work and the journalists, bloggers, and whistleblowers whom I will be remiss in not naming, very few people are taking notice.

We need all the voices to come to the fore and impact public policy on the most unregulated social experiment of our times: the Internet.

excerpted from Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble   Published by New York University Press, Washington Sq. NY NY 10003 in 2018

]]> https://archive.newyorkmoves.com/?feed=rss2&p=9516 0 https://archive.newyorkmoves.com/?p=9491 https://archive.newyorkmoves.com/?p=9491#comments Tue, 26 Nov 2019 01:51:20 +0000 http://archive.newyorkmoves.com/?p=9491 As we live through these most testing of times, we have a national identity made up entirely of migrants stretching thousands of years way back. I’m sorry… it’s who we are.

By Christina Ying

Alcohol has always been central to many different cultures around the world. It has been consumed as part of so many spiritual and religious rituals including an integral part of one of Jesus’ first miracles: water into wine. So, it’s no surprise that alcohol became such an important component of almost every country’s culture.

The British (who else!) developed a formerly medicinal liquid into one of the country’s most popular drinks, the Vikings used to enjoy copious amounts of beer as celebration in their meeting halls, while other European countries developed ouzo, vodka, absinthe all manner of liquers and from the East came sake and Chinese maotai. (Although this one is said to be an acquired taste.)

And of course the French developed wine making into a fine art.

These culturally important spirits and traditions traveled to America with immigrants and have  become a key part of our American culture, community and recreation time.
When the Pilgrims immigrated to America on the Mayflower they carried with them more ale than water. This was not any indication of an alcohol problem afflicting the immigrating people, but it was actually necessary to their survival since plain water could carry harmful bacteria and spread infectious disease throughout the ship. According to Dana Johnson from Birko, the ale they carried with them was safe to drink throughout the journey not only because of it’s low alcohol content, but also because it provided the struggling travelers with some of their needed calories.

Prior to European colonization, alcoholic beverages were made from fruit and vegetables that were native to North America such as blackberries, strawberries, squash, and celery. The Southwestern tribes of North America such as the Apache, Zuni, Pima, and Papago drank alcohol for rituals and cultural ceremonies only. Drinking for pleasure and social engagement would become a custom with the arrival of the Spanish.

When Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon landed in Florida in 1513, Spanish and French Huguenot settlers began making Muscadine wine. The wine process required a bit of adjustment, because the European grapes refused to adjust to North America’s wet climates. Eventually, Spanish and French wine makers found new grapes that were native to the U.S. and expanded their businesses with wineries across the nation.

Without Cuba and the Caribbean, we would not have rum! Americans loved it so much that it was the drink of choice for many of our country’s founding fathers who indulged on a regular, even daily basis. Cognac was said to be a considerable contributing factor in the framing of our Constitution. (However the rum based cocktail, Fish House Punch, was a favorite of our first president, George Washington and rumor has it one occasion, Washington drank so much he couldn’t write in his diary for three days.)

On the dark side of history the import of rum and cognac wouldn’t have been possible without the “Triangle Trade,” in which rum was traded for West African slaves. The trade continued in the West Indies for more molasses which was then made into more rum. This trading of rum and cognac was essential to the prosperity of colonial life becoming so popular that eventually every major city across the East Coast had a rum distillery.

Cocktails as we know it today were invented in the early 1800s. The first published definition of a cocktail appeared in The Balance and Columbian Repository of 1806 as “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.” However, today’s cocktails as we know them would never have happened if it weren’t for ice.  The commodity only became accessible during the early years of the nineteenth century with the help of one Frederic Tudor, with his revolutionary business for transporting ice.

During the 1830s and 1840s the ice trade expanded rapidly to England, India, South America, China and Australia and with this importing of ice from various countries around the world, Tudor made his vast fortune and changed the way we consume cocktails.
The massive wave of immigrating Europeans in the mid-1800s brought over European beer, whiskey, gin and a wide variety of wines. It was the introduction of lager beer by the Germans that forever changed the way Americans drink beer. However this change in the drink that was almost a staple of everyday life was not initially welcomed with open arms. In 1851, a Philadelphia editor described lager as a “vile compound of dirt and poison” and was “worse, far worse, than rye whiskey; a mixture to madden and destroy.” Though on what unbiased basis it is not clear.

The Europeans continued to experience discrimination when it came to alcohol. Many were accustomed to spending Sundays with family and friends in beer gardens, mostly because it was their only day off. So when cities enforced an ordinance for the closing of beer gardens on Sundays it was considered to be highly discriminatory against the German-American population.  Despite this initial discrimination, the German preference for beer was not received too negatively by the American public. This encouraged more German brewing and as many different flavors and strengths became available beer became the “opiate” of the masses and became the essential ingredient in American culture it is today. In addition to assimilating new immigrants into American society and establishing a beer culture, it is rumored (although denied by many many other claimants) that the Germans also invented cocktails. They were already making a version with “wine cups,” which have a combination of spirits, wines, liqueurs, and flavored syrups so when German immigrants began working at American bars the tradition of American mixology was born and “cocktail hour” became a go-to feature of the day.

