I've been trying hard, in best scientific style, to not just look for confirming instances of my stereotypes and cliches regarding America. After all, it's an enormous place, and as I'm told with wearying regularity, Miami is very different from the rest. This post, though, amounts to a long endorsement of the George Bernard Shaw commonplace about the US and the UK being two nations divided by a common language.
It's easy to trot off a list of words, mostly nouns, which have different meanings on either side of the Atlantic. I cooked a meal the other day involving aubergine, courgette, and coriander; after a conversation with my housemate about what I was making, I wondered if I could have possibly made anything (palatable) with more ingredients whose name we disagreed about. But the linguistic divisions go deeper than individual words. It's a lot to do with rhetorical forms, inculcated call-and-response routines, and differences in tone.
A few examples to illustrate that obtuse little list. During a class discussion on rhetorical figures of speech recently, litotes was mentioned. The (English) lecturer and I had no difficulty
in dashing off a long list of examples - 'not so bad', 'none too shabby', 'no big deal', and so on and so on. The American students were still struggling slightly with how the trope was supposed to work. The idea of asserting something by uttering its negation just seemed completely alien to them; the rhetorical form isn't part of American speech.
By 'inculcated call-and-response' routines, I mean the kind of everyday conversation-oiling exchanges that you can spell out in advance; greetings are a good example. I've still not got used to being asked 'what's going on?' as a form of 'hello'; my mind starts scrabbling around for a literal answer, whilst an American has some non-literal, non-committal answer instantly ready that gets the conversation going. By contrast, when I, in typical English style, greet someone by saying 'Y'alright?', or similar, they often look slightly surprised... 'yeah, I'm fine, why, do I look ill or something?'.
As for differences in tone, well, I think this might be the origin of the canard about Americans not getting irony. Most do, at least in print. But they often fail to notice every instance of irony in my speech, because (it seems) they don't recognise the contexts, intonations, and sentence-forms that indicate that I'm not being serious. This isn't just to do with me; I've noticed the same thing happen with other English people, in person or on film or TV. It's as if the tone, the tenor, of English-English discourse is more allusive, less direct, more replete with extra unspoken meaning and opportunities for irony.
So what of all this? Two consequences occur to me, one personal, one more general. The personal aspect is that, without (heaven forfend) adopting an American accent or vocabulary, the tone and content of my talk is changing slightly. I've been making a more or less conscious effort to not use much slang or dialect words, since I'm tired of having to explain them; but additionally, without deliberately trying, I seem to be using more direct forms of speech, fewer distinctively English non-literal phrases, less irony and so forth. I'll have to watch that I don't become excessively bland by the time I leave.
The general consequence is rather speculative, but worth thinking about. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis says, roughly, that the thought of a population sharing a language is shaped at least partially by the nature of that language. A lot of people accept the converse, too; i.e., that the thoughts of a population are reflected in their language. So it's interesting to wonder about the American preference for direct speech, its origins (perhaps in 'plain-speaking' pilgrims?), and the way in which it may have shaped the country's self-image and behaviour. I also wonder, listening to the apparently vacuous pronouncements of the presidential candidates, if the things they say are in fact replete with meaning for an American, meaning that's lost on me as an outsider; that is, whether the words and phrases ('dreams', 'hopes', etc) just don't have the same resonance in the English mind.
I don't suppose that's the case all the time, mind. When Miami city commissioner (cf councillor) Marc Sarnoff says of the assault rifles he's trying to crack down on that they're 'designed to kill with lethal force', I'm pretty sure that he's talking thoughtless rubbish, whatever language he thinks he's speaking.
Thursday, 21 February 2008
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
Full Cycle
Decent article from the Miami New Times here about cycling in the city (though the headline's rather lurid, and the webpage is horribly cluttered). If you get through the thing, you'll get a good idea of why Miami should be, but isn't, a great city for cycling.
I was never a cyclist in the UK. I always lived within walking distance of most places I needed to get to, and moreover, I always lived in places with many big steep hills. Miami has no hills, and most of the places I need to get to are further than is feasible on foot. Moreover, the public transport network is, at best, skeletal. So I've taken to two wheels, on a second hand mountain bike that's probably a little too small for me but was only $35. It has numerous gears; I don't even know how many, since I never shift it from the top one. It took me a while to find the top one, in fact. The right hand shift is numbered 1-5, and the left hand one has a series of lines with 'low' at one end and 'high' at the other. It was a couple of weeks before I realised that the lever could be pushed well beyond the point marked 'high', thus engaging a higher gear (set?). I had thought until then that I'd become disastrously unfit, but I was just being dense.
