Two pages on Palestine

Page 6 of Palestine, by Joe Sacco. Click to enlarge.

Every morning, I hear on NPR the latest, in their tortured pro-Israel way, about what’s going on in the Middle East. Today the shock was that a rocket managed to land in Gedera, a mere 20 miles from Tel Aviv. It hit a building.

Oh, but that rocket did not hit just a building. It “exploded near a house,” and a “three-month-old girl sustained minor injuries in the attack.” The news is becoming sentimental. It’s not enough that bombs and/or rockets are killing “civilians.” Now it is more important that IDF tanks are hitting “schools” (maintained by the UN) or that babies are suffering from “minor injuries.”

In other words, war is being sentimenalized as it becomes all about the children. Of course, this is an ancient tactic, villifying the enemy by emphasizing (or inventing) incidents of extreme social cruelty in a game of propaganda. And that’s fine. But it’s important to maintain a certain level of skepticism. Glenn Greenwald touches on this tactic in his intense takedown of Michael Goldfarb and others from Sunday. The cost of villifying the enemy in such a way is that you can begin to excuse mistreating the enemy yourself. If they behave “inhumanely,” then there is no reason to treat them humanely.

If Hamas is willing to run the risk of injuring a toddler, why should the IDF care about a Palestinian school?

This sort of questioning, of a kind of tribalism run amok, usually reminds me of Butler’s Precarious Life, which warns against the use of violence in mourning, but the specific way in which the media plays a role reminds me of two pages (that I’ve put on flickr: p. 6, 7) from Joe Sacco’s excellent Palestine, a collection of comics journalism from the early 1990s.

Sacco begins his narrative in Cairo, but he demonstrates an eagerness to try and approach the conflict from the Palestinian side. In talking to a young woman he’s interested in, he lays the lack of this approach precisely at the feet of the media. On the incident aboard the Achille Lauro, he writes:

You gotta understand the American media. They want human interest. Klinghoffer gets killed and we get the full profile, the bereaving widow, where he lived and what he put on his corn flakes… you see the power of that?

The US media never tells the other side. Hamas is sending rockets into Israel because they are terrorists and that is what terrorists do. Sending a rocket becomes the initial act of war, not the blockade. But then Sacco twists the knife in further. Klinghoffer, you see, not only represented Israel (as a Jew), but also America. And here Sacco demonstrates his own tribalism:

Americans won’t care about the problems of Palestinians when Americans get killed in these terrorist attacks. One American dies like that, it eclipses anything Palestinians have to say!

The woman he’s wooing is Middle Eastern, and to this whining about one dead American, she simply replies, “Well… I don’t know so much about these things…” But Sacco shows the scene fantastically. He’s pounding his fist. There are lines of adamance surrounding his head and fist, while Claudia looks away at brawling late night Berliners. This American is right, dammit. He has the answers for Palestine.

Yet Claudia demurs. The conversation is over. Sacco’s love affair is put on hold. And in the next panel he is seething, white hot, sweating, drooling, shouting, “Palestinian boyfriend! Ha! Bitch! Terrorist groupie!”

It’s not, then, just the arrogance of putting American lives ahead of Palestinian lives (though that’s bad). It’s not, then, also the arrogance of thinking that America knows best. His calumny in response to Claudia’s rejection is a sign of being terribly afraid of being wrong. The American media is so wound up in its pro-Israel bias, that it cannot afford to be even-handed, since that would involve explaining how it had messed up and gotten the story so one-sided in the past.

Sacco gives us this story as the first part of a conversion narrative. It’s sad at how unlikely it is that others would follow.

Tags: children, Glenn Greenwald, IDF, Israel, Joe Sacco, Judith Butler, Palestine, sentimentality

Language Log posted about the Typealyzer last month, and only today (while waiting for some video to digitize) did I get around to playing with it. The Typealyzer scans a blog and then decides what kind of Myers-Briggs personality type the blog represents. I’m allegedly an ENFP, so I thought it would be neat to see if this blog or the other I maintain would come up as such.

No such luck. Both blogs came up as INTP. Typealyzer characterizes the INTP blogger like this:

The logical and analytical type. They are espescially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

“Arrogant, impatient and insensitive”? If that’s what my blogs manage to appear, then that means they succeed! I think I’m actually proud of the fact that my blogs don’t come up ENFP. Cheap science as it is, Typealyzer suggests that I do a good job of maintaining a level of distance between what I write about and how I live my life–at least these days. That, I think, is full of win.

I also ran my friend’s blogs: Pete blogs as ESTP: “very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through.” That’s an amazing description of Banana Nutrient. Whet’s blog is an ISTP: “especially attuned to the demands of the moment [and master] of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously.” Manan’s blog, on the other hand, comes up INTP just like mine. I think that makes sense.

Tags: language, Language Log, myers-briggs, personality, psychology

Rod Blagojevich, who is probably going to jail, is of Serbian ancestry. But his Serbian surname has a root visible in lots of Slavic languages. So, for the sake of the staggering level of pseudo-ironic coincidences available here, I present you a list with Russian words that begin with “Blago”:

• благо - blágo - good, blessing
• благоволить - blagovolít’ - be favorably disposed
• благоговейный - blagogovéjnyj - reverent, respectful
• благодарить - blagodarít’ - to thank
• благодарный - blagodarnyj - grateful
• благодать - blagodat’ - blessing
• благодетель - blagodétel’ - benefactor
• благодеяние - blagodejánie - good deed
• благодушный - blagodúshnyj - benevolent
• благой - blagój - good
• благонадёждый - blagonadjózhdyj - reliable, trustworthy
• благоприятный - blagoprijátnyj - favorable
• благоразумие - blagorazúmie - prudence, discretion
• благородный - blagoródnyj - noble, well born
• благословение - blagoslovénie - benediction
• благотворительный - blagotvorítel’nyj - charitable
• благотворный - blagotvórnyj - wholesome
• благочестивый - blagochestívyj - pious

Enjoy.

Tags: Blagojevich, corruption, etymology, root, russian, slavic

Poster for The Event of Obama. Click to enlarge.

I started this post two weeks ago exactly, but just as I was trying to get my thoughts about Obama straight–or, more precisely, my thoughts about why I felt how I did about his election–I saw a poster for an event hosted by 3CT on “The Event of Obama.” So I decided to hold off this post until after that event, hoping that my ideas would have made more sense to me and write two posts about maps. Yet now, the event about the event in the past, I’m writing this and not thinking about Obama again for like six months.

