(1) In Kaliningrad a Western lifestyle has merged, at least as residents understand it. They pass long hours in cafés and go on frequent shopping sprees to Poland. The “Westernness” of Russian towns and cities may be evaluated, to an extent, by the ease with which they have accepted the café culture of Europe – the sharing of leisurely moments over a cup of coffee, something less substantial than a meal or a drink. This, we would see, varies greatly from place to place. When, for example, people have disposable income in Tyumen (the capital of Siberian oil), they mostly spend it on furs, jewelry, and appliances; there, cafés are hard to come by. But in Kaliningrad – so close to the West and bearing a history that makes it Western – café culture exists, yet only in a superficial, inchoate form. Naturally, it has not cured the paranoid attitude of the authorities.

(2) We walked along the memorial wall surveying the faces and names of men and women who went to eastern Ukraine to defend their homeland, and the reality sank in: Ukraine is at war, and with Russia – a once-inconceivable notion.

(3) What we saw during our travels through Russia’s eleven-time zones gave us little reason to predict doom for Putin, or for the country, at least in the immediate term. People are, as a rule, living better than ever before, freer than ever before, and – where public finances allow – local governments are overhauling infrastructure and bettering life for their citizens. In any case, more than twenty-five years of capitalism and, roughly, a decade of prosperity under Putin have done much to transform Russia from the broken-down, chaotic reck of a country it was during Yeltsin’s time. The people we met criticized Putin or praised him to us, in most places without apparent fear of being monitored by the authorities. (Broadcasting such opinions via the media would probably be another story.) Almost all seemed resigned to Putin’s domination of the political scene; in fact, politics, unless we brought it up, was not on people’s minds, as it often is in Moscow or Saint Petersburg.

(1) And once a youth had started on heroin his descent into addiction was inevitable. St. Charles wrote that the “Big Boys” in the dope racket targeted adolescents in order to expand their market. “The drug Czars reasoned ‘kids will try anything once.’ And with heroin, ‘once’ is enough.” Other accounts suggested the same unavoidable end. Eventually, as one author concluded, the addict “is just a human pincushion with an infinite capacity for agony and a short life expectancy.” These works confirmed the popular belief that heroin users were bound to become prostitutes, thieves, and desperate junkies.

(2) The modest penalties for drug dealing, especially in the 1940s, meant that there was little incentive to cooperate with police. Federal penalties increased in 1951 in the moral panic that followed the discovery of adolescent heroin use, but during the early postwar period, sellers had little to worry about. (…) With “doing time” almost a rite of passage among gang members, even the increased penalties for narcotics dealing in the 1950s did not deter gang members from the trade or induce them to “snitch” to the police.

(3) LENA adopted the methods of working with street gangs to suppressing heroin, but with little success. Street workers identified drug users in the neighborhood and tried to get them to return to school or complete a general education degree (GED), find jobs, utilize recreational facilities, become reconciled with their families, and find programs in which to detoxify. Some of these activities were counterproductive. Bringing heroin users into recreational facilities with nonusers seemed to offer a marketing opportunity. Parents, who already feared their adolescents might experiment with heroin, discouraged them from attending.

(4) Americans consume vast amounts of licit and illicit drugs, and the organizing power of this market is visible throughout remote areas of the globe where peasant farmers see their illicit crops as the only opportunity to participate in a market economy. Political conflict, poverty, and a legacy of colonialism and economic underdevelopment -marginality – have left these areas without effective states and have sometimes opened the door for warlords or guerrillas to use illicit commodities to fund civil war. One long-term goal for American policy should be the economic, political, and social integration of these otherwise marginal regions of the world. Simply out, peace and prosperity are inherently good and are clearly in everyone’s best interest, even if these are distant and somewhat utopian objectives. However, the only real solution to the drug problem lies at home – in changing the market by reducing the demand for drugs. The concept of marginality is key to understanding the size and shape of the domestic heroin market. (…) Although patterns of rural and small-town heroin use have persisted and heroin retains a certain allure to the disaffected middle class, I am convinced that any attempt to solve the drug problem in America must begin in the inner city.