When I got it, I borrowed some Allen keys from the head of department, a keen cyclist, to adjust the handlebar height. He warned me to be careful, because Miami drivers 'don't see cyclists'. I asumed this was just colourful exageration on his part, but after a couple of incidents in which I was nearly mown down by vehicles pulling out of intersections, I realised that he was speaking with proper philosophical precision; they really don't see cyclists, probably because they're not used to looking for them.
Actually, they sometimes do see cyclists, and that's where the real problems can start. As the New Times article suggests, the attitudes of the drivers here towards cyclists range from the inattentive to the downright murderous. Riding on the carriageway (like you're legally meant to) is an invitation for drivers to shout abuse, honk horns, and if they're feeling particularly frisky, see if they can run you off the road by passing far too close and then sometimes even swerving closer as they do so. After a few too many experiences of this nature, I gave in and became something that, in the UK, I hated; a pavement cyclist.
I assure myself that this is less of a sin here, because there's hardly any pedestrians to mow down. I cycled 1o miles earlier today, and saw four, three of whom I passed on a cycle track/footpath. However, cycling on the pavement is frustrating. The surface is often awful, and you have to stop, or at least slow down, at every one of the frequent intersections. Better, though, than risking the road. My ride earlier today was in some ways the most pleasant I've had, because it involved some of Miami's very few dedicated cycle lanes. To be able to go fast and feel safe was a sort of revelation about how efficient cycling can really be given the right conditions.
Really, I should overcome my road phobia. Plenty of my peers cycle in the traffic, and none have yet come to calamity. According to the New Times, there's a small Critical Mass group in Miami. Hooking up with them, perhaps, might be the way to conquer the city from the saddle.
I was never a cyclist in the UK. I always lived within walking distance of most places I needed to get to, and moreover, I always lived in places with many big steep hills. Miami has no hills, and most of the places I need to get to are further than is feasible on foot. Moreover, the public transport network is, at best, skeletal. So I've taken to two wheels, on a second hand mountain bike that's probably a little too small for me but was only $35. It has numerous gears; I don't even know how many, since I never shift it from the top one. It took me a while to find the top one, in fact. The right hand shift is numbered 1-5, and the left hand one has a series of lines with 'low' at one end and 'high' at the other. It was a couple of weeks before I realised that the lever could be pushed well beyond the point marked 'high', thus engaging a higher gear (set?). I had thought until then that I'd become disastrously unfit, but I was just being dense.
When I got it, I borrowed some Allen keys from the head of department, a keen cyclist, to adjust the handlebar height. He warned me to be careful, because Miami drivers 'don't see cyclists'. I asumed this was just colourful exageration on his part, but after a couple of incidents in which I was nearly mown down by vehicles pulling out of intersections, I realised that he was speaking with proper philosophical precision; they really don't see cyclists, probably because they're not used to looking for them.
Actually, they sometimes do see cyclists, and that's where the real problems can start. As the New Times article suggests, the attitudes of the drivers here towards cyclists range from the inattentive to the downright murderous. Riding on the carriageway (like you're legally meant to) is an invitation for drivers to shout abuse, honk horns, and if they're feeling particularly frisky, see if they can run you off the road by passing far too close and then sometimes even swerving closer as they do so. After a few too many experiences of this nature, I gave in and became something that, in the UK, I hated; a pavement cyclist.
I assure myself that this is less of a sin here, because there's hardly any pedestrians to mow down. I cycled 1o miles earlier today, and saw four, three of whom I passed on a cycle track/footpath. However, cycling on the pavement is frustrating. The surface is often awful, and you have to stop, or at least slow down, at every one of the frequent intersections. Better, though, than risking the road. My ride earlier today was in some ways the most pleasant I've had, because it involved some of Miami's very few dedicated cycle lanes. To be able to go fast and feel safe was a sort of revelation about how efficient cycling can really be given the right conditions.
Really, I should overcome my road phobia. Plenty of my peers cycle in the traffic, and none have yet come to calamity. According to the New Times, there's a small Critical Mass group in Miami. Hooking up with them, perhaps, might be the way to conquer the city from the saddle.