While waiting for the event, I came across (via zunguzungu) Judith Butler’s ideas about the election. What struck me was that her tone was very similar to mine (and it made use of discredited statistical information, just as my original thoughts did). But people I knew weren’t marking out all over place over Obama, criticized Butler’s piece as well. And the critiques are very well understood and reflect perfectly back to me. My finger-wagging warnings were a sort of shield of condescension, hiding from view the fact that I was startled at how simply ambivalent I felt about the election.

The next four paragraphs are a quick recap of some of the questions and positions taken by the two conversers and the audience. You can skip them if you want to get to the part about ambivalence. Or, you can click here.

So the 3CT talk was more of an open conversation between Lauren Berlant and Michael C. Dawson. Berlant started, with a few ideas and anecdotes, by creating a sort of space where youth was important, but that somehow the youth was tied in with a strong current of a kind of (sometimes guarded) optimism. Exhibit A of (an unguarded) utopian practice was the imagined July 4, 2009 New York Times by The Yes Men. Reading the document, we begin to wonder if these sorts of futures are now earnestly on the table. Has the idea of, say, Big Boxes getting evicted from low-income neighborhoods actually become a potentially (or soon-to-be) mainstream position? And does this mainstreaming come with a newly saturated political public, including this hyperactive youth which searches for “Barack Obama” almost as often as “Britney Spears”? Are the Overton Windows finally moving toward me?

Dawson now began his introduction, in which he reiterated his persistent critique of Obama throughout the election season, including a post about Obama’s famous race speech. Dawson tied his ideas around speculation about the effect of the economic crisis on Obama’s chances, in that it seemed like the future of the nation was now at stake. He also mentioned that it’s been a terrifically long time since a (lefty) social movement had won while being tied to an electoral victory. These are all crucial reasons for why people are excited about the Obama election. But Dawson was very critical of those who would suggest that we are now in a “post-racial” moment, speculating that the demonization of those who suggested that the (lack of) response to Hurricane Katrina was racially motivated was later layered onto Rev. Wright and Michelle Obama. Will Obama as President reinforce those exclusions? Or will they fade? Or will other demonizations (of Arabs, Muslims) become central, in a redistribution of the iconicity of race?

Berlant returned to mention the issue of gender, presenting it as a big downer that no one wanted to talk about. We’re supposed to be “over” gender, after all. But she showed how the coverage of Clinton was tied to classic misogynist tropes. She was always too much or too little. Finally Berlant asked if it was possible for Clinton (or any female candidate) to represent “composure” or “cool”–two things Obama does. In my mind, I kept thinking of Jackie Kennedy, which I suppose proves the point. Only as First Lady can a woman be composed (maybe like HRC was a decade ago?).

After this, we moved to the broader Q&A section of the talk. Among the interesting ideas that emerged during this part involved how Obama’s election might encourage a renaissance of class politics in African-American communities. Next, the conversation moved to the narcissism of identity and representation, which made me feel like it would be worthwhile to ask a question based largely on my annoyed election day hangover post. Dawson fielded it and told me not to fret about the happiness people are feeling. They’re happy for all different sorts of reasons, he explained, and it’s crucial to remember this. There is, after all, a lot to be happy about regarding this election, even in political terms.

In any case, the Q&A ended with Berlant’s asking about what it means to be ambivalent about this moment. This is, if I had to do it all again, where the discussion would have started. After all, that’s the good way of explaining my reaction. I was happy that a Democrat won. I was happy that we elected an African-American. I was happy that the UofC gets Democrat prestige points from the election. Talking about this afterward, Berlant reiterated two sites of hope from her post: Obama is not afraid of running on politics, and he is a firm believer in the power of grassroots organizing.

The bad does not need rehashing–the other side is very obvious to anyone who pays attention. Perhaps people like me can find some comfort in the New Deal fantasy that presents Roosevelt as enacting such wide reform by pitching it to Congress as a compromise with what the noisy socialists wanted. And I think that’s the good place to be. But as Berlant writes, there’s nothing wrong with ambivalence–in fact, in this case, it’s something good, as it shows the complexity of our attachments. And it’s fine to be complexly attached.

Perhaps, then, this is a perfectly fine place to stop these thoughts (as I’m still not very impressed with their coherence, but I want this semi-final Obama post as behind me as my absentee ballot), and leave with the meditation on complexity coupled with an activist call to arms provided by Jay Smooth:

I’m cool here. I don’t have to be right all the time.

Tags: 3CT, ambivalence, attachment, Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Jay Smooth, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Michael Dawson, optimism, The Yes Men, utopia, zunguzungu

(This is how I spent GIS Day)

I was surprised in my previous post by how young and black Louisiana was (in 2000), yet how not for Obama it went. Only 10 of 64 parishes were carried by the Democrat, though they included three of the four most populous parishes. I wondered if maybe there was a rupture between the demographic data I had (from the 2000 Census) and the election data from this year.

That rupture, of course, could be Katrina. The hurricane obviously changed the demographics of the state somewhat, but how much? I’m certain that the campaigns canvassed a good demo picture of the state, but I don’t have (I don’t think) access to that data. Instead, I wonder if we can detect a Katrina effect knowing simply that there was a huge change in the population voting for president between 2004 and 2008. And once we detect it, can we measure it. And once we do that, can we speculate as to a possible result in 2008 that did not involve Katrina.

So let’s start with the demographic data. In 2000, Louisiana was about 1/3 African-American (145k against a total population of 445k). Over half of that population was in four parishes (in descending order): Orleans (where New Orleans is), East Baton Rouge (Baton Rouge), Caddo (Shreveport), and Jefferson (New Orleans suburbs). To give a sense of the drop off: in 2000, there were over 10,000 African-Americans in Jefferson Parish. The next largest population was in Ouachita Parish, which had not even 5000. Jefferson is also notable in that it was only 23% black. African-Americans made up larger portions of the populations of the other three parishes, topping out with 67% of Orleans Parish. Here, then, is a simple chart.

