*headdesk*
Nov. 11th, 2005 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Wonder where rich Canadians go when they are sick? They cross the border to America for health care.
What American, if he were really, really sick, would voluntarily go to Canada, Germany, France or Sweden? Keep health care in America private.
What about poor Americans? Where do *they* get to go when they are sick? Nowhere, that's where. Not that this seems to matter.... I see no problem myself in having a public health care system alongside a private health care system, as we do with the schools, but I'm really a bit ignorant on the subject.
Anyway, some Times articles....
On colic, and remedies thereof
For City Kept Sleepless by Colic, No End to Cures in Melting Pot
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Nearly 200 languages are spoken in New York City, and in all of them, the wail of a colicky baby needs no translation. Nursed, burped, rocked, changed and cuddled, the baby still howls.
Is it indigestion? Gas? Nostalgia for the womb? Nobody really knows. So in this city where 6 of 10 babies have at least one foreign-born parent and pediatricians come from every corner of the world, a cornucopia of colic cures serves as a kind of Rorschach test of child-rearing culture in migration.
Doctors cheerfully define colic as more than three hours of "unexplained crying" three times a week in an otherwise healthy infant. It affects anywhere from 10 percent to half of all babies in the first three months, and leaves glassy-eyed parents ready to try almost anything.
"You would boil pork rinds if someone told you it worked," said Felina Rakowski-Gallagher, a mother of two whose Manhattan boutique, the Upper Breast Side, caters to nursing mothers and serves as a hot spot for rumors of remedies at the front lines of baby care.
So far, no one is touting pork rinds as a cure for colic. But little New Yorkers are being comforted with Colombian cinnamon tea, soothed with Egyptian recipes for rosewater and calmed with infusions of anise seed, fennel, chamomile, or "hierba buena," a kind of spearmint plant that Latin American mothers and baby sitters seek out in supermarkets. Others are dosed with "gripe water," the elixir once bootlegged from the former British Empire, and now sold over the Internet in nonalcoholic versions with names like "Colic-Ease" and "Baby's Bliss."
Sure, methods from the heyday of America's machine age are still popular: place the crying baby atop a vibrating washing machine; run the vacuum cleaner full blast near the cradle, or take the wakeful infant on a midnight ride (preferably on a route without stoplights).
But now, with more immigrants in the city than ever before, so too are there more ancient anticolic traditions practiced down the block: Chinese acupressure, Haitian belly binding, Mexican swaddling, Indian oil massage, African cowry shell bracelets. And just as exotic foods from distant cultures enter the city's culinary mainstream, these methods are being examined and tried by the city's natives and nonimmigrant transplants, desperate for any way to stop the screaming.
At St. John's Family Health Center in the Elmhurst area of Queens, Dr. Lolita Uy has seen almost every colic remedy known to woman. Her basic rule: "Anything outside the baby is fine. Anything internal, I have to know."
Dr. Uy, who grew up in the Philippines speaking Chinese and Spanish, tends toward tolerance for such old herbal remedies as the chamomile tea that Leonel Hernandez, a 2-month-old of Mexican, German, Scottish and Puerto Rican descent, gets twice a day.
"It's supposed to clear out your system of gas or constipation," said his mother, Krystina Hernandez, 18, who was using a constant hip-sway, football carry and back-rubbing technique to keep Leonel's fussing at a low simmer. "His Mexican grandmother told me about it."
But Dr. Uy takes a dim view of the old version of gripe water, though it typically contained safe spices and herbs like fennel, ginger, dill, or anise, and is particularly championed by mothers and baby nurses from places once under the influence of British nannies - the West Indies, India, Egypt, Canada.
"One patient had a master's degree in biology and she told me, 'It's wonderful, whenever they give the gripe-water, the baby sleeps,'" Dr. Uy recalled. "Turns out, it contains 8 percent alcohol."
In the 1980's and early 1990's, such concerns prompted the Food and Drug Administration to order customs agents to seize cases of the stuff at the border. Now nonalcoholic gripe waters have their own followings. Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher is a second-generation convert - and an example of how old remedies recycle through migration.