Thursday, 24 January 2008
Seeds and saplings
I've started volunteering at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Founded in 1938 by David Fairchild, an eminent botanist, the garden consists in an enormous (83 acre) site. The garden is arranged around several small lakes, and has areas dedicated to, amongst other things, rainforest plants, butterfly favourites, succulents, tropical fruits, and replications of tropical ecosystems like the coastal Florida Keys and the spiny forests of Madagascar. The list of individual plants growing there runs to 291 pages, a catalogued collection of palms, vines, flowering trees, orchids, cycads, and a host of other incredible, beautiful things. Walking around the place is wonderful, a visual, aural, olfactory delight.
I asked for a horticultural placement, rather than anything to do with education, staffing gift shops, or the like. As it turns out, most of the gardening jobs get filled pretty quickly in the Miami winter; come the summer, they're more freely available as everyone prefers an air conditioned working environment. So rather than working in the garden proper, I've been set to at the Centre for Tropical Plant Conservation.
The CTPC is part of Fairchild's research and conservation work. It's located about a mile from the garden, on a nondescript site behind locked automatic gates. The security is not just for show; some of the species under cultivation in the greenhouses and outdoor growing areas behind the fences are both rare and valuable. In the chaos following the last hurricane, some opportunistic thieves turned up with a truck and helped themselves to plants worth hundreds of dollars. The section of the CTPC to which I've been attached has two main projects. The first involves a set of lab experiments designed to assess the viability of the seeds of various tropical species under storage conditions. The work feeds into the seed bank project in Colorado; samples those that are found to be sufficiently robust are sent for storage there, to allow for reestablishment of the species in the event of their extinction (similar to the planned seed vault at Spitzbergen).
Though this is, of course, tremendously important and exciting stuff, lab work is not really my forte, and so I've been assigned to help out with the other project. This is a massive, ongoing effort to cultivate specimens for reintroduction into the wild, or to replicate fast-vanishing ecosystems. For example, the pine rocklands of South Florida, which used to sustain a wide variety of succulents and associated wildlife, have been under severe pressure from development, climate change, the usual factors. At the CTPC, there's a host of plants being carefully grown in containers for replanting, either within the garden or in protected locations elsewhere.
So my four hours of contribution to this yesterday mainly involved re-potting a succession of seedlings, vines, and saplings. Pleasant, vacant work. The Americans, it seems to me, have a habit of making some good efforts at conservation and environmental friendliness, but not getting it quite right. Recycling points only accessible by car, trying to reduce dependence on petrol by investing in bio fuel, that kind of thing. So I was only mildly perturbed when told that the potting soil used in huge quantities at the CTPC is mainly peat. Anyway, that aside, I left after my morning's work feeling happy that I'd spent some time mucking around in muck, doing something useful, and not thinking about logic. Although, given the massive rainstorm that soaked me through on the cycle ride home, I could have saved myself the effort of watering in my new charges.
I asked for a horticultural placement, rather than anything to do with education, staffing gift shops, or the like. As it turns out, most of the gardening jobs get filled pretty quickly in the Miami winter; come the summer, they're more freely available as everyone prefers an air conditioned working environment. So rather than working in the garden proper, I've been set to at the Centre for Tropical Plant Conservation.
The CTPC is part of Fairchild's research and conservation work. It's located about a mile from the garden, on a nondescript site behind locked automatic gates. The security is not just for show; some of the species under cultivation in the greenhouses and outdoor growing areas behind the fences are both rare and valuable. In the chaos following the last hurricane, some opportunistic thieves turned up with a truck and helped themselves to plants worth hundreds of dollars. The section of the CTPC to which I've been attached has two main projects. The first involves a set of lab experiments designed to assess the viability of the seeds of various tropical species under storage conditions. The work feeds into the seed bank project in Colorado; samples those that are found to be sufficiently robust are sent for storage there, to allow for reestablishment of the species in the event of their extinction (similar to the planned seed vault at Spitzbergen).
Though this is, of course, tremendously important and exciting stuff, lab work is not really my forte, and so I've been assigned to help out with the other project. This is a massive, ongoing effort to cultivate specimens for reintroduction into the wild, or to replicate fast-vanishing ecosystems. For example, the pine rocklands of South Florida, which used to sustain a wide variety of succulents and associated wildlife, have been under severe pressure from development, climate change, the usual factors. At the CTPC, there's a host of plants being carefully grown in containers for replanting, either within the garden or in protected locations elsewhere.
So my four hours of contribution to this yesterday mainly involved re-potting a succession of seedlings, vines, and saplings. Pleasant, vacant work. The Americans, it seems to me, have a habit of making some good efforts at conservation and environmental friendliness, but not getting it quite right. Recycling points only accessible by car, trying to reduce dependence on petrol by investing in bio fuel, that kind of thing. So I was only mildly perturbed when told that the potting soil used in huge quantities at the CTPC is mainly peat. Anyway, that aside, I left after my morning's work feeling happy that I'd spent some time mucking around in muck, doing something useful, and not thinking about logic. Although, given the massive rainstorm that soaked me through on the cycle ride home, I could have saved myself the effort of watering in my new charges.