Places like San Francisco during the Gold Rush had a huge influx of new immigrant communities. It was unlike anywhere else in the world and without these social drinking spaces, not even bars but mostly makeshift tents with long trestle tables, there was no way these new immigrants would have adapted so readily and so quickly. True melting pots albeit with their own rigid social strata.

In addition to Southerners and Yankees living in the same spaces post Civil War, the streets were also filled with men from Australia, Mexico, China, Russia, Europe, and South America. Because of the Gold Rush, San Francisco became built up around real saloons as we know them and these served as social hubs for people from all around the world to meet and mingle and build community. Historically, the saloons and pubs in most American cities catered to immigrants and members of the working class thus producing a camaraderie and common cause that broke down national and ethnic barriers.

Then came the crunch. Prohibition!

During the 1800’s alchohol consumption in the newly formed republic reached what some saw as epidemic proportions not unlike the opioid crisis of today. Public disorder, violence and sexual assaults coupled with saloon-based political corruption prompted fundamental religious believers and other prohibitionists in power to end the manufacture and sale of alcohol to, as they saw it, rid society of this evil. (There was also huge political bias in the vote to deny one set of supporters a basic daily need. The rich always had access to whatever they wanted.)

When Prohibition began immigrants from all walks worked in the illegal trade as distillers or distributors in the whiskey business.  A Jewish immigrant from the United Kingdom, Jacob “Jack” Grohusko, one of the most significant cocktail bartenders in American cocktails, made waves with his cocktail concoctions in bars located in lower Manhattan. Grohusko subsequently published several editions of Jack’s Manual his handbook for crafting nearly 400 different cocktails, which  was essential in the development of mixology (and the creative force that produced so many new mixes) all around the world.

Whiskey is an American staple. The production process however requires a lot of time, from the original mash, through the distilling and maturing in casks down to the bottling and distribution can, in the best of brands, often many years. This made decent whiskey, as opposed to the rot gut variety sold in the Old West, not always readily available to consumers and a local spirit from south of the border became their ideal choice of drink. Tequila

After World War II, the U.S. initiated the Bracero programs which imported migrant workers from Mexico to work in the country temporarily or become naturalized citizens of the United States. Many of the migrant workers brought their indigenous brand of hooch made from the agave plant with them. Tequila. It caught on! Now a global billion dollar industry tequila is the choice for shots from all stratas of society. From Park Avenue penthouses to Texas panhandle dives we are awash with this potent product. Seven out of every 10 liters of tequila produced in Mexico are exported abroad, with the United States purchasing 80%.

So, for better (I think so) or worse (there’s still prohitionists out there) immigrants changed the structure of US society with their own brand of white lightening. Today it may be under pressure from a rapidly expanding legal marijuana industry but the signs are still that our choice to take the edge off comes out of a bottle and the contents of that bottle have been influenced by centuries of overseas influence. Immigrants.

This brief look at the history of alcohol in the US highlights the contribution immigrants have made to our culture. In their pursuit of a better life, they found a way to adapt despite dealing with racism and discrimination. When you have a group of people who’s sole focus is to better themselves and their communities, they will elevate our culture. Because of immigrants some of our best memories are enjoyed over a sip or two of their efforts and we can’t help but acknowledge the colorful history that went into bringing those drinks to our tables.

“…There is a traditional optimistic story that runs as follows. Our hero is a prisoner who has been sentenced to death by a tyrannical king, but gains a reprieve by promising to teach the king’s favorite horse to talk within a year. That night, a fellow prisoner asks what possessed him to make such a bargain. He replies, ‘A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might talk!’…”

by Professor David Deutsch FRS, University of Oxford

All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress. Whenever we try to improve things and fail, it is not because the spiteful (or unfathomably benevolent) gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached a limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough, in time. But optimism is also a stance towards the future, because nearly all failures, and nearly all successes, are yet to come. Optimism follows from the explicability of the physical world, as I explained in Chapter 3. If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how. Optimism also assumes that none of the prohibitions imposed by the laws of physics are necessarily evils. So, for instance, the lack of the impossible knowledge of prophecy is not an insuperable obstacle to progress.

That means that in the long run t here are no insuperable evils, and in the short run the only insuperable evils are parochial ones. There can be no such thing as a disease for which it is impossible to discover a cure, other than certain types of brain damage—those that have dissipated the knowledge that constitutes the patient’s personality. For a sick person is a physical object, and the task of transforming this object into the same person in good health is one that no law of physics rules out. Hence there is a way of achieving such a transformation—that is to say, a cure. It is only a matter of knowing how. If we do not, for the moment, know how to eliminate a particular evil, or we know in theory but do not yet have enough time or resources (i.e. wealth), then, even so, it is universally true that either the laws of physics forbid eliminating it in a given time with the available resources or there is a way of eliminating it in the time and with those resources.