(1) If the use of force against children is of dubious value, the use of force against adolescents is an outright disaster. Better than any other type of abuse, the use of physical force against adolescents illustrates the ill-effects of parental spanking for discipline increase the level of force they use. The adolescent growth spurt significantly increases the child’s size and parents who continue to rely on corporal punishment may feel they have no choice but to increase the amount of force they use. We think that the sheer amount of force necessary to subdue a teenager makes the practice abusive. Corporal punishment is a poor disciplinary tactic in childhood, but it is worse in adolescence. This is reflected in the finding from a national survey that the overall use of force by most mon sense dictates a shift away from physical discipline toward more mature, psychologically oriented discipline.

(2) What are the necessary conditions for child abuse? There appear to be two. The first is twofold and involves the way a culture defines the rights of children. For a pattern of maltreatment to occur within families there must be cultural justification for the use of force against children and a generally held belief that children are the property of their parents to be cared for or disposed of as the parents see fit. This becomes apparent, of course, most clearly in social and historical comparisons. A culturally defined concept of children as the property of caregivers and of caregivers as legitimate users of force against children and youth appears to be an essential component of child abuse and neglect: physical, sexual, and emotional. (…) The validity of this proposition is supported by analyses of the history of child abuse, the anthropological study of other cultures, and analyses of the forces justifying violence in American society. There can be little doubt that American society fulfills this necessary condition for child abuse. In excess of 90 percent of parents reported employing physical force in the upbringing of their children in a survey conducted by Stark and McEvoy.

(3) Several citations may serve to illustrate this point, though caution must be exercised in generalizing from these studies which may contain sampling problems of undetermined direction and magnitude. Young found that 95 percent of severe abuse families had no continuing relationships with others outside the family. This same study concluded that 85 percent of the abusive families did not belong to or participate in any organized groups. Lenoski found that 89 percent of the abusive parents having telephones had unlisted numbers, as opposed to the 12% of nonabusive parents. More than 80 percent of the abusive families sought to resolve crises alone versus 43 percent of the nonabusive parents. Straus found that stress was linked to physical abuse when it occurred in the absence of participation in normal social groups (clubs, church, and so on). Polansky and his colleagues found a history of estrangement from normal social experience among neglecting parents. Giovannoni and Billingsley found that among a low-income group those who did not participate in the cooperative activities of the neighborhood (principally shared homemaking and child care) were more abusive and neglectful. The unanimity of research findings on the issue of social isolation as we have defined it here is virtually complete.

(4) One such study concludes: Without exception in our study group of abusing parents there is a history of having raised in the same style which they have recreated in the pattern of rearing their own children. Several had experienced severe abuse in the form of physical beatings from either mother or father; a few reported “never having a hand laid on them.” All had experienced, however, a sense of intensive, pervasive, continuous demand from their parents.

(5) Occupying the maternal position in a sexually abusive family is a difficult task. Coping with incest would exceed the personal resources of most women. However, some investigators believe the mothers in sexually-abusive homes are often complicitous in the incest, indirectly stimulating it by their sexual unavailability. Such women may have a history of emotional deprivation and be ill-equipped to protect their daughters. Often they groom their daughters to become the “little mother” of the family, reversing roles and encouraging the daughter to assume maternal responsibilities. If incest occurs, the mothers in these cases are thought to be relieved.

(6) The power imbalance in a father-daughter relationship is so unequal that physical force is rarely necessary to initiate incest. For the daughter, there are many reasons for compliance. Leaving home may be risky, frightening, and even illegal.

