Thinking in Black and White

"It just wouldn't look right to have the world without color television in today's society."

The above is a sentence in a student-essay on the topic of technology and how it could both "free" us as well as enslave us to itself, simultaneously.

The one thing I like in the sentence is the stupendous conviction. The writer firmly believes in what she says.

But everything else radiated by the sentence is ripe for critical thinking.

The writer is technically stating the obvious: Color televisions are the only televisions available today in the market, is my guess. Black and white TV’s are out, aren’t they?

Perhaps, the child is implying something else?

Were you to be discovered with a black and white television set in your possession, you might be perceived as someone not belonging to this era, or you might simply be perceived as “weird”. Would you not you look askance at the owner of a flip-phone?

In the world of certain types of technology, I believe, the progression from old to new is mercilessly linear. In the world of audio-visuals, the march from black and white to color and silence to sound, among other marches, is irreversible such that black and white is now a subset of color and silence, as is demonstrated so exquisitely by the 2011 Oscar nominated film The Artist, is a part of the wholeness of sound.

However, what the writer of the sentence does is not just confine the statement to a specific context, but draw an absolute truth of “life”, as it were, from it.

And that is precisely where the trouble—of me accepting the sentence’s conviction at face value is—begins.

The writer believes, I feel, that the movement from black and white to color is a movement of progress in general. To have color is to be modern, but to have black and white is to be anachronistic. 

I feel the writer reflexively draws from the advancement in the field of technology an unexamined truth and applies it to the field of life.

The syllogism is faulty, reducing the sentence itself to black and white.

  

  

Nudity and Class

Sex-arrested yet again: Dominique Strauss-Kahn is in French police custody in connection with a prostitution ring.

The crux of the matter is as simple as Zola's characterization of the Parisian prostitute Nana: All Paris was likely to get in once Nana opened her thighs.

Straus Kahn, now a butt of jokes on French television--on the puppet show "Les Guignols", Strauss Kahn is caricatured as an oversexed skirt-chaser in leopard-print bathrobe--apparently dropped his pants or opened his flies, and every time he opened the gates, women got in (or so it seems).

Could several of the women at Strauss Kahn gatherings have been prostitutes? The French police asks. Did Strauss Kahn knowingly consort with prostitutes?

The gentleman's lawyer has argued a resounding "no":

People are not always clothed at these parties. I challenge you to tell the difference between a nude prostitute and a classy lady in the nude.

His argument: a majority of the women that Strauss Kahn consorted with at gatherings would be in the nude. Can you tell the difference between a classy lady and a whore when both are in the nude?

Great question! Makes you think about the philosophical query of whether clothes make the woman.

It isn't possible to tell a class female apart from a whorish one? Shows that Strauss Kahn never attempted to speak to any of the women. He simply came at them with his flies open? Surely one can tell somebody's "class" when one engages in a conversation? Or, maybe naked female's class can be ascertained through other means?

Strauss Kahn has always seemed to be in a hurry, to get it over with, as the case with the hotel maid in New York City demonstrated, and the case with the French journalist--his goddaughter--showed.

I wonder what my dearest friend T thinks of all this...She was an ardent admirer of Strauss Kahn and was resolute in her belief that the lowly maid from the Bronx had tried to frame Strauss Kahn on rape charges. Surely, T had argued, this French gentleman had class enough to distinguish between who deserved to suck his instrument?

Well, the latest sexarrest of Strauss Kahn proves that the Parisian gentleman is class-blind.

Caveat to classy ladies: Never appear in public in the nude or your class risks getting dissolved.

What is Diversity, Really?

German intelligence: The story of Miriam and Christian Rengier, German expats in New York City, is heart-warming.

The Rengiers are affluent and highly educated and wanted to provide their kids with the best possible education money can buy. After shopping around for schools in Manhattan, they chose a Public over private schools on the following grounds: Private schools did not have diversity, whereas public schools abounded in it. Being white and “Germanic”, the Rengiers didn’t want their sons to experience more of the same.

They scoffed at the token diversity on display in private schools—in the choice of cafeteria food:

The kids were able to choose between seven different lunches: sushi and macrobiotics and whatever, […] And I said, What if I don’t want my son to choose from seven different lunches? And she looked at me like I was an idiot.

The Rengiers said they wanted “real” diversity in the lives of their children, not simply a gastronomic one.

This isn’t just about how smart the Germans are in differentiating between “real” and “cosmetic”, but about how illuminating this whole ability to make fine distinctions is.