Thursday, 10 January 2008
Wherever I lay my hat
America is the only non-EU country I've ever visited, so I don't know if you have to fill out interminable customs forms when travelling elsewhere too. It at least gives you something to do whilst sitting in the departure 'lounge' trying not to gag on the smell of fast food and travel sweat recycled by the air conditioning. Apart from the obvious environmental reservations, I quite like air travel, especially things like the view of Grand Bahama, grey-blue and blending with the ocean in the dusk as you approach Florida. But the parts at either side of the actual travel - airports, customs, embarkation, check-in - sometimes seem designed by double-agent Greenpeace activists within the relevant authorities to dissuade people from flying altogether.
I mention the customs forms not because they're annoying - though they are - but because one question in particular gave me pause for thought (two, actually. 'What is the value of all goods that will remain in the USA?'. Errr, I have a cake. It won't be leaving the USA, but I don't know if you can say it'll be remaining there...). It appeared on two forms, once plainly, once pompously: 'Where do you live?'; 'What is your country of residence?'.
Both times, I wrote 'UK' without hesitation. It was only later, queuing for passport control and re-checking my forms, that I questioned myself. Nobody in uniform did so, they waved me through happily (as happy as border police get, anyway). But was it the right answer? How do you tell? By most measures, surely, it was wrong. Even if I spend all my holidays over the next few years in the UK, I'll still be spending the majority of my time in the US. I pay taxes here, my official status is 'resident alien'. When people, strangers, inquired about my occupation over Christmas, I said that I live and study in Miami.
It's irrelevant that being back in the UK felt like putting on a comfortable pair of trainers after a day spent in cripplingly unfamiliar footwear. Being at home is always cosy; that's been the case in the past whether I've been living in Sheffield, Bristol, anywhere. I suppose I now think of the UK in a wider sense as 'home'; previously, the term only really applied to Durham, whereas this time, I got that warm feeling in the pit of my stomach as soon as the tube from Heathrow left that airport hinterland and started to pick up commuters on the way into central London. But where you call home, and where you live, can of course be two different things, and in my case, it should be clear that they are.
So why do I write 'UK'? And why do I balk somewhat at the thought of doing otherwise? The answer's obvious, really. Despite all the considerations that suggest I live here, I feel very much like a visitor still. I can isolate three reasons for this. The first is that the culture, the lifestyle, the climate, remain surprising and strange. I'd forgotten, after just three weeks, how big the city was, how warm, how bloody awkward for anyone without a car. The second is that my lifestyle, at present, feels like one in which I've accommodated myself to the place, rather than settled into it. This applies in particular to my house, in which I feel somewhat more like a long-term hotel guest than a resident (through no fault of my landlord - I imagine this is just a general feature of lodging). Both these factors will dwindle, I suspect, as time goes on, my lifestyle changes, the city becomes mundane, I move house.
The third reason, though, I think will be constant; indeed, will become more acute as time passes. Despite the fact that I'm here for a while, despite the fact that I spend most of my year here, I'm on a finite time scale. A long time scale, for sure; very different from a fortnight's break on the beach. But I know that, once I've exhausted my visa and got the piece of paper from the university (fingers crossed), I'll be coming home. It may be a long, drawn-out, involved trip, but I'm really just visiting here. In my heart, I live elsewhere.
Well, that was all rather self-absorbed, wasn't it? Don't worry, I'll find something less navel-gazing to write about next time...
I mention the customs forms not because they're annoying - though they are - but because one question in particular gave me pause for thought (two, actually. 'What is the value of all goods that will remain in the USA?'. Errr, I have a cake. It won't be leaving the USA, but I don't know if you can say it'll be remaining there...). It appeared on two forms, once plainly, once pompously: 'Where do you live?'; 'What is your country of residence?'.
Both times, I wrote 'UK' without hesitation. It was only later, queuing for passport control and re-checking my forms, that I questioned myself. Nobody in uniform did so, they waved me through happily (as happy as border police get, anyway). But was it the right answer? How do you tell? By most measures, surely, it was wrong. Even if I spend all my holidays over the next few years in the UK, I'll still be spending the majority of my time in the US. I pay taxes here, my official status is 'resident alien'. When people, strangers, inquired about my occupation over Christmas, I said that I live and study in Miami.