African-Americans vs. others in 2000, by parish

What’s clearest here is that, surprise, Louisiana has some pretty sparsely populated parishes, a few of which, actually, end up having black majorities. The real numbers are so small, though, that they just look like little chips on the map. But since it’s the people that matter, not the space, I made cartograms of the state for the past three presidential elections (Data: 2000, 2004, 2008). To make the cartograms, I used Tom Gross’s Cartogram Geoprocessing Tool, which itself is based on cart, by Michael T. Gastner and M. E. J. Newman. As with the last post, the colors change at 5% and 10% margins of victory. The Republican (Bush and McCain) is red, and the Democrat (Gore, Kerry, Obama) is blue.

Presidential election cartograms sized by 2000 population

Now things get a little clearer (and far more cetacean). Orleans is reliably, strongly Democratic, as are the teeny parishes on the western edge of Mississippi. Yet Obama was able to flip Caddo Parish back to blue and carried Baton Rouge’s parish, which neither Kerry nor Gore could. We can speculate as to why other parishes went more for McCain than they did for Bush (like 42% black St. Landry Parish, which Gore managed to carry but went soft to the GOP in 2004 and 2008), but my primary interest here is in speculating about Katrina, which means focusing on Orleans Parish.

Orleans Parish in 2000 was about 2/3 African-American. Gore carried it by 54%, Kerry by 55%, and Obama by 59%. This is predictable based on the higher African-American support for Obama in comparison to Gore and Kerry. It wasn’t that much bigger (it would be hard for it to be so), but it was bigger. But if we look at the raw vote totals, perhaps we can get a sense of a parish that has lost its population. Here we have the total number of votes cast, the percentage that went to the Democrat, and the change from the previous election:

2000: 181,221 (76%)

2004: 195,269 (78%) (up 8%)

2008: 146,287 (79%) (down 25%)

Interesting. Obama got a larger share of the vote (and won by a larger percentage), but got fewer total votes. Nearly 50k fewer people voted in Orleans Parish in 2008 than in 2004. How did the vote count change statewide?

2000: 1,768,656

2004: 1,928,049 (up 9%)

2008: 1,958,059 (up 2%)

So even though turnout was actually up in Louisiana in 2008 generally, Orleans Parish suffered an intense drop. In fact, in 2008, Orleans dropped to third among parishes by total number of votes cast. In the previous two elections, it led the way. Only six parishes had fewer votes in 2008 than in 2004: Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Red River, and Cameron. Plaquemines and St. Bernard are, of course, the two parishes just southeast of Orleans Parish. Interestingly, St. Bernard had an even steeper drop in votes cast than Orleans Parish. Not even half as many votes were cast in that parish in 2008 as had been in 2004. Cameron and Red River Parishes had relatively small drops of votes cast. Cameron’s 17% drop was big proportional to it, but both Parishes put together had just over 800 fewer votes total. Considering that of the Katrina parishes (the other four), over 77k fewer votes were cast, those western parishes are a drop in the bucket.

So despite the general tick up of 2% in the Louisiana voting, over 77k fewer votes were cast in Orleans, St. Bernard, Jefferson, and Plaquemines parishes. In fact, not including those four parishes, the statewide increase was actually not 2% but over 6%! And if you consider further that only two parishes had fewer votes in 2004 than 2000 (Tensas and Madison), and that both decreased by under 3% each, it’s not that far of a stretch to assume that without Katrina, there would’ve been increases in those four parishes. So it’s obvious that something huge, and Katrina is a great culprit, suppressed the hell out of the vote in southeastern Louisiana.

So now to finish: absent Katrina, could Obama have won?

Statewide, 1,958,059 votes were cast this year. Obama came 198,049 short of a majority. So even if the 50k Orleans Parish lost would’ve all voted for Obama (which is close to assumable, considering he won 80% of the votes in the Parish as it was), he still would have only started to chip away at that imposing 200k vote difference. Additionally, the other three depressed parishes went strongly for McCain, so the big strides made by the extra votes in Orleans would’ve been nibbled away by the extra McCain support in the other parishes. It’s possible that Jefferson would have gone a little less strongly for McCain (Obama carried a smaller portion of the parish in comparison to Kerry, but not much smaller), but there’s still no way. Furthermore, in St. Bernard, McCain got about 10,000 fewer votes than Bush did, while Obama only got about 6,500 fewer votes than Kerry.

But there’s one more thing to take into account, which is visible in the cartograms: East Baton Rouge Parish’s going for Obama could, in fact, be the result of Katrina relocation. Over 14,000 more people voted in that parish this year than in 2004. And in that parish, McCain got about 5,000 fewer votes than Bush did, but Obama got over 17,000 more than Kerry did. Furthermore, though many parishes posted gains of 10k or more voters between 2000 and 2004, only East Baton Rouge did so between 2004 and 2008.

So, sadly, it looks like, tragedy that Katrina was, it did not prevent Obama from carrying Louisiana. Orleans Parish, large as it is, simply was not large enough to make the difference. Furthermore, ultimately, the racial makeup (assuming a level of correlation between racial identity and support for Obama) was not big enough to push the vote in Obama’s direction. There is no doubt that Orleans Parish, which was both the blackest and most vote gutted parish in the state underwent an immense demographic upheaval. But compared to the rest of the state, it wasn’t big enough. Furthermore, while it is true that many parishes in Louisiana have large African-American populations, many of them–especially the parishes adjoining Mississippi–are so small in terms of population that they could not overwhelm the huge McCain strongholds like St. Tammany Parish (which McCain carried by almost 60,000 votes).

That said, the new taste for Democrats in Baton Rouge and Shreveport bodes well for the future.

Tags: Barack Obama, GIS, Katrina, Louisiana, New Orleans, statistics

[I massively updated the middle part of this post after thinking about it on the ride home]

I was pretty startled by the two maps I saw at Strange Maps over the weekend. They showed a distinct correlation between cotton production in 1860 and Obama support in 2008. Where more cotton was picked 150 years ago, there were more Obama voters. There’s ways in which the correlation makes sense: slavery increased production on plantations, slaves were African-Americans, and, now, African-Americans voted almost unanimously for Obama (95%, according to CNN). But could it be that that band of Obama support snaking through the middle of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi was still predominately African-American, though it had been the center of cotton production in the waning days of slavery? Enter GIS and 2000 census data!

Before I continue, I have to make the caveats that I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I’m just playing around with some data and ArcGIS. Hit me back in half a year, and I’ll be much smarter.