The same must hold, equally trivially, for the evil of death—that is to say, the deaths of human beings from disease or old age. This problem has a tremendous resonance in every culture—in its literature, its values, its objectives great and small. It also has an almost unmatched reputation for insolubility (except among believers in the supernatural): it is taken to be the epitome of an insuperable obstacle. But there is no rational basis for that reputation. It is absurdly parochial to read some deep significance into this particular failure, among so many, of the biosphere to support human life—or of medical science throughout the ages to cure ageing. The problem of ageing is one of the same general type as that of disease. Although it is a complex problem by present day standards, the complexity is finite and confined to a relatively narrow arena whose basic principles are already fairly well understood. Meanwhile, knowledge in the relevant fields is increasing exponentially.

Sometimes ‘immortality’ (in this sense) is even regarded as undesirable. For instance, there are arguments from overpopulation; but those are examples of the Malthusian prophetic fallacy: what each additional surviving person would need to survive at present-day standards of living is easily calculated; what knowledge of the person would contribute to the solution of the resulting problems is unknowable. There are also arguments about the stultification of society caused by the entrenchment of old people in positions of power; but the traditions of criticism in our society are already well adapted to solving that sort of problem. Even today, it is common in Western countries for powerful politicians or business executives to be removed from the office while still in good health.

There is a traditional optimistic story that runs as follows. Our hero is a prisoner who has been sentenced to death by a tyrannical king, but gains a reprieve by promising to teach the king’s favorite horse to talk within a year. That night, a fellow prisoner asks what possessed him to make such a bargain. He replies, ‘A lot can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. Or the horse might talk!’ the prisoner understands that, while his immediate problems have to do with prison bars and the king and his horse, ultimately the evil he faces is caused by insufficient knowledge. That makes him an optimist. He knows that, if progress is to be made, some of the opportunities and some of the discoveries will be inconceivable in advance. Progress cannot take place at all unless someone is open to, and prepares for, those inconceivable possibilities. The prisoner may or may not discover a way of teaching the horse to talk. But he may discover something else. He may persuade the king to repeal the law that he had broken; he may learn a convincing conjuring tick in which the horse would seem to talk; he may escape; he may think of an achievable task that would please the king even more than making the horse talk. The list is infinite. Even if every such possibility is unlikely, it takes only one of them to be realized for the whole problem to be solved. But if our prisoner is going to escape by creating a new idea, he cannot possibly know that idea today, and therefore he cannot let the assumption that it will never exist condition his planning.

Optimism implies all the other necessary conditions for knowledge to grow, and for knowledge-creating civilizations to last, and hence for the beginning of infinity. We have, as Popper put it, a duty to be optimistic—in general, and about civilization in particular. One can argue that saving civilization will be difficult. That does not mean that there is a low probability of solving the associated problems. When we say that a mathematical problem is hard to solve, we do not mean that it is unlikely to be solved. All sorts of factors determine whether mathematicians even address a problem, and with what effort. If an easy problem is not deemed to be interesting or useful, they might leave it unsolved indefinitely, while hard problems are solved all the time.

Usually the hardness of a problem is one of the very factors that cause it to be solved. Thus President John F. Kennedy said in 1962, in a celebrated example of an optimistic approach to the unknown, ‘We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because but because they are hard.’ Kennedy did not mean that the moon project, being hard, was unlikely to succeed. On the contrary, he believed that it would. What he meant by a hard task was one that depends on facing the unknown. And the intuitive fact to which he was appealing was that although such hardness is always negative factor when choosing among means to pursue an objective, when choosing the objective itself it can be a positive one, because we want to engage with projects that will involve creating new knowledge. And an optimist expects the creation of knowledge to constitute progress—including its unforeseeable consequences.

Thus Kennedy remarked that the moon project would require a vehicle ‘made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival’. Those were the known problems, which would require as-yet-unknown knowledge. That this was ‘on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body’ referred to the unknown problems that made the probabilities, and the outcomes, profoundly unknowable. Yet none of that prevented rational people from forming the expectation that the mission could succeed. This expectation was not a judgment of probability: until far into the project, no one could predict that, because it depended on solutions not yet discovered to problems not yet known. When people were being persuaded to work on the project—and to vote for it, and so on – they were being persuaded that our being confined to one planet was an evil, that exploring the universe was good, that the Earth’s gravitational field was not a barrier but merely a problem, and that overcoming it and all the other problems involved in the project was only a matter of knowing how, and the nature of the problems made that moment the right one to try to solve them. Probabilities and prophecies were not needed in that argument.

Pessimism has been endemic in almost every society throughout history. It has taken the form of t he precautionary principle, and of ‘who should rule?’ political philosophies and all sorts of other demands for prophecy, and of despair in the power of creativity, and of the misinterpretation of problems as insuperable barriers. Yet there have always been a few individuals who see obstacles as problems, and see problems as soluble. And so, very occasionally, there have been places and moments when there was, briefly, an end to pessimism. As far as I know, no historian has investigated the history of optimism, but my guess is that whenever it has emerged in a civilization there has been a mini-enlightenment: a tradition of criticism resulting in an efflorescence of many of the patterns of human progress with which we are familiar, such as art, literature, philosophy, science, technology and the institutions of an open society. The end of pessimism is potentially as beginning of infinity. Yet I also guess that in every case—with the single, tremendous exception (so far) of our own enlightenment—this process was soon brought to an end and the reign of pessimism was restored.