Perhaps the only retired New York City police officer who owns a breastfeeding boutique, she was born in Berlin 40 years ago. Though her own colic was dosed with British gripe water, as her mother tells it, she was resolved to give her babies nothing but breast milk for the first six months. Then her second, Jack, wailed for weeks, and her mother screamed, " 'Give your son some gripe water or I'll kill you now!' "
"I did use half a dose on my son and half a dose on me," Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher recalled, "and there was a miracle."
According to a 2001 research review by American Family Physician, such colic miracles are clinically unproven, or owe a lot to placebo effect on parents. But to parents, placebo is not a dirty word. And one study did find improvement from an herbal tea of chamomile, vervain, licorice, fennel and balm-mint - herbs championed by various immigrant groups.
"We're talking about a population that isn't used to popping pills to deal with pain," said Juanita Lara, health access coordinator for the Latin American Integration Center. "They're used to drinking teas and rubbing oils. It's going to comfort them because of the warmth, because of the flavor."
For Maggie Wong, director of marketing at the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center in Chinatown and a first-time mother at 40, comfort came from doing acupressure massage of her baby's palm, as taught by an acupuncturist friend, or chanting the names of Buddha.
"It helps to calm me down also," Ms. Wong said.
At a time when mainstream medicine is marketing non-Western techniques from yoga to acupuncture, native parents seem more open to trying "natural" methods - or to buying trademarked approximations: a "Miracle Blanket" for swaddling, a "Lull-a-Band" inspired by a Guatemalan grandmother, a teddy bear that makes womb noises.
Others have married into the real thing, like Gabriele Ortiz, 40, who described herself as "half-Jewish, half-Italian, like a good New Yorker," and said it was her Mexican husband who taught her to swaddle their baby, Madeleine, and calm her with a nightly bath.
Even for hybrid New Yorkers, some remedies seem just too exotic. One Brazilian immigrant mother whose firstborn cried until 3 a.m. for the first three months was urged by her Trinidadian housecleaner to settle his digestion with a surefire home remedy: a tea made from cayenne pepper. She demurred.
"I was desperate, but not that desperate," said the mother, Danielle Curi, 36. Native or immigrant, there may be no substitute for experience, said Dr. Sandy Saintonge, a pediatrician at New York Hospital Queens, whose family is from Haiti. She has counseled patients from every continent on colic, in the process collecting an international repertory of home remedies.
Then, 18 months ago, she had her own child.
"I wasn't prepared for the crying," she confessed. Eventually, she called her older sister, a nurse and experienced mother, who gave her the best advice: "Just ride it through. It will not last forever."
So the doctor put on her music headphones, held her baby close, and danced through the tears.
On the return of standards from the Revolution
Stripes, Stars and Dollar Signs
By GLENN COLLINS
The war veterans who once revered them and followed them - and then lost them - are all long gone. But now, their battle standards, taken by the enemy, have at last returned to American soil after two and a quarter centuries.
The flags are believed to date from the Revolutionary War and to have been seized by a notorious British cavalry officer, Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton.
On Oct. 28, the four flags arrived in New York from the south of England, where they had been privately hung as wall trophies by Tarleton's descendants.
Their sudden re-emergence, like the awakening of a martial Rip Van Winkle, has caused a stir in military and historical circles, to the intense satisfaction of Sotheby's, the auction house. It hopes to sell the flags next year for a total of $4 million to $10 million.
Such an improbably grand price for four faded pieces of fragile, hand-stitched and hand-painted silk derives from their origin as "sacred and vivid relics of the birth our nation," said David N. Redden, a vice chairman of Sotheby's in Manhattan.
"Flags of such rarity and history have never come up for sale," said Mr. Redden, who has an auction tentatively scheduled for next June 14 - Flag Day.
The flags arrived from the Hampshire home of Capt. Christopher Tarleton Fagan, 70, who said his great-great-great-great-uncle was Banastre Tarleton (the first name is pronounced Ben-AS-ter).