Anyway, first, the vote results by county (poll results via Mark Newman, shapefiles courtesy US Gov’t). My map is a bit different than the one floating around the internet, since I think I broke down the colors differently. Simply put, where the colors are light, the support for Obama (blue) or McCain (red) was under 5%. Where the colors are bright, support was between 5% and 10%. Where the colors go dark, support goes over 10%:

How does that thin, thin band of blue match up with African-American populations in the South? Enter my second map, which charts the percentage of the population identifying as “Black” in the 2000 census:

There seems to be a strong correlation, at least visually. It’s interesting to note, however, that Obama failed to carry many counties that were at least 40% black. Some even went rather strong for McCain. As I don’t have voter demographic information, I can’t really speculate as to the reason. But one possible reason is that the black population is too young to vote in those counties.

But youth was also, apparently, a huge indicator of Obama support. Of the under-30 crowd nationaly, 66% went for the Democrat. So I decided to see if youth could predict anything about Obama support–perhaps it, too, would correlate strongly. This sets up the need for two maps, however, one of everyone under 30 in 2000, and one just of everyone ages 18-30 in 2000:

% of population under age 30 in 2000, by county

We can see that the same sort of band winds its way through the Deep South, though south Georgia and Louisiana, which are rather young, didn’t go for Obama so strongly. Let’s see how the demographics work out for the youth of today, the 18-30 demographic:

% of population aged 18-30 in 2000, by county

Now it’s just a visual mishmash. In the earlier version of this post, I had % of population under the age of 22, but that’s not really useful information. It’s not like those people all aged 8 years since 2000 and weren’t replaced by new youths. It made more sense that if I didn’t adjust the racial demographic data at all, I shouldn’t also adjust the age data–just so I can be consistent. But what do we see here, other than that there’s no one young in far west North Carolina? I’m not sure. In fact, it’s so visually messy, that the map ceases to be useful, and I might need to actually scatter plot this.

So let’s first look at Obama’s margin of victory against the population under 30:

I’m not (yet) a statistician, but this plot, to my eye, shows that Obama trended a bit younger than McCain, and that the younger the counties got (proportionally), the bigger margin of victory he got. But if this is the “young” demographic, what does the “youth” demographic show?

Is it showing the same sort of thing? I can’t tell. Maybe? If it is, it seems very subtle, and I don’t know how to suss out the information any better. It does seem like once 27% or more of the population was “youth,” they went for Obama more than McCain, but then there are those outliers in the super youthy counties, which all went for McCain. So if the youth plotting isn’t, actually, all that helpful, let’s plot the margin against racial makeup:

This, I believe, speaks for itself…

Anyway, I think there’s more to be said about the age thing. I just wish I understand the data better. And I wonder how much the data is being skewed by including Katrina. In 2000, Louisiana was very young and very black, as my later maps show. Yet it was decidedly not interested in sending Obama to the White House, unlike other black and young counties in the Deep South.

Tags: Barack Obama, GIS, John McCain, statistics, The South, youth

Well, it turns out that my concerns about the turnout in my previous post are now totally wrong. Nate shows today that Obama beat Kerry in pretty much every demographic, and in some he beat him by double digits. Considering that more people voted, period, than in 2004, it follows that more of each demographic (in raw numbers, not just as a percentage) voted for Obama, too.

I would like to know, however, how many people voted for Bush in 2004 and voted for Obama this time. I’ve heard lots of anecdotal stories, but I want data, if such data exists. Saying something like “America is more Democratic now” requires a better understanding of the relationship between the set of “Voters in the 2008 election” within the set of “Americans.” I mean, you can make a sort of 1:1 distinction (I believe one of my profs says something like “a public is made of who bothered to show up”), but in trying to understand the broader scale of things, you know… something a bit meatier is maybe helpful.

Still, I got a pretty strong complaint from a buddy about my previous post. His complaint was basically about why I cared about what Matthews thought about what had happened in the election. The event was what was worth remarking upon, not the response/reading of the event.

What I meant was, however, that it is important that people are responding to this election in such an affective manner. What kinds of celebration are, actually, called for here?

For Matthews, it’s worth celebrating that the US has elected an African-American. This feeling has anecdotally permeated all of my encounters with Obama supporters since Ohio was called. There’s a lot of “it shows a lot that in 40 years…” and the like that I hear from, generally, white yuppie types–including both baby boomers and young hipsters. There’s a lot of self-congratulation, like, “See? We proved we’re not racist! And for our second trick, we’re going to make Crash Best Picture!”

But, look, the point wasn’t to make some kind of gesture about race with this election. The point was to stop the GOP brand of corrupt misgovernance (which is why I think it’s important to realize how full of FAIL Bush’s reëlection was). The fact that at the same time we managed to break some kind of color line is, not to be too dismissive of the true happiness that people are feeling, sort of just a bonus. We need a good President. Obama’s racial makeup is neither a necessary nor a sufficient component of his chance at being that. Do I think it helps? Sure. Is it enough? Does anyone think that?

So for the time being, I see it as important to keep the reactions as two separate things. There’s a response that’s a repudiation of GOP misrule, and there’s a response that’s a gesture toward civil rights.

But what kind of credit can (or should) I take for the civil rights side of any kind of response I’d have (as a non phenotypical racial minority)? This morning on the 12, a young guy boarded and started a call/response with the rest of the riders about Obama. “Barack Obama!” he’d shout, and the bus would respond, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” I kept my mouth shut. Then he started trying to guess who on the bus voted for McCain. Again, I kept my mouth shut (and I was too far away to fall into his gaze). But it would’ve been strange for me to somehow join in. I don’t see his election as a validation of some kind of American promise regarding equality for all.

(Weirdly, if the call/response were about a team that had just won a championship, then I would’ve joined in.)

I mean, part of the (alleged) McCain gambit in the selection of Sarah Palin as running mate was that she would bring over people who wanted to see the glass ceiling for women shattered. She even alluded to this in her début. So for people who cared most about seeing women finally reach for the (second) highest office in the land, the thinking goes, McCain should get their vote. After all, Obama could’ve chosen HRC as his running mate, but didn’t. Obviously gender equality (continuing the thread) is not as important to him. These were all GOP logical contortions we experienced this summer, don’t forget.

Turn the clock back further to Obama’s 2004 race against Alan Keyes, a nominee suspected of being chosen precisely because it would take the racial aspect out of the election equation (or so some surmised). Now imagine, then, for a moment, this year’s election if Obama went up against Keyes instead of McCain.

Now imagine Keyes against HRC. Or, hell, even Biden or Edwards, unlikely as it is.