It's irrelevant that being back in the UK felt like putting on a comfortable pair of trainers after a day spent in cripplingly unfamiliar footwear. Being at home is always cosy; that's been the case in the past whether I've been living in Sheffield, Bristol, anywhere. I suppose I now think of the UK in a wider sense as 'home'; previously, the term only really applied to Durham, whereas this time, I got that warm feeling in the pit of my stomach as soon as the tube from Heathrow left that airport hinterland and started to pick up commuters on the way into central London. But where you call home, and where you live, can of course be two different things, and in my case, it should be clear that they are.
So why do I write 'UK'? And why do I balk somewhat at the thought of doing otherwise? The answer's obvious, really. Despite all the considerations that suggest I live here, I feel very much like a visitor still. I can isolate three reasons for this. The first is that the culture, the lifestyle, the climate, remain surprising and strange. I'd forgotten, after just three weeks, how big the city was, how warm, how bloody awkward for anyone without a car. The second is that my lifestyle, at present, feels like one in which I've accommodated myself to the place, rather than settled into it. This applies in particular to my house, in which I feel somewhat more like a long-term hotel guest than a resident (through no fault of my landlord - I imagine this is just a general feature of lodging). Both these factors will dwindle, I suspect, as time goes on, my lifestyle changes, the city becomes mundane, I move house.
The third reason, though, I think will be constant; indeed, will become more acute as time passes. Despite the fact that I'm here for a while, despite the fact that I spend most of my year here, I'm on a finite time scale. A long time scale, for sure; very different from a fortnight's break on the beach. But I know that, once I've exhausted my visa and got the piece of paper from the university (fingers crossed), I'll be coming home. It may be a long, drawn-out, involved trip, but I'm really just visiting here. In my heart, I live elsewhere.
Well, that was all rather self-absorbed, wasn't it? Don't worry, I'll find something less navel-gazing to write about next time...
Saturday, 8 December 2007
News values
A friend with a healthy interest in news and current affairs said, when he returned from six months or so in the Antipodes, that one of the most interesting things about the experience was the different perspective it gave on news values. In the UK, we perhaps flatter ourselves that we take a fairly international perspective. What was striking down under, apparently, was that what we regard as 'international' news hardly ever featured - walk-outs in France, corruption in Italy, that kind of thing. Instead, there was far more of the day-to-day news from Indonesia, Malaysia, and so forth - places that only ever feature in the UK in the event of a coup or natural disaster or similar. The point being, the news one gets in a given country is filtered by proximity; us first, neighbours second, distant places last.
The US media, of course, are notoriously parochial, and in fact don't quite follow that model. It's more like: USA first; other countries that the US is currently interested in fighting/bullying/making peace with/being sucked up to by second; everyone else, a remote third. You can watch the national networks for a week without Canada or Mexico being mentioned, except perhaps the the latter in an immigration debate. Iran and Iraq figure, in predictable terms; France got a mention recently following Sarkozy's nauseating visit to Congress. Other than that, it's interminable coverage of presidential primaries and forensic analysis of the latest fall from grace of a sportsman, celebrity, or congressman. Same with the newspapers; only the NY Times seems to have anything like an internationalist outlook.
But, as I'm constantly being told in many contexts, Miami is very different from the rest of the States, and looking at the news values here is one way of getting a handle on dissimilarity. The main local papers are the Miami Herald, a daily of vaguely liberal tendencies, and the Miami New Times, a weekly free sheet with slightly more overt pinko sympathies. Both often feature international news prominently. The Herald - which also publishes a Spanish language edition - has had more than one front page article on Venezuela in the last week or so. The New Times, which concentrates more on 'colour' pieces than hard news, last week ran long stories about the new wave of Venezuelan immigrants to Miami, and the plight of Haitian boat people.
This focus is in some sense more international than that of the national media, but viewed through a different lens, it's also just as parochial. One of the things that makes Miami so different is its status as the destination of choice for political refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean; and the international element of the local news is almost exclusively concerned with whichever countries in those areas are tending most towards the Left at the moment, hence the recent interest in Venezuela. Cuba, naturally, is a constant. The New Times piece on the Haitian immigrants was an exception, a provocative article questioning why the 100 or so dirt poor migrants fleeing persecution who washed up on the beaches of South Florida recently are treated so differently from their Cuban counterparts.