"There is no question that they are authentic," the captain said from home in a telephone interview, explaining that the flags have adorned the walls of Tarleton descendants for at least a century. He provided a photograph from the early 1900's showing the flags - flanking a stirring portrait of Colonel Tarleton by Sir Joshua Reynolds - in the smoking room of Breakspears, the family home. Captain Tarleton Fagan's grandmother, who died in 1952, bequeathed the Reynolds painting to the National Gallery in London.
One of the four flags is believed to be from a Connecticut cavalry regiment, which lost a standard to Tarleton's troops in Westchester County in New York on July 2, 1779. The other three flags, from a Virginia regiment, are thought to have been captured near the border between North and South Carolina on May 29, 1780.
Unlike most surviving flags from the era, two of the standards have vibrant colors. Two measure about a yard square; the others are close to four feet square.
"It's the first I've heard of it," said Susan P. Schoelwer, chief curator at the Connecticut Historical Society Museum in Hartford, referring to the Connecticut standard. The historical society has another rare flag from the same unit, the Second Regiment of the Continental Light Dragoons.
"To have a flag come on the market, with a history like this, is pretty remarkable," Dr. Schoelwer said.
The Smithsonian Institution currently has on view another battle flag from the same Connecticut regiment and possesses two other Revolutionary flags and the fragment of another.
"This is an incredible find," said Walter H. Bradford, acting chief of collections at the United States Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C., which under federal law maintains the Army's flag collection. "They are extremely rare. The Army would be very interested in acquiring them. We don't have those kinds of funds, but we could accept the gift of a private individual."
The flags' arrival has occasioned some expressions of reverence.
"The connection with Veterans Day is very important," said Salvatore F. Tarantino, captain and commander of Sheldon's Horse, a volunteer Connecticut cavalry troop that is a quasi-official modern descendant of the unit that lost a flag to Tarleton.
"It's as if these flags were captured for all those years in England," Mr. Tarantino said, "and now they have come home, and with them the spirit of the men who had to give them up."
Bedford, N.Y., was one town Tarleton's troops raided. The executive director of the Bedford Historical Society, Evelyne H. Ryan, said, "It is thrilling that this artifact from 225 years ago, that had been grabbed and stuffed into a sack and carried with Tarleton's troops, still exists."
To the American soldiers of the Revolutionary War, the standards had similar resonance to that of Roman eagles. "The symbolism of the flags was very powerful," said Marilyn Zoidis, a senior curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Troops pledged their allegiance to states, counties and regimental banners, she said, since "the American flag was not taken into battle at that time."
Dr. Schoelwer said, "The position of flag bearer was a great honor, and many individuals sacrificed their lives to protect their flags."
Colonel Tarleton has been credited with the capture, in 1776, of George Washington's Continental military rival, Gen. Charles Lee, surprised in his nightshirt and slippers at a tavern in Basking Ridge, N.J.
Tarleton was renowned for his daring and for the ferocious speed of his attacks. But he was reviled by the Continentals as "Bloody Ban" and "The Butcher" for his role in the Battle of Waxsaws, near the border of North and South Carolina, on May 29, 1780.
It was in that conflict, Sotheby's says, that the three Virginia flags were captured.
Tarleton's cavalry overtook a Continental force of Virginians. Later, he personally reported that he gave them an initial summons to surrender and that they declined. A contemporary Continental account, however, described the subsequent melee as a "massacre" and said that despite the hoisting of a Virginian surrender flag, Tarleton's forces created "indiscriminate carnage never surpassed by the ruthless atrocities of the most barbarous savages."
In 1781, Tarleton lost half his army in the Battle of Cowpens, and he surrendered at Yorktown later that year.
Tarleton was accorded a hero's welcome upon his return to England in 1782. He was painted then by Reynolds, who depicted him in the heat of battle, with a pile of crumpled, generic Continental flags in the dust at his feet. Tarleton finished his military career as a major general.
In the telephone interview, Captain Tarleton Fagan said his ancestor "has been given a much worse name than he should have" for the Waxsaws bloodshed. "His horse was shot from under him, and his troops thought he'd been killed," his descendant said. Angered, they "went to town and butchered people - which was monstrous - and Tarleton got the blame for it."