See what I mean? The proper response to having Alan Keyes defeat Joe Biden for President is not, “I’m so amazed at how far we’ve come since the end of Jim Crow” or Matthews’s “America has done it [showing the world it is the vanguard in equality] again!” The proper response is, “I can’t fucking believe that the Democrats failed, once more, to convince the USA that the GOP simply has no interest in governance.”

And that’s the point of keeping the affective and political responses somehow separate. Making the significance of Obama’s election related to race carries value (as I believe Cory Booker explained on MSNBC, Obama’s election may encourage more African-Americans to seek statewide offices, no longer wary of looking for votes outside of urban environments), but it’s a part of a picture that has many more crucially important elements at hand, like fixing this country.

And it’s in the fixing the country where I get a little deflated. I don’t think the press will let the Democrats enact the agenda they want, nor do I think the GOP (though they may be so chastened that they are willing to start playing ball) somehow will forget how to obstruct. But even if that were all in place, Obama, himself (and the leadership in Congress) are not, simply, progressive enough to push through change that would, actually, be change. Perhaps I’m wrong; I’d love to be. But I see Obama as ruling as an infuriating centrist right out of the School of Clinton. And that, then, makes me a lot less excited about the election than everyone else around me seems to be.

Then again, I can’t think of anyone who shares my politics close enough where I’d be excited about their election who could, also, at the same time, actually get elected. This is where 2004 returns: had Kerry won, defects and all, we still would’ve thrown Bush out of office. Now we are denied the opportunity of actually turning our backs on him. And here’s where kos’s mantra returns: first, more Democrats; then, better Democrats.

The short version of this post (from The Simpsons via Rob McDougall and zunguzungu):

Bart: “Wow. I feel so full of…what’s the opposite of shame?”
Marge: “Pride?”
Bart: “No, not that far from shame.”
Homer: [quavering] “Less shame?”
Bart: [happy] “Yeah…”

(now on Daily Kos, too)

Tags: Alan Keyes, Barack Obama, Chapati Mystery, daily kos, Jim Crow, Race, Sarah Palin, Simpsons, zuguzungu

I wrote a post for Daily Kos about my feelings about the election, or, well, about how people are reacting to it. I really don’t see the same level of change that everyone else does. I’m not pessimistic or anything, but I think that the optimism (or whatever) is a bit… overdone. Anyway, it’s looking like the turnout claim was a bit premature, but I think the rest stands.

Tags: Barack Obama, chris matthews, daily kos, parliament

I’m sitting in on a seminar this fall called “New Directions in the Study of American Culture.” It’s also the introductory seminar of the new Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. The class, being taught by Center Co-director Eric Slauter, has a clear premise: each week, we read a recently published book about American culture written by a faculty member. In class, the first 90 minutes is spent discussing the book. The second 90 is spent in a Q&A with the author. In this way, we can have a discussion about how interdisciplinarity is being pursued right now at the UofC

So in the spirit of interdisciplinarity, the class is pretty much evenly split between History, English, and Divinity. There’s an art historian and a human developmentist in the class, but I think the rest of the 20 or so students all come from one of those three departments. And in the first meeting, we talked with an English professor, and everything went very smoothly and everyone had a blast.

For the second guest, Eric invited David Galenson, from the Department of Economics, to discuss his forthcoming book about how it was the young conceptual innovators who took over the 20th century art world. Galenson devised a technique of determining artistic importance quantitatively, and his results (Picasso is the most important artist of the 20th century) are not very surprising, but his methodology has unleashed quite a bit of retaliation from art historians and others.

The second class was, for lack of a better term, a bloodbath. Everyone I talked to afterward was, at the very least, disappointed with how we were totally unable to have what looked like a useful conversation about the manuscript. And though there are many reasons why the class fell apart like it did, it’s useful to focus on two main issues that sort of energized my thinking about my discipline.

First, we spent the first 90 minutes (as in, the time before Galenson was there) discussing and criticizing his methodology. He arrived at his conclusion about Picasso by making a list of art history textbooks from the past 18 years, counting how many times each artist has a work represented visually, and, then, from there determining importance. We spent a lot of time arguing that his sample was messed up: what about museum exhibition catalogs? What about non-American textbooks? What about monographs?

My own primary issue with this question of sample was largely that Galenson seemed to be talking about two different populations with two different influence streams: on the one hand, there were art history textbooks to be consumed by the cultural élite as they develop a sense of taste at university; on the other were the artists’ works to artists themselves, who are not necessarily attached to the same set of influences. Musicians, I argued as an analogy, probably consider something like Pet Sounds to be far more influential and important than the regular, élitist music-consuming public would.

Galenson instantly explained to our class that he’s an empiricist and, hence, not at all interested in theory. That is, he avoids “staring at the ceiling” first and gathering the evidence second. Then he addressed (though it doesn’t seem like the whole class picked up on it) this issue of sample right away. Regarding my take, he said that textbooks are marketed not to the aspiring cultural élite, but, rather, to professors. Furthermore, there is no significant artist today who would not have been exposed to such a textbook. Arguing that there are different streams of influence, it seems, unnecessarily complicates the issue.

His response to the expanded “what about other sources?” question, though, was far more useful. Give me a break, he basically said. The social sciences are way more advanced than the humanities when it comes to controlling for sample bias. So what about those other sources? He had already checked them, and they returned pretty much the same results. Why, he seemed to say, should the humanists feel they have some sort of special insight into the biases in his study that he would have overlooked?

Things got testy here, but that point is a very important one. Reading Galenson’s book, I immediately made all these mental, “but what about?” questions, never guessing that maybe he had controlled for it–though, to be fair, he doesn’t mention that extra work (he argued that he didn’t have to). But maybe it is a sort of disciplinary bias. Aren’t I always convinced that, in reducing things to quantitative research, social scientists are missing something?

Isn’t that, after all, the knock on Moretti, when he gives lectures based on 17,000 novels? That he’s missing “something”? Well, what? What goes missing? A “human” touch? A “human” effect or affect? But isn’t it precisely, as Moretti argues, not the point to read James if one wants a sense of the generally human? James is an outlier, a mutant, an aesthetic freak. He’s not a typical novelist of his time–he’s the best. Why would a mutant freak be able to best portray the real world, to best show a feel of his time?

