Exceptional America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mugambi Jouet
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
Law School ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
American Conservatism ◽  
The Bible

Americans are far more divided than other Westerners over basic issues, including wealth inequality, health care, climate change, evolution, the literal truth of the Bible, apocalyptical prophecies, gender roles, abortion, gay rights, sexual education, gun control, mass incarceration, the death penalty, torture, human rights, and war. The intense polarization of U.S. conservatives and liberals has become a key dimension of American exceptionalism—an idea widely misunderstood as American superiority. It is rather what makes America an exception, for better or worse. While exceptionalism once was largely a source of strength, it may now spell decline, as unique features of U.S. history, politics, law, culture, religion, and race relations foster grave conflicts and injustices. They also shed light on the peculiar ideological evolution of American conservatism, which long predated Trumpism. Anti-intellectualism, conspiracy-mongering, radical anti-governmentalism, and Christian fundamentalism are far more common in America than Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing inspiration from Alexis de Tocqueville, Mugambi Jouet explores American exceptionalism’s intriguing roots as a multicultural outsider-insider. Raised in Paris by a French mother and Kenyan father, he then lived throughout America, from the Bible Belt to New York, California, and beyond. His articles have notably been featured in The New Republic, Slate, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, and Le Monde. He teaches at Stanford Law School.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mugambi Jouet
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
Vicious Circle ◽  
Global History ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
American Society

Jouet begins his book by describing his work as a human rights lawyer representing poor prisoners in New York at the time of mass incarceration on a scale unprecedented in global history. He goes on to describe how the degeneration of American justice embodies troubling dimensions of American exceptionalism, including acute wealth inequality, systemic racism, anti-intellectualism, Christian fundamentalism, and chronic human rights abuses. While the word “exceptional” can imply greatness or superiority, American exceptionalism historically referred to how America is “exceptional” in the sense of “unique,” “different,” “unusual,” “extraordinary” or “peculiar.” Ironically, scores of Americans equate “exceptionalism” with their nation’s superiority when it might be its Achilles Heel—a self-destructive vicious circle threatening admirable dimensions of American society.

Mass Incarceration, Executions, and Gun Violence in “the Land of the Free”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mugambi Jouet
Keyword(s):  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Gun Violence ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Murder Rate ◽  
Criminal Justice Reform ◽  
Second Amendment ◽  
Western Democracy

Mass incarceration exists in America on a scale unmatched in global history. America is also the only Western democracy that has not abolished the death penalty; and one of the nations that execute the most prisoners alongside abusive dictatorships like China, North Korea, and Iran. American justice is further characterized by pervasive racial discrimination, the peculiar “War on Drugs,” the dehumanizing treatment of juveniles, and routine use of harmful solitary confinement. Modern America has thus become a systematic human rights violator in criminal law and punishment. It was not always so, as foreigners once saw American justice as enlightened. Harsh justice has not made America particularly safe. It has the highest murder rate and the most gun violence in the West due to extraordinarily lax gun control shaped by die-hard partisans of the Second Amendment and lobbying by the NRA. Criminal justice reform gained more attention after shootings of unarmed black men in Ferguson and beyond led to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, historical root causes behind this dimension of American exceptionalism have been widely overlooked, including systemic racism, populism, anti-intellectualism, market fundamentalism, and religious fundamentalism.

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

„Rzymski” Żyd – nieznana twórczość Romana Brandstaettera

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Dariusz Konrad Sikorski
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Role Model ◽  
The Self ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Law

Summary After 1946, ie. after embracing Christianity, Roman Brandstaetter would often point to the Biblical Jonah as a role model for both his life and his artistic endeavour. In the interwar period, when he was a columnist of Nowy Głos, a New York Polish-Jewish periodical, he used the penname Romanus. The ‘Roman’ Jew appears to have treated his columns as a form of an artistic and civic ‘investigation’ into scandalous cases of breaking the law, destruction of cultural values and violation of social norms. Although it his was hardly ‘a new voice’ with the potential to change the course of history, he did become an intransigent defender of free speech. Brought up on the Bible and the best traditions of Polish literature and culture, Brandstaetter, the self-appointed disciple of Adam Mickiewicz, could not but stand up to the challenge of anti-Semitic aggression.

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