Category Archives: Culture

Apple and America: Don’t Look Back

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A friend mentioned a recent column by Joe Nocera of The New York Times analyzing the “unmitigated disaster” of the iPhone5’s new map application.  I am not into technology so it took me a week or so to get around to Nocera’s column – which was not about the iPhone5 as much as about the moment when companies reach an inflection point in their history that causes them to decline.  The same thing happens to the human mind as it ages and, of course, to whole nations.

I am going to abbreviate much of Nocera’s column verbatim and ask readers to consider whether his analysis of Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and Blackberry applies to the cases the Supreme Court is deciding badly on voting rights, affirmative action, political redistricting and anti-immigrant laws.  Jumping from the map app disaster, Nocera wrote: “Though Apple will remain a highly profitable company for years to come, I would be surprised if it ever gives us another product as transformative as the iPhone or the iPad.   Part of the reason is obvious: (Steve) Jobs isn’t there anymore… Apple’s current executive team is no doubt trying to maintain the same demanding, innovative culture, but…there is also a less obvious — yet possibly more important — reason that Apple’s best days may soon be behind it…

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Not about Sulzberger’s Times, so much as Our Times

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Arthur Ochs Sulzberger was a name that almost any journalist who does not work for Fox News would recognize.  Most HispanicLatinos never heard of him.  The former publisher of The New York Times died Saturday.  As soon as family members announced his death, they started receiving the usual praise that accompanies most men at the time of their deaths.  By almost any measure of those who knew him, Sulzberger merited the honors that made their way to his family.  This posting is not about Sulzberger.  It is more about the importance of the period in journalism in which he lived his life and that his family’s newspaper nurtured.  It would be interesting in a few years from now to see what is written about Rupert Murdoch, another influential publisher and Sulzberger’s contemporary.

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Demographic Implosion

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Years ago, supporters of George W. Bush’s push for immigration reform correctly predicted in public that falling birth rates in Mexico and a growing Mexican economy would reduce and stabilize historic immigration to the United States from its southern neighbor.  Bush wanted to disarm critics skeptical of anything that smelled of an amnesty that would add fuel to the demographic change that so many in his party fear.  The ploy did not work.  Immigration reform went down in flames.

Now comes evidence that the life span of the lower-income non-HispanicLatino white population without high school diplomas is falling precipitously – a development that will amplify and accelerate the growth of the HispanicLatino population and its importance to the economy.  Most of this blog draws heavily and directly from a story in The New York Times by Sabrina Tavernise two weeks ago that details in part how the demographic transformation that alarms so many in the country will continue.

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It is more than the economy, stupid.

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When does community end?  If the country feels as if it is fraying, that a big scramble is on during which everyone grabs for their own, it is because the sense of unity that fragilely sews together a nation that depends on comity started coming undone first.  It is not the economy, stupid.  The furies of our times are about something else.

The sad and disturbing fact is that many Americans are having trouble handling the new demography that has come down on them pretty fast.  The components of change embedded in the population decades ago by individuals choosing not to have more than two children put the country on a fast track that along with immigration altered the country’s demography.  Now the consequences of those decisions are being reflected in an election that people want to treat as a discussion about the direction of the economy and about its closely-related cousin, Medicare.  But the election is about so much more.  It is about whether the nation at some point understands the dangerous point at which we have arrived, when community is not about everyone.  The Republican line about saving America is rhetorical gauze for something more disturbing.

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The Age of Scramble

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We entered the age of information – and disinformation – not that long ago.  It changed our world and our lives, and now we live in the age of scramble.  In almost every sense of the word, life has become scramble as noun and verb.  The most vivid image of scramble of late is the tens of thousands of young residents in the country illegally scurrying to take advantage of an opportunity to legalize their presence and status – at least for now.  The long lines of young residents, mostly Hispanic/Latinos brought to the country illegally from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and other places, represent only part of the scrambling of individuals, groups of people, institutions, and organizations reacting to defend their interests or get their slice of the pie that appears to have been getting smaller.

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Manzano So Much More than Navarrette

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Where and how does one begin to make sense of what Ruben Navarrette wrote for CNN about Leo Manzano and, by extension, Hispanics/Latinos, be they recent immigrants or descendants from founders of some of the oldest cities in the nation?  To start off, the column Navarrette wrote lambasting the young Olympic runner for raising a Mexican and a U.S. flag to celebrate his silver medal in the 1500-meter race was not about Manzano.  It was about Navarrette.  The object of Navarrette’s anger was not Manzano’s alleged act of disloyalty but something about Navarrette that is not yet settled within his own self.

Navarrette admits as much in the column, which in a way is the most important he has ever written:  “Most Mexican-Americans I know would need a whole team of therapists to sort out their views on culture, national identity, ethnic pride and their relationship with Mother Mexico,” the 55-year-old Navarrette wrote.  And that is the problem.  The problem is not Manzano, who knows who he is and knows what he thinks and who is not going to back down from someone like Navarrette who has not figured himself out at his age and remains incomplete – like many Mexican-Americans and other HispanicLatinos.

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What the Queen of England Can Teach Facebook

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Facebook stock is now down 45 percent from what its first buyers paid for it.  So if someone bought $10,000 worth of stock it is now worth $5,500.  Yikes. If you start adding zeros to those numbers it becomes real money. I almost dared not open my mouth when in a conversation months ago someone was wondering how to get his hands on some Facebook stock once it became public.  But I could not refrain, though I said merely that he ought to think about it before investing.

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Eva Longoria and Clint Eastwood: Changing Drivers for America’s Future

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A recent news report on CNN — followed immediately by a television commercial — put our current state of affairs in bas-relief.  The news report headlined Eva Longoria and Clint Eastwood.  Reporters captured Longoria, the beautifully young and erudite Hispanic or Latina actor most famous for her role in Desperate Housewives, attending a fundraising event for President Obama.  In stark and almost desperate contrast, observers recapped the aging Eastwood endorsing Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee.  After the news anchor took the viewers to break, up popped a commercial for Cisco touting a computerized robotic arm that fixes broken computer production lines at a factory with not a human worker in sight.  The producers of the commercial dispensed with all body parts – not even a face.  Only a voice accompanied the ad.  Intended to be innocuous, the voice instead must cause viewers to conclude unsettlingly that American manufacturers will need fewer and fewer workers in the future.

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Dropping the Ball: Ending the Sports Madness

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I wonder how upset most college presidents would be if all of a sudden — overnight — their football programs were ripped apart like the NCAA did Penn State University on Monday.  Earlier this week, the top college enforcement organization eviscerated football from a football-crazed campus.  Were that to happen at other schools, I would not be surprised if a fair number of college presidents might not let out a cheer, privately, of course.  You see, football is out of control at most colleges.  Football programs are nothing more than revenue-producing businesses that push power at the expense of college presidents and faculty members to coaches of teams most of whose members do not ever graduate.

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The America of the Future: What HispanicLatinos Make of Themselves

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The United States is always in the act of becoming, remaking itself.  Like all nations, America’s population replaces itself through the generation of a new people, except that unlike other nations it has done so in the context of an inventive society endlessly progressing somewhere.  No one has ever laid out a plan for America.  It happened as the result of hard work, freedom, perseverance and luck.  Were the American continent 2,500 instead of 3,500 miles from Europe, history would almost certainly have been different.  Indeed, geography is crucial for any nation.  Left alone for a decisive period, American society was able to adopt the values of a progressive culture that made it special for a long period of time.  Now, its geography and a great demographic moment are remaking a country hard to recognize from even two decades ago, and the role of Hispanic or Latinos is watershed.

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