It doesn’t make sense, and my “what if?”s don’t really begin to give me any special kind of entry into Galenson’s argument. I’m just trying to nit-pick, as he explained. Nit-picking is, of course, a funny thing to be accused of by a social scientist if you’re a humanist. After all, I’m supposed to be the one who is loosey-goosey with the reliance on ideas of truth. But either way, in fact, the jumbled, chaotic system that is a society’s culture only starts to make sense when you step back and look at it as–instead of a jumble of seemingly randomly moving actors–a complex system moving toward something. And that is, essentially, what Galenson has done for 20th century art.

How would an art historian answer his question, I wondered. An art historian would probably not care at all about “who is the most important artist of the 20th century?” After all, I certainly don’t care about the answer to that question in literature. I’ve never even given it any thought since I was, like, 18 (Joyce was in the lead by a mile–but, then, 18 year old me would say that). Whenever someone asks me, out of courtesy to my bizarro profession, who my favorite author or book is, I always say, “well, that’s complicated, and there’s no answer.” Well, what the fuck does that mean? I mean, give me two books, and I can tell you which I like more (at that specific time). Expand this to a massive bracket, and a favorite will emerge. That, then, could be my stock answer to non-specialists. (Incidentally, this is exactly how Nate Silver decided which place had the best burrito in Wicker Park, and it’s stupidly obvious. Arriving at the answer just takes iteration, which means it’s not for the lazy. The answer doesn’t just arrive after thinking about it long and hard–it takes eating the same burritos over and over.)

But the move Galenson makes is to take what would be a question of seeming no interest to art historians and turn it into something that he feels art historians should care about (in their role as, you know, historians of art, and, therefore, theoretically somewhat social scientifically inclined): how to account for the increasingly fractured and cloistered world of contemporary art. For Galenson, it grows out of Picasso’s influence–specifically that Picasso showed that it’s possible to become important very quickly and at a young age just by having a new conceptual idea about art. And this model of innovation was reproduced over and over again, including, crucially, in the textbooks that young artists were reading in art school. For Galenson, the chaos also grows out of the end of the monopoly on the artistic market provided by patrons and the salon. The Impressionists broke the monopoly of artistic evaluation, thereby turning the art world into a free for all.

And that’s it. If you want to make sense of the system of contemporary art, the answer to the question of importance becomes, you know, important. This answer, however, cannot be found in the meticulous, “close” work that (at least) English scholars at the UofC do. Nor can it be sussed from a critical positioning that is constantly not trusting the data (unreliable author, etc.). If you don’t trust the data, that means you adjust your confidence levels–not that you give up on the question.

So what kind of questions could knowing who the most important author of the 20th century is answer? For a literary critic, I’m not sure. But Galenson’s project has forced me to reconsider the scope of my own dissertation. I’m currently mining about 50 novels written between 1928 and 1941 for geographical information with which to draw maps. Is 50 enough? Obviously no, though it would be impossible for this kind of work to be done on a much larger scale (without massive assistance). So what can I say with 50?

And, this question, then, brings up Galenson’s second big take-home point. What is what I can say about 50 novels worth? That is, if I write a dissertation about these 50 novels, leave it at that, get my degree, and then… well, what have I accomplished? Galenson explained that his books sell far better on Amazon than those by art historians. The reasons, I suppose, are two: first, he writes for a non-specialized audience (and has the attendant press managers, etc., to push a book in the popular marketplace–though I don’t know if he was comparing himself to popular art histories); second, he answers questions that a non-specialized audience would like to know. They don’t care about some obscure artist from some corner of the world who toiled in obscurity. They want to know more about what they already know.

If that second point is not a goal of my dissertation already, should it be? If it isn’t, can I say that what I’m doing in graduate school is anything but killing time while pursuing a hobby? What value, really, is the hyper-specialization of my field?

Tags: art history, complexity, Galenson, Henry James, humanities, Joyce, literature, Moretti, Picasso, Slauter, systems

Making fun of Sarah Palin for being dumb has bugged me for a while, and I avoided watching her interview with Charlie Gibson precisely because of that. You don’t get to be governor–even in Alaska–if you’re an idiot. And even so, it’s unclear what being an idiot means and how it helps or hurts one. But this performance with Katie Couric… I’m not sure what to make of it. She sounds completely lost, but the payoff is at the end, around the five minute mark.

Couric has been asking her all sorts of questions about the economy, and Palin explains that McCain has pushed for regulating. Couric is having none of it:

Couric: But he’s been in Congress for 26 years. He’s been chairman of the powerful commerce committee, and he has almost always sided with less regulation–not more.

Palin: He’s also known as… The Maverick, though–takin’ shots from his own party, and certainly taking shots from the other party. Tryin’ to get people to understand what he’s been talkin’ about; the need to reform the government.

Couric: I’m just going to ask you one more time, not to belabor the point: specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation.

Palin: I’ll try to find ya some, and I’ll bring ‘em to ya.

I apologize for writing Palin in dialect, but she ups the folky accent for these two answers (edited together out of context, it seems)–to my untrained ears, she seems to be slipping into a sort of aw-shucks type of vernacular. And look at how ridiculous the discourse gets. McCain is “also known as… The Maverick”? Her pause and emphasis almost forces “The” to be capitalized. I feel like it’s the v/o to the beginning of a superhero tv show.

And then she dodges the question like a lost TA in the first discussion section of the year: “I’ll look that up and get back to you.” This is how a VP speaks? Is this the Bushish “play dumb/just folks” routine?

Tags: CBS, diction, Katie Couric, Maverick, Sarah Palin

In first grade, the “Mr. Men” books were all the rage. The short length and taxonomic/essentialist nature of the series and characters appealed to me very greatly. And though many of the books taught me terms for vices that I didn’t know (fussy, mischievous, nosey), the only book I could not understand was Mr. Uppity. I could not get a grasp of what made him “uppity” instead of, say, just “rude” or “selfish.” I got the sense, though, that it had something to do with money–look at his saucy bourgeois hat!

So when I started coming into contact with the term “uppity” later in life–almost always affixed to variant of “negro,” I could not square how the new datapoints related to Mr. Uppity. But, once Lynn Westmoreland referred to the Obamas as “uppity,” repeating the term for clarification, investigation into the word began anew, leading up to yesterday’s post on Language Log.