The cavalryman's reputation was hardly enhanced by Hollywood's 2000 film "The Patriot," starring Mel Gibson, in which the exceptionally evil British commander, Col. William Tavington, was based in part on Tarleton. Captain Tarleton Fagan dismissed the film characterization as "pure make-believe."
A former British Army grenadier who served in Malta and Cyprus, Captain Tarleton Fagan said his family's flags had never been publicly displayed. A special export license was required to ship the antiquities from Britain.
Sotheby's claims that the provisions of the Treaty of Paris in 1782 would prevent anyone from suing to recover them as stolen artwork.
It is hard to let the flags go, Captain Tarleton Fagan said.
"But when there comes a time when their value becomes so disproportionate that you can no longer insure them and give them care, well, a decision must be made," he said. "It was a decision not taken lightly."
Chandler Saint, a historic preservationist in Litchfield, Conn., who has been an antique and fine-arts dealer, said he and several associates tried to buy the Tarleton flags several years ago. But he said the American Revolution "has never caught the public's imagination like the Civil War has."
Jennifer L. Jones, chairwoman of the Military History and Diplomacy Division at the National Museum of American History, said of Sotheby's: "They can put any price that they would like on them, but they are worth what someone is willing to pay for them."
Mr. Saint said it was possible that the Connecticut flag wasn't captured but instead was looted by Tarleton's troops. "It could affect the value, if the flag doesn't have the mystique of the great battle," Mr. Saint said.
Even if the Connecticut flag was looted, however, Mr. Tarantino, commander of the contemporary cavalry troop, said, "It was really used by the soldiers who won our independence - it is an authentic piece of the Revolution."
Many of those interviewed hoped the flags could remain in the United States. "They don't mean as much to anyone but Americans," Mr. Redden said. "I'll eat my hat if they don't remain in the country."
On being French, and other things
What Makes Someone French?
By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS, Nov. 10 - Semou Diouf, holding a pipe in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood amid the noisy games of checkers and cards in the dingy ground-floor common room of a crowded tenement building and pondered the question of why he feels French.
"I was born in Senegal when it was part of France," he said before putting the pipe in his mouth. "I speak French, my wife is French and I was educated in France." The problem, he added after pulling the pipe out of his mouth again, "is the French don't think I'm French."
That, in a nutshell, is what lies at the heart of the unrest that has swept France in the past two weeks: millions of French citizens, whether immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional French society, which has resisted adjusting a vision of itself forged in fires of the French Revolution. The concept of French identity remains rooted deep in the country's centuries-old culture, and a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair.
Though many countries aspire to ensure equality among their citizens and fall short, the case is complicated in France by a secular ideal that refuses to recognize ethnic and religious differences in the public domain. All citizens are French, end of story, the government insists, a lofty position that, nonetheless, has allowed discrimination to thrive.
France's Constitution guarantees equality to all, but that has long been interpreted to mean that ethnic or religious differences are not the purview of the state. The result is that no one looks at such differences to track growing inequalities and so discrimination is easy to hide.
"People have it in their head that surveying by race or religion is bad, it's dirty, it's something reserved for Americans and that we shouldn't do it here," said Yazid Sabeg, the only prominent Frenchman of Arab descent at the head of a publicly listed French company. "But without statistics to look at, how can we measure the problem?"
Mr. Sabeg was born in Algeria when it was French territory and moved to France with his family as an infant. His father worked as a laborer and later a mechanic to put him through a Jesuit boarding school, and he went on to earn a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne.
He scoffs at the notion of a French identity based on what he believes is a fiction of equal rights and France's reluctance to engage in debate about the gap between ideals and reality. "France doesn't know how to manage diversity," he said. "It doesn't want to accept the consequences of a multiethnic society."
Like most French schoolchildren, he was taught that his ancestors were Gauls and that "in 732, Charles Martel, the Mayor of the Palace, repelled the Arabs in Poitiers."
French leaders admit failings but insist they are working to bring equality to all citizens and have embarked on an oblique public debate about what it means to be French. But that debate is still bounded by fidelity to ideals of the French Republic. President Jacques Chirac told reporters at Élysée Palace on Thursday that the government "hasn't been fast enough" in addressing the problems of discrimination, but that, "no matter what our origins, we are all children of the Republic."
