The paradoxical US of A

From the Economist of 28 February.

1. “America is one of the most religious countries in the industrialised world. Over 80% of Americans claim to believe in God, compared with 62% of the French and 52% of Swedes. About two-thirds of Americans claim membership of a church, 40% go to church once a week, and 43% describe themselves as born-again Christians. Three times as many people believe in the Virgin birth as in evolution.”

Further down the same column….

2. “But America is also one of the most secular countries in the world. The Constitution guarantees a rigorous separation of church and state, and secular groups are assiduous in using the courts to enforce that separation. (On February 25th, the Supreme Court ruled that states could withold scholarships from students studying divinity.) Public schools recoil from even the mildest religious imagery. More than 29m Americans say that they have ‘no religion’, a number that exceeds all but two religious denominations, Roman Catholics and Baptists. For the most part, the people who run America’s media industries in New York and Hollywood are aggressively secular, combining intellectual hostility to Middle America’s religious fundamentalism with a generous measure of cultural disdain.”

Valuing a ‘brand’

From James Gleick, writing in the NYT:”The word NIKE is thought by analysts to be worth $7 billion; COCA-COLA is valued at 10 times as much.” Hmmm… The latter has just depreciated a bit, at least in the UK.

Gleick’s piece is full of examples of the absurdity of the world we are creating. For example:

“An Atlanta music writer known as BILL WYMAN received a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing the former Rolling Stones bass player known as Bill Wyman: demanding, that is, that he ”cease and desist” using his name. In responding, Bill Wyman No. 1 pointed out that Bill Wyman No. 2 had been born William George Perks.

The German car company known as Dr. Ing. h.c.F. Porsche AG has fought a series of battles to protect the name CARRERA. But another contender is a Swiss village, postal code 7122. ”The village Carrera existed prior to the Porsche trademark,” Christoph Reuss of Switzerland wrote to Porsche’s lawyers. ”Porsche’s use of that name constitutes a misappropriation of the good will and reputation developed by the villagers of Carrera.” He added, for good measure, ”The village emits much less noise and pollution than Porsche Carrera.” He didn’t mention that José Carreras, the opera singer, was embroiled in a name dispute of his own. The car company, meanwhile, also claims trademark ownership of the numerals 911.”

Though presumeably not of the string 9/11.

Engineering and Design

Just found a lovely essay by Scott Berkun meditating on the way engineering, design and aesthetics have become separated. He uses the Roeblings’ Brooklyn Bridge as a focus for his thoughts. For them, the equation was:

design = aesthetics + engineering + performance

“Every sketch and diagram John Roebling made considered not only its physical purpose and structure, but also its visual appeal to those walking on the bridge, and those looking at it from across the river. Like DaVinci and Michelangelo (who both had major efforts in architecture), Roebling saw his works from multiple perspectives. This is probably, at least in part, why Roebling was able to convince the government of Manhattan to fund the project at all. It was a bold and crazy idea for its day, and Roebling’s ability to consider and make arguments from the political, business and social points of view must have been an asset. Had he been a engineer (little e instead of big E), he probably would have failed to even get the project off the ground.”

Scott grew up in New York, but paid no attention to the bridge. Years later, however, “in a course I took on the history of NYC, I finally read the book The Great Bridge by [David] McCullough and was blown away. During the last class we took a walk out on the bridge, and I will never forget that day. It was a sunny January afternoon, sun just starting to descend as we stood at the center of the span, quietly looking out over the Hudson, imagining in my mind all the things the Roeblings did to make it possible for me to stand there. Think about what you do for a living: will you ever attempt to do something half as great as the bridge?”

Things get worse with Coke

That’s the headline on today’s Guardian report of the saga of Coca-Cola’s attempt to muscle in on the huge and growing UK market for bottled water. Excerpt:

“First, Coca-Cola’s new brand of “pure” bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that what the firm described as its “highly sophisticated purification process”, based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.

Yesterday, just when executives in charge of a £7m marketing push for the product must have felt it could get no worse, it did precisely that.

The entire UK supply of Dasani was pulled off the shelves because it has been contaminated with bromate, a cancer-causing chemical.

So now the full scale of Coke’s PR disaster is clear. It goes something like this: take Thames Water from the tap in your factory in Sidcup, Kent; put it through a purification process, call it “pure” and give it a mark-up from 0.03p to 95p per half litre; in the process, add a batch of calcium chloride, containing bromide, for “taste profile”; then pump ozone through it, oxidising the bromide – which is not a problem – into bromate – which is. Finally, dispatch to the shops bottles of water containing up to twice the legal limit for bromate (10 micrograms per litre).

The Drinking Water Inspectorate confirmed yesterday it had checked the Thames water supplied to the factory and found it free of bromate. Because it is unsafe at high levels, standards for bromate in tap water are strictly monitored.”