Zwicky narrows his post to Westmoreland’s office’s turning to the dictionary as an authority, to supposedly prove that “uppity” has no inherent racial character. Mr. Uppity, despite his unfortunate coloring, might be more proof of that. But Zwicky echoes (and links to) the point that Brent Staples made: it’s very, very unlikely that Lynn Westmoreland, who was born in Georgia and was 14 when the Civil Rights Act was signed, did not know of the racial shading of the term “uppity.” So, in another edition of “Using Google as my Research Assistant,” let’s make some speculations as to whether or not that’s true. Below is a matrix of search terms and hits:

uppity: 1,790,000

uppity -westmoreland: 1,400,000

“uppity [person term]“: < 1,000

uppity man: 1,050,000

“Mr. Uppity”: 5,360

My goal here was to see what kinds of words uppity tends to modify. As you can see, terms like “uppity man,” “uppity person,” or “uppity fellow” don’t make up even .1% of the total hits for “uppity.” Searching for both “uppity” and “man,” of course, fills out the bulk of the “uppity” hits, look at what happens when you refine it:

uppity man -westmoreland -obama: 520,000

uppity man -black -negro -african-american -race: 278,000

uppity man -black -negro -african-american -westmoreland -obama: 202,000

Pulling out the newsy terms (”Westmoreland” and “Obama”) and the racial terms trims away 80% of the hits. Considering that removing the racial terms removes over 70% of the hits really weakens Westmoreland’s claim to never have heard “uppity” used in conjunction with race.

So let’s try this same pattern, but building up:

“uppity black”: 18,900

“uppity negro”: 89,700

uppity black: 869,000

uppity negro: 105,000

According to Google, the preferred form is “uppity negro,” which makes sense, as it’s the form I’ve encountered the most in the past (though not the form quoted in the OED). It is also the name of a six year old blog, which possibly helps its Google popularity.

But considering Westmoreland’s claim that “uppity” means “elitist,” let’s see how that plays out positively:

uppity negro: 105,000

uppity elitist -obama: 40,900

uppity elitist -obama -race -negro -racist -black: 877

This isn’t a great comparison, since in the former, one term is modifying (or augmenting) the other, whereas in the latter, both are synonyms, but then look at the third line, which tries to strip the racial terms the model, leaving only “uppity” and “elitist” together.

So if the nostalgia for an antebellum paternalist past is what seems to motivate use of the term “uppity,” at least in comparison to equating “uppity” with “elitist,” how does that play out, you might ask, in the other realm of paternalism, namely gender?

I’m fucking glad you asked!

“uppity woman”: 38,700

uppity woman: 244,000

uppity bitch: 227,000

uppity blues women: 58,700

This number of hits is helped along by the presence of multiple blogs using the expression “uppity woman” as well as the popularity of the blues band “The Uppity Blues Women.” But, of course, those names only give more weight to the argument that running the two terms together makes perfect sense in our society.

And I was startled at first to see how many hits “uppity” paired with “bitch” brought up, until I figured that if you’re using a derisive adjective, you might as well use a derisive noun. Using other derogatory terms for women consistently yields 40k+ hits per term.

What, then, does Google tell us? First, Mr. Uppity is very likely not uppity. He is rude and selfish. “Uppity” is someone who does not know his place, and Mr. Uppity, as the richest man in town, certainly knows his “place.” He’s just a jerk. It’s notable that his punishment is shrinking in size after each instance of “uppitiness”–he is being reduced, marginalized.

Google tells us this because Mr. Uppity is not already a marginalized person. “Uppity” modifies traditionally marginalized people (uppity gay: 350,000, though this number shows a ton of overlap with race and gender) who are acting out of their socially expected place. Furthermore, it is a term of derision.

So Westmoreland is lying. He may not have realized he was trafficking in such specifically offensive terminology, but I sincerely doubt he has ever heard “uppity” modifying anything other than an African-American or a woman.

Tags: Arnold Zwicky, Barack Obama, Brent Staples, Gender, language, Language Log, Lynn Westmoreland, marginalization, Mr. Men, Race, sexuality, usage

Staying away from adding to the voices complaining about the $7e11 bailout of Wall Street is not something I’m very equipped to do. So I would like to compare two paragraphs here:

The first is from Glenn Greenwald’s astonishingly muted post from Saturday:

And all of this was both foreseeable as well as foreseen — see the 2002 grave warnings from Warren Buffett on pages 14-15 of his shareholders letter (.pdf), among many other things — and it’s also happened before, when the Federal Government bailed out the S&L industry that (with John McCain’s help) was able to gamble recklessly and then force the country to protect them from their losses. The people who did this have no fear of anything — they completely lack the kind of healthy fear that impedes reckless behavior — because they know how our Government works and that they control it and thus believe that their capacity to suffer is limited in the extreme. And they’re right about that.

The second is from a key text to understanding the United States in the post-JFK era:

No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit … What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

What, exactly, is the difference here?

Tags: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Glenn Greenwald, Hunter Thompson, Wall Street

The Coen brothers have some seriously involved things to say about anti-intellectualism. Check it out and join me in the discussion. This, sirs, is the GWB legacy. That and, you know, $7e11 debt to Wall Street.

I learned last night how stupidly easy it is to make ringtones for the iPhone. That, coupled with how stupidly easy it is to strip audio from videos on YouTube makes this little project possible: 3 ringtones for the iPhone built from the Obama campaign video “Signs of Hope and Change.”

The video is great because it uses a fantastic song (”Fake Empire,” by the National) with fantastically inspiring audio. The thing sort of makes me cry a lot to the point where I’ve weaned myself off the video by forcing myself to donate $5 to a Democrat every time I watch the video. That adds up.

But that’s not important. Here are the three ringtones:

1. (14 seconds) Two supporters speaking: “I think for a long time I had given up that… that we could work together to make change in this country.” “Now I’ve been involved in politics–I’ve seen politicians–but this is different.” (This one loops very nicely) [.m4r for iPhone] [.mp3 for other phones]
2. (14 seconds) Joseph Biden, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is no ordinary time. This is no ordinary election. And this may be our last chance to reclaim the America we love.” [.m4r for iPhone] [.mp3 for other phones]
3. (26 seconds) Barack Obama, making me cry: “We are one people. We are one nation. And, together, we will begin the next chapter in the American story with words that will ring from coast to coast–from sea to shining sea! Yes! We! Can!” (Audience follows) [.m4r for iPhone] [.mp3 for other phones]

Installing for the iPhone is a snap and requires no hacking/jailbreaking:

1. Download the above .m4rs, usually by right-clicking or control-clicking and choosing “Save Link As…” or whatever.
2. Open up iTunes and drop the m4rs into the library. They should immediately get copied into the ringtones Library.
3. Sync. Cry.