(1) Fragmentation erodes accountability because sheer institutional complexity obscures who is accountable to whom for what. Special-purpose, nominated bodies have multiplied in place of central departments and elected local councils for the delivery of some services. Again, Yorkshire RHA dramatically illustrates the point; the catalogue of misdeeds is eye-catching. The Committee of Public Accounts was ‘concerned’ about a further eight instances of ‘unacceptable’ behaviour which they noted ‘with surprise’ and ‘serious concern’, including on one occasion, an ‘appalled’. They also consider the remedial action ‘deeply unsatisfactory’. It paints the picture of an Authority that embraced the culture of the day, neglected its classical stewardship role, and got away with ‘blue murder’ for several years. Control was exerted – later, much later. No one was bought to book for the substantial waste of public money. The money was not recovered. Nor can Yorkshire RHA be dismissed as a single, aberrant organization. It is an example of both private government in action and the problem of holding networks to account.

(2) In his preface to the Fairness at Work White Paper, Mr Blair claimed that even after the implementation of promised workplace reforms, the UK would continue to have ‘the most lightly regulated labour market of any leading economy in the world’. But this questionable assertion, which irritated many union leaders, did nothing to reassure many employers who complained that they were being compelled to swallow an array of regulations in their business establishments which might be of some minimal advantage to their employees but brought a burdensome cost to them in money and time that might be better spent improving their corporate performance. No doubt, much of the rhetorical hostility levelled at the government’s employment relations proposals by companies and employer associations was ritualistic and ill-directed. (…) However, Mr Blair was always determined to develop and maintain close and friendly relations with private sector employers and seek to bring them into his government’s policy making process.

(3) The Labour government correctly grasped that the conflict required external as well as internal resolution, and realized that the sovereignty and self-determination disputes needed to be resolved. But it failed to follow through on its treaty commitments, and broke international law when it unilaterally suspended some of the Agreement’s institutions between February and May 2000, and thereby destabilized the Agreement by making all its provisions and commissions negotiable.

(4) Lone mothers in the UK have lower employment rates than most European mothers. Indeed their employment rates have been dropping during the 1980s while that of married mothers had continued to rise. In the United States, Charles Murray made a similar pattern of behaviour central to his argument that lone mothers could not expect to be exempted from work requirements given that it was now accepted that adult women would be in the labour market. (…) Labour took up this particular baton with more vigor, in large measure because it fit with its conception of ‘active citizenship’ grounded in the responsibility to work. Modern welfare states have always been constructed around the paid work/welfare relationship, but Labour made its new mechanisms for securing ‘welfare to work’ the centerpieces of its social policy. Tony Blair’s introduction to the document on welfare reform has been widely quoted: ‘Work for those who can, security for those who cannot.’ Social inclusion has been defined in terms of access to paid work. But how to draw the boundary between those who ‘can’ and those who ‘cannot’ is a major issue. In respect of parents, particularly women given the traditional gendered division of labor, there is the issue of how far care work constitutes a valid reason for not going out to work.

(1) Countering this continuity was the idea that time is neither divisible nor continuous but composed of contingent, unpredictable, and unknowable instants that are ultimately unrepresentable. Like Benjamin’s notion of the shock, or Anthony Gidden’s description of ontological insecurity and psychological vulnerability, the contingent produced genuine fear in the modern citizen-spectator. A streetcar would rush by, threatening to crush passing pedestrians; a disease, a bomb, or a baby-stealing Gypsy might appear, as it were, out of nowhere. But in the safety of the cinema of attractions, the representation of such an encounter with chance exhilarated the spectator. A temporality of excitement offered relief from the monotony of labor time, while it necessarily produced anxiety. Cinema was a mechanism that ran in standardized time, but it also privileged the ultimate, impossible immediacy of the moment, the instant, so foreign to a standardized world. On film, contingency felt real. And for a nation so concerned with its supposed backwardness, there were high stakes involved in controlling what was seen as reality.