If you wanted a case study in the fatuity of the contemporary obsession with ‘brands’ and branding, then this is it. Would you buy anything from a company which engaged in this kind of cynical nonsense? Sadly, many people do.

Useful phrases when governing Iraq

From a lovely New Yorker ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ piece.

“The next train to Basra will depart in 2009”.

“I can’t hear you over all that ‘Death to America!’ chanting.”

“There is no soap in my hotel bedroom. Also, no walls or ceiling.”

And my favourite:

“Could you please direct me to the weapons of mass destruction?”

Catherine Cooke: another perspective

Following my little piece about Catherine Cooke, I had a lovely message from Paul Dorrington.

“I read your note on Catherine Cooke”, he writes.”I also have fond memories of her. I bought her parents’ house at Upnor, Kent after it had been advertised in the Twentieth Century Society newsletter. This was the house where she lived with her parents when she was not up at University.

She was just as you describe her. The house reflects her father’s interest in all things Scandinavian and includes a small suana/summer house designed by Catherine. When we viewed the house with my five year old twin daughters I will always remember her welcoming us with the remark. “Oh, I see you have brought some little people with you”. She was not used to relating to small children. However she was extremly charming and during the process of buying the house directly from her we came to love her as she unselfconsciously regaled us with stories about the great and the good who touched her life. The villagers say she was very much her father’s daughter.

Catherine was also not adverse to putting on overalls and doing a spot of DIY. We had moved into Hammond Place and she was still helping out putting the place in order, sanding down and painting windows. This was up to ten o’ clock at night when the nieghbours, whom she knew well, came out and told her to stop using the electric sander. Other stories abound of her being out in the garden on Christmas Day putting a new felt roof on their summer house.”

That sounds like Catherine!

Medical humour

Lovely photographic joke on Quentin’s Blog.

American imperialism? Or should that read ‘nationalism’?

Extraordinary piece in Prospect by Anatol Lieven. His general argument is that Jacksonian nationalism is transforming America from a conservative power to a revolutionary one — and that this spells trouble for everyone. Quote:

“A great many Americans are not only intensely nationalistic, but also bellicose in their response to any perceived attack on their country: “Don’t Tread on Me!” as the rattlesnake on the American revolutionary flag declared. Coupled with an intense national solipsism and ignorance of the outside world, this has allowed an unwise extension of the “war on terror” from its original – and legitimate – targets in al Qaeda and the Taleban to embrace the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, and possibly other regimes in the future. This nationalism has also been turned against a range of proposals that have been portrayed as hurting the US or infringing its national sovereignty, from the international criminal court to proposed restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.

Most Americans genuinely believe all this to be a matter of self-defence – of their economy, their “way of life,” their freedoms or the nation itself. The US under George W Bush is indeed driving towards empire, but the domestic political fuel being fed into the imperial engine is that of a wounded and vengeful nationalism. After 9/11, this sentiment is entirely sincere as far as most Americans are concerned and all the more dangerous for that; there is probably no more dangerous element in the nationalist mix than a righteous sense of victimhood. This is a sentiment which has in the past helped wreck Germany, Serbia and numerous other countries, and is now in the process of gravely harming Israel…”

It’s a terrific essay, full of intriguing shafts. This, for example:

“The US is in part simply an old European state which avoided the catastrophes that nationalism brought upon Europe in the 20th century. Its nationalism thus retains an intensity which Europeans have had kicked out of them by history. 72 per cent of Americans say they are “very proud” of their nationality, compared to 49 per cent of Britons, 39 per cent of Italians and just 20 per cent of the Dutch.

But the dangers of unreflective nationalist sentiments remain all too obvious. Nationalism thrives on irrational hatreds, and the portrayal of other nations or ethno-religious groups as irredeemably wicked and hostile. Yesterday this was true of the attitudes of many American nationalists to the Soviet Union. Today it risks becoming the case with regard to the Arab and Muslim worlds, or to any country which defies American wishes. The run-up to the war in Iraq saw an astonishing explosion of chauvinism directed against France and Germany. ”

(Other) famous iPod owners

Er, what was on Ulysses S. Grant’s iPod? See here for the answer. And thanks to Dave Hill for providing it.

Gadget Wars — update

I am now the proud possessor of what my kids regard as a really ‘cool’ gadget — an iPod Mini, which arrived courtesy of my friend Hap and his lovely daughter Ellie, who personally escorted it across the Atlantic yesterday. It holds 4 GB of stuff, and slips neatly into my shirt pocket. But of course the main reason I have it is because last Sunday Quentin had the temerity to come to lunch clutching his new phone, which he then proceeded to flaunt by (a) taking a photo of me and emailing it on the spot, and (b) later, recording a nice sound clip thanking us for lunch and emailing me that also. A chap has to respond to this kind of provocation.