Installing .mp3 ringtones on Motorolas, etc., varies widely. Your best bet is, where possible, to use Bluetooth File Exchange program.

I think I will next tackle other Obama YouTube clips and post the results up here. I have no idea, of course, about the legality of any of this. I have not sought permission, etc. But spread the word!

This summer I return to Lithuania for the second time in as many years (and will be back again next summer), so part of my trip preparation has been stressing over how to most economically turn my dollars into litai. This research is using a trip to Lithuania as a specific baseline, but I think it would demonstrate the sort of research necessary for future use for any trips abroad.

For traveling abroad, I count up 4 ways of spending money:

1. Riding your ATM or credit card.
2. Bringing USD to the other country and converting there.
3. Converting to the other currency in the US.
4. Opening up a bank account in the foreign country, and going from there.

At first glance, it seems like these are ordered from “most wasteful” to “least wasteful.” What I’ve found out, however, is that it’s not quite so simple. But before moving on, I’m going to use two conversions from today:

€1 = $1.5838
$1 = 2.1687 Lt

And I’m going to assume that I’ll blow through $1000 over the course of the trip.

So another way of asking this question that this post answers, then, is, how can I turn $1000 into 2168.70 Lt (or more)?

1. ATMs and credit cards

Obviously your bank will vary (so call them for details!), but I use Citibank. I have a regular checking account, so every time I use an ATM abroad, I get a 2% fee tacked on. A gold account would have been 1%. Plus, the bank would not give me a conversion rate to litai over the phone. So considering the litas is pegged to the euro, I asked for the rate in euro. “1.6891,” the woman told me. So…

$1000 - 2% = $980

$980/1.6891 = €580.19

3.4528(€580.19) = 2003.28 Lt

Using your ATM card, then, loses you 165.42 Lt for every $1000 you spend. That’s just over $76, or 7.6% of the total.

The main bottlenecks here are, of course, the 2% fee and the intensely unfavorable exchange rate with the euro. I have no reason to suspect the rate with the litas would be more favorable, and the 3.4528 is, of course, the rate at which the litas was pegged to the euro.

Incidentally, between Chase, Bank of America, and WaMu, I was only able to find out a competing rate from one of them (online). Bank of America sells euro at 1.676. Not as terrible as Citibank, but still heavily influenced by massive drugs.

2. Converting in Lithuania

I was always told not to handle my conversions in this manner. The currency exchanges rob you, etc. It is probably true that an airport exchange will rob you blind between their fees and unfavorable rates. Banks, however, are a different story. Banks are also all over the place in central Vilnius, and exchanging a sum of cash every morning proved to be no big deal for me last summer. I went to Hansa bankas last year, but here I’ll try to make a matrix for three banks in Lithuania.

(Part of how you know that this is an intelligent way of exchanging money is that these banks typically list the exchange rates right on the front of their websites. Citibank does no such thing.)

Hansa buys dollars at 2.1551. Their fee is 1 Lt for transactions under 400 Lt

Snoras buys dollars at 2.153, and transactions “shall include the fee not larger than the fee for exchange operations set by the Bank of Lithuania.”

Finally, DnB NORD buys dollars at 2.1500 and charges a fee of 1 Lt.

As you can see, they all have very similar exchange rates, and I imagine the Snoras fee is around 1 Lt. So since I’m partial to Hansa bank (and they have the best rate), let’s calculate using it:

(2.1551)$1000 = 2155.10 Lt

Here you lose 13.6 Lt per $1000 spent, or $6.27. That’s just over .6%.

3. Converting in the US

To me, this seemed like the brilliant thing to do. So brilliant, in fact, that it’s precisely what I did do last month in preparation. Citibank offers a service called World Wallet.

They take money from your account and give you currency. That way you can land in a foreign country with money in hand, ready to go. Exchanging less than $1000 lands one a $5 fee (I thought it was higher, but I was probably wrong). But what’s the rate? I called 1-800-756-7050 and was quoted the same exact rate as for ATM purchases. Further, the phone looked at me funny when I asked about the litas, so we’ll use the euro as the baseline again.

$1000/1.6891 = €592.03

3.4528(€592.03) = 2044.16 Lt

The loss is 124.53 Lt for every $1000 spent, or over $57. That’s a 5.7% loss. That percentage is better than using the ATM, of course, but that’s because it doesn’t include the 2% ATM fee.

I’m not going to lie. This absolutely floored me when I found this out. Furthermore, because the conversion was done to euro, not Litai, I lose even more money, because these euros I now have in my pocket need to be converted again.

Converting at Hansa, which buys at 3.442, makes my total litas count out to be 2037.76 Lt, so it’s closer to a 6% total loss.

My only saving grace is that I converted when the euro was at $1.67 (according to Citibank), so the euro in my pocket have gained in value since I put them in there.

4. Opening up an account

A glance at Hansa’s conversion table shows that there are favorable rates for transferring in money as a deposit, instead of as a cash operation. Hansa furthermore has no minimum balance or monthly fee associated with accounts with debit cards. I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be able to open an account with a US passport, however. But I plan on doing this when I arrive in Lithuania.

2.1562($1000) = 2156.20 Lt

This is a 12.5 Lt loss for every $1000 deposited, or $5.76. Notable is that it’s not even $1 saved against just converting the money in cash at the bank, so the opportunity cost of having to open an account, wait for the debit card, etc., may not make this a worthwhile investment.

Having a Lithuanian bank account, however, will permit you to top-up your Labas cell phone online while you’re not in Lithuania to keep the number alive. And though that’s not a huge thing, it’s not nothing.

Conclusion

Always go to Lithuania with as many US dollars as you feel comfortable bringing. Once you’re there, if you convert to Litai via cash or via a bank account at a Lithuanian bank is up to you–the bank account saves you not even $1 per $1000 in exchange versus cash, making the hassle of opening an account potentially not worth it. And though you’ll lose money emptying out the account back into dollars to bring back home (assuming you did not spend it all), the rate the bank will give you will still be in the vicinity of 2% off the real rate. That means that even still you lose less money converting from USD > LTL > USD at Hansa Bank than you do converting USD (> EUR) > LTL at Citibank in your neighborhood.

Tags: currency, euro, litas, Lithuania