The answer is precedent and protocol. So far as Cuba goes, America's antipathy is firmly established, and the route from Havana to here has been well-trodden since the 1959 revolution. The first wave of immigrants mostly consisted in the rich who stood to lose most in Castro's country. Subsequent immigration, which has waxed and waned, has been from all social classes. The most famous influx was the Mariel boatlift in 1980; 125 000 Cubans, mostly economic rather than political refugees, were allowed to leave by Cuba and promised sanctuary by the US. The majority ended up in or near Miami. Still today, a Cuban of whatever status arriving in Miami is almost guaranteed the right to remain, in part for fear of upsetting the vocal community here who regard all Cuban expats as brothers and braves in the struggle against Castro.
Venezuelans are in a similar situation. Although there has been no mass migration on the scale of Mariel, since Chavez took over there Miami has seen a steady stream of mostly political exiles; middle-class journalists, army officers, and of course the rich. Since America is so openly hostile to Chavez, it can't help but offer asylum to all these people if its policy is to seem consistent. This is the difference between the Venezuelans and the Haitians; since the US is officially friendly with Haiti, no such laissez faire attitude to immigration from there exists. It's also been noted that the Haitian refugees tend to be poor and black.
All this highlights two factors in Miami's make-up. The first is the massive and continuing influence of waves of Latin American immigration. Initially through proximity to Cuba, Miami is the place to be for Hispanic exiles. And, because of the peculiar position the US has on Cuba and other countries, these Latins aren't illegal migrants like the Mexicans in the West; they're full members of society.
The second is the gulf between the rich and poor here, which is truly astonishing. The first Cuban exiles, and those from other Latin American countries since, were rich, often enormously so, and contributed to the millionaire's playground element of the city. They also brought a particular political culture in which money can buy influence, and this is now part of the fabric of South Florida life. Subsequent immigrants, though, have often tended towards the poor, dirt-poor; and enormous influxes like the Mariel boatlift have put tremendous strain on public finances and services. A Republican Congressman from Colorado got in trouble a year ago for calling Miami a 'third world country', but many feel he had a point. There's that same ridiculous disparity of wealth, shocking slums rubbing up against glittering high rises, that one associates with such places; and the same sense that the rich run the place in their favour. Joan Didion's book 'Miami', which I read just before coming here, is in some ways outdated; it's a mid-eighties piece of journalism, and some of the contemporary references are now hopelessly obscure. But the picture it paints of of the city, seething with barely submerged undercurrents of shady deals, horrible disparity, and pervasive, murky links to the politics of countries far from here, is as accurate now as it was then.
The US media, of course, are notoriously parochial, and in fact don't quite follow that model. It's more like: USA first; other countries that the US is currently interested in fighting/bullying/making peace with/being sucked up to by second; everyone else, a remote third. You can watch the national networks for a week without Canada or Mexico being mentioned, except perhaps the the latter in an immigration debate. Iran and Iraq figure, in predictable terms; France got a mention recently following Sarkozy's nauseating visit to Congress. Other than that, it's interminable coverage of presidential primaries and forensic analysis of the latest fall from grace of a sportsman, celebrity, or congressman. Same with the newspapers; only the NY Times seems to have anything like an internationalist outlook.
But, as I'm constantly being told in many contexts, Miami is very different from the rest of the States, and looking at the news values here is one way of getting a handle on dissimilarity. The main local papers are the Miami Herald, a daily of vaguely liberal tendencies, and the Miami New Times, a weekly free sheet with slightly more overt pinko sympathies. Both often feature international news prominently. The Herald - which also publishes a Spanish language edition - has had more than one front page article on Venezuela in the last week or so. The New Times, which concentrates more on 'colour' pieces than hard news, last week ran long stories about the new wave of Venezuelan immigrants to Miami, and the plight of Haitian boat people.
This focus is in some sense more international than that of the national media, but viewed through a different lens, it's also just as parochial. One of the things that makes Miami so different is its status as the destination of choice for political refugees from Latin America and the Caribbean; and the international element of the local news is almost exclusively concerned with whichever countries in those areas are tending most towards the Left at the moment, hence the recent interest in Venezuela. Cuba, naturally, is a constant. The New Times piece on the Haitian immigrants was an exception, a provocative article questioning why the 100 or so dirt poor migrants fleeing persecution who washed up on the beaches of South Florida recently are treated so differently from their Cuban counterparts.