(2) The more notable Spanish films that immersed spectators in such digressions are La sin ventura (dir. Benito Perojo and E. B. Donatien, 1923), El abuelo (dir. José Buchs, 1925), Malvaloca (dir. Benito Perojo, 1926), La Condesa Maria (dir. Benito Perojo, 1927; The Countess Maria), La malcasada (dir. Francisco Gómez Hidalgo, 1927), La Venenosa (dir. Roger Lion, 1928), El sexto sentido (dir. Eusebio Fernández Ardavín and Nemesio Sobrevila, 1929), and El misterio de la Puerta del Sol (dir. Francisco Elías, 1929). A film that reflects the influence of the actualities with especial clarity is Águilas de acero, aka Los misterios de Tánger (dir. Flarián Rey, 1927), which is based on a war novel by López Rienda, an acclaimed chronicler of the Moroccan war.

(3) As we saw with Raquel Meller, the simultaneous racialization and whitening that the Spanish star underwent showcased an ambivalent white individualism that proved decisive for later films, like Filigrana (1949), that treated the performance and embodiment of stardom. The rags-to-riches story of Filigrana traces the rise of its lower-class heroine to the status of international performance artist, much like Piquer’s role of Emma in El negro. For modernity means the ability to generate narratives of stardom in which Spaniards associated with racial others become producers of modern capitalist culture who can vie with their counterparts in the other filmmaking capitals of the world: Paris, Berlin, and Hollywood. Star culture and ambivalent otherness therefore is modernity. As El negro conveys, the narrative of the undiscovered but talented underclass girl who only needs grooming to be made into a star develops though her engagement with modernity. The economically marginalized (and therefore radicalized) Emma, played by Concha Piquer, learns to preform whiteness in this film when she becomes a cosmopolitan dancing star.

(4) The physical presence of the Roma must have reminded even those who were on the “right side” that the racial situation was inherently unbalanced, if not unjust. But since this lack of balance or wholeness could not be openly acknowledged. it expressed itself in the drama of lawfulness and unlawfulness. In these popular narratives about Gypsies, the goal was to entertain through a flirtation with an attractive difference that then justified the cleansing of all foreign elements and their incorporation into the body. In reality assimilation was rarely successful, The state’s efforts to assimilate others are a history of failure. But the melodramatic scenarios reenacting stories of legality, law, and Gypsies continues to assert an imaginary in which these legal measures where successful. The underclass ethnic female married a white professional, a cortijo owner, or a nobleman, or through her paid labor of singing and dancing, she integrated herself into Spain’s formal (and ultimately tourist) economy.

(5) The second song delves even further, however, into the piquant double-entendre sensibility of the cuplé:

In the hands of the love-struck girlfriend,

The parasol is an expert language.

It says, “Don’t come near,” when closed

And says, “Come on over,” when open.

(1) A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, – whether this end be not the Final Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?

(2) When I behold a rich landscape, it is less my purpose to recite correctly the order and superstition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.

(3) The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, – present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is a priest, and a scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual , to process himself, must sometimes embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, – a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

(4) The condition of our incarnation in a private self seems to be a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of universal being. (…) Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. The vision of genius comes by renouncing the too officious activity of the understanding, and giving leave and amplest privilege it the spontaneous sentiment. (…) A man of cultivated mind but reserved habits, sitting silent, admires the miracle of free, impassioned, picturesque speech, in the man addressing an assembly; – a state of being and power unlike his own! Presently his own emotion rises to his lips, and overflows in speech. He must also rise and say somewhat. Once embarked, once having overcome the novelty of the situation, he finds it just as easy and natural to speak, – to speak with thoughts, with pictures, with rhythmical balance of sentences, – as it was to sit silent; for it needs not to do, but to suffer; he only adjusts himself to the free spirit which gladly utters himself though him; and motion is as easy as rest.

(5) Those who are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefits of mankind, are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as the insane do. They bite us and we run mad also. I think the work of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him; but when I have seen it near, I do not like it better. It is done in the same way, it is done profanely, not piously; by management, by tactics and clamor. It is a buzz in the ear. I cannot feel any pleasure in sacrifices which display to me such partiality of character.