The answer is precedent and protocol. So far as Cuba goes, America's antipathy is firmly established, and the route from Havana to here has been well-trodden since the 1959 revolution. The first wave of immigrants mostly consisted in the rich who stood to lose most in Castro's country. Subsequent immigration, which has waxed and waned, has been from all social classes. The most famous influx was the Mariel boatlift in 1980; 125 000 Cubans, mostly economic rather than political refugees, were allowed to leave by Cuba and promised sanctuary by the US. The majority ended up in or near Miami. Still today, a Cuban of whatever status arriving in Miami is almost guaranteed the right to remain, in part for fear of upsetting the vocal community here who regard all Cuban expats as brothers and braves in the struggle against Castro.
Venezuelans are in a similar situation. Although there has been no mass migration on the scale of Mariel, since Chavez took over there Miami has seen a steady stream of mostly political exiles; middle-class journalists, army officers, and of course the rich. Since America is so openly hostile to Chavez, it can't help but offer asylum to all these people if its policy is to seem consistent. This is the difference between the Venezuelans and the Haitians; since the US is officially friendly with Haiti, no such laissez faire attitude to immigration from there exists. It's also been noted that the Haitian refugees tend to be poor and black.
All this highlights two factors in Miami's make-up. The first is the massive and continuing influence of waves of Latin American immigration. Initially through proximity to Cuba, Miami is the place to be for Hispanic exiles. And, because of the peculiar position the US has on Cuba and other countries, these Latins aren't illegal migrants like the Mexicans in the West; they're full members of society.
The second is the gulf between the rich and poor here, which is truly astonishing. The first Cuban exiles, and those from other Latin American countries since, were rich, often enormously so, and contributed to the millionaire's playground element of the city. They also brought a particular political culture in which money can buy influence, and this is now part of the fabric of South Florida life. Subsequent immigrants, though, have often tended towards the poor, dirt-poor; and enormous influxes like the Mariel boatlift have put tremendous strain on public finances and services. A Republican Congressman from Colorado got in trouble a year ago for calling Miami a 'third world country', but many feel he had a point. There's that same ridiculous disparity of wealth, shocking slums rubbing up against glittering high rises, that one associates with such places; and the same sense that the rich run the place in their favour. Joan Didion's book 'Miami', which I read just before coming here, is in some ways outdated; it's a mid-eighties piece of journalism, and some of the contemporary references are now hopelessly obscure. But the picture it paints of of the city, seething with barely submerged undercurrents of shady deals, horrible disparity, and pervasive, murky links to the politics of countries far from here, is as accurate now as it was then.
Thursday, 6 December 2007
Christmas travel
A quick note to inform of my travel plans at Christmas:
Dec 19: Arrive at Heathrow at 6:20am and make my weary jetlagged way across London and up to Durham. Hang around there complaining about the cold until:
Dec 28: Fly from Newcastle to Amsterdam and then train to Rotterdam, to spend a few days with some friends there.
Jan 1: Fly back to Newcastle. That is not going to be a fun flight.
Jan 6: Take a train down to London and stay there overnight, in preparation for
Jan 7: Heathrow again, and back to MIA.
I've no plans for the periods Dec 20 -27 (apart from the obvious) and Jan 2-5, so I'm somewhat open to suggestion; but I'm unlikely to want, or be able to afford, to spend much of that time traipsing up and down the country. Summer, I think, is going to be better for seeing people... More light, you see. Anyway, I hope I'll see at least some of you soon.
Dec 19: Arrive at Heathrow at 6:20am and make my weary jetlagged way across London and up to Durham. Hang around there complaining about the cold until:
Dec 28: Fly from Newcastle to Amsterdam and then train to Rotterdam, to spend a few days with some friends there.
Jan 1: Fly back to Newcastle. That is not going to be a fun flight.
Jan 6: Take a train down to London and stay there overnight, in preparation for
Jan 7: Heathrow again, and back to MIA.
I've no plans for the periods Dec 20 -27 (apart from the obvious) and Jan 2-5, so I'm somewhat open to suggestion; but I'm unlikely to want, or be able to afford, to spend much of that time traipsing up and down the country. Summer, I think, is going to be better for seeing people... More light, you see. Anyway, I hope I'll see at least some of you soon.
Friday, 23 November 2007
Black steel
There's two reasons why my posts here have become less frequent. One is that I am working very, very hard, and so are most of my friends. So the supply of interesting events to relate has dried up somewhat. I've done some fun things in the last couple of weeks or so; but I don't think anyone would benefit from my amateur criticism of an exhibition of Goya drawings, and there's only so much you can say about occasional drinking.
The other reason is that, without exactly getting used to the place, I'm gradually reaching a kind of accommodation with Miami. Though it still regularly strikes me as deeply alien - the palm trees, the alligators in the university lake, the November sun that warms the bones rather than warning of frost - I've lost the wide-eyed sense of wonder that encouraged me, at first, to write about everything I saw.
Every now and then, though, something occurs that reminds me what a thoroughly strange and unfamiliar country, state, city this is. Yesterday was Thanksgiving. Even were I American, I think I would be ambivalent about the day. What, exactly, are thanks been given for? The survival of some of the early colonies; and, by extension, the subjugation of the indigenous population and establishment of the good old USA. Hmmmm. Leaving aside that perhaps ungraceful point, a compulsory family gathering within a month of Christmas seems particularly cruel. I dodged two invitations to spend the day with large extended families and spent it
hiding in the philosophy grad 'work room' - a poky space, apparently once a small apartment, that makes the eleventh floor of Sheffield's arts tower seem well-appointed.
Only a cynic would say that the day after Thanksgiving is a more apposite expression of the American way of life. Today is 'Black Friday'. The name has nothing to do with stock market crashes, massacres, or the like. Instead, it's (probably incorrectly, but very nicely) said to derive from the fact that it's first day of the financial year on which the figures on the retailers' bottom lines can be penned in black rather than red (The American fiscal year begins on Oct 1). The discounts are, apparently, massive, and the queues enormous; the whole nation hits the shops and does their bit for the national economy.
Another strange thing happened recently. I can't resist the quotation: I got a letter from the government the other day, I opened and read it, it said they were suckers. They wanted me for their army or whatever. Imagine me giving a damn, I said never.
Yes, I was informed by mail that I had been registered for the Selective Service System. This is a compulsory scheme under which every male between the ages of 18 and 30 are registered so that, if a military draft is deemed necessary, the process can be conducted fairly, efficiently, and quickly. I was briefly worried, given that the American military is so far short of its recruitment targets that conscription is being seriously mooted by some. Luckily, my registration is an administrative error, an automatically produced document linked to my registration for a social security number. As a 'resident alien', I can de-register easily. No Arabian nights for me any time soon.
So, dubious holidays, rampant consumerism, and worrying intimations of military service. It's the American way, and it's still, reassuringly, very peculiar indeed.
The other reason is that, without exactly getting used to the place, I'm gradually reaching a kind of accommodation with Miami. Though it still regularly strikes me as deeply alien - the palm trees, the alligators in the university lake, the November sun that warms the bones rather than warning of frost - I've lost the wide-eyed sense of wonder that encouraged me, at first, to write about everything I saw.
Every now and then, though, something occurs that reminds me what a thoroughly strange and unfamiliar country, state, city this is. Yesterday was Thanksgiving. Even were I American, I think I would be ambivalent about the day. What, exactly, are thanks been given for? The survival of some of the early colonies; and, by extension, the subjugation of the indigenous population and establishment of the good old USA. Hmmmm. Leaving aside that perhaps ungraceful point, a compulsory family gathering within a month of Christmas seems particularly cruel. I dodged two invitations to spend the day with large extended families and spent it
hiding in the philosophy grad 'work room' - a poky space, apparently once a small apartment, that makes the eleventh floor of Sheffield's arts tower seem well-appointed.
Only a cynic would say that the day after Thanksgiving is a more apposite expression of the American way of life. Today is 'Black Friday'. The name has nothing to do with stock market crashes, massacres, or the like. Instead, it's (probably incorrectly, but very nicely) said to derive from the fact that it's first day of the financial year on which the figures on the retailers' bottom lines can be penned in black rather than red (The American fiscal year begins on Oct 1). The discounts are, apparently, massive, and the queues enormous; the whole nation hits the shops and does their bit for the national economy.
Another strange thing happened recently. I can't resist the quotation: I got a letter from the government the other day, I opened and read it, it said they were suckers. They wanted me for their army or whatever. Imagine me giving a damn, I said never.
Yes, I was informed by mail that I had been registered for the Selective Service System. This is a compulsory scheme under which every male between the ages of 18 and 30 are registered so that, if a military draft is deemed necessary, the process can be conducted fairly, efficiently, and quickly. I was briefly worried, given that the American military is so far short of its recruitment targets that conscription is being seriously mooted by some. Luckily, my registration is an administrative error, an automatically produced document linked to my registration for a social security number. As a 'resident alien', I can de-register easily. No Arabian nights for me any time soon.
So, dubious holidays, rampant consumerism, and worrying intimations of military service. It's the American way, and it's still, reassuringly, very peculiar indeed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)