Further to the political right, the debate has taken on another cast: the far-right National Front party released a computer-generated video on its Web site this week that showed Paris in flames. "Immigration, explosion in the suburbs ... Le Pen foretold it," the banner over the video reads, referring to the party's patriarch, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The idea behind France's republican ideal was that by officially ignoring ethnic differences in favor of a transcendent French identity, the country would avoid the stratification of society that existed before the French Revolution or the fragmentation that it now sees in multicultural models like the United States. But the French model, never updated, has failed, critics say. "France always talks about avoiding ghettoization, but it has already happened," Mr. Sabeg said, adding that people are separated in the housing projects, in their schools and in their heads.
The country's colonial legacy has only deepened that alienation. Rachid Arhab, one of the only well-known minority broadcast journalists in France, says that he lives with the resentments touched off by the bloody war of independence that Algeria won against France in 1962. "Unconsciously, for many French, I'm a reminder of the war," he said, adding, "now they see images of second-generation Algerian children in the streets burning cars and buildings, and that brings out the resentment even more."
Mr. Arhab himself is a study in the country's ambivalence toward what it means to be French. He was born in Algeria when the country was French territory and so was born French. He moved to France as an infant, but lost his French citizenship when he was 8 in the wake of the Algerian war - like many French-Arabs from Algeria, his parents didn't understand that they had to apply to retain their citizenship in France. Mr. Arhab didn't become a French citizen again until 1992. Yet he said, "I feel profoundly French."
But even the language of identity has its barbs. Mr. Arhab said that when he hears people refer to him as French "of Algerian origin," it carries with it the subtext that he is not really French.
He said earlier generations like himself have had it easier than the frustrated youths in the housing projects today, because his generation had closer ties to their homelands. "When someone says to me, 'you're not French,' I can take refuge in my origins," he said, "but the young can't do that."
Most second-generation Muslim immigrants are generally no more observant than young French Catholics. But the legacy of discrimination creates the conditions for young people who feel neither French nor North African to seek an identity in Islam - often anti-Western, political Islam.
"I've known discrimination all of my life," Mr. Sabeg said, adding that the prejudices only grew stronger the more prominent he became. In 1991, he led a group of investors in taking over CS Communication and Systémes, a publicly listed company that he now runs. When he applied to the government to become a defense contractor, a ministry official told him, "You're called Sabeg, that's a problem for us," meaning that he was of Algerian descent.
Rumors soon began circulating that he was an Algerian spy. It took him three years to win his first contract from the Defense Ministry. He never found out who was behind the rumors. "It's like a snake, you see the tail as it disappears, but never the head," Mr. Sabeg said, adding that the rumors continue.
So far, the government's efforts to reach out to minority ethnic youth have been half-hearted, constrained by the republican ideals that have turned affirmative action into a taboo. But private efforts are beginning, skirting the rules.
Karim Zeribi, a former soccer player and political adviser, said a study he carried out earlier this year found that résumés sent out with traditionally French names got responses 50 times higher than those with North African or African names. In the wake of the study, Mr. Zeribi established an agency in April called Act for Citizenship, which canvasses minority neighborhoods for qualified job candidates and markets them to corporations.
"We want to create a network for these people where there is none," Mr. Zeribi said. Still, he said, his young candidates are regularly asked if they are practicing Muslims when they are interviewed for jobs.
What American, if he were really, really sick, would voluntarily go to Canada, Germany, France or Sweden? Keep health care in America private.
What about poor Americans? Where do *they* get to go when they are sick? Nowhere, that's where. Not that this seems to matter.... I see no problem myself in having a public health care system alongside a private health care system, as we do with the schools, but I'm really a bit ignorant on the subject.
Anyway, some Times articles....
On colic, and remedies thereof
For City Kept Sleepless by Colic, No End to Cures in Melting Pot
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Nearly 200 languages are spoken in New York City, and in all of them, the wail of a colicky baby needs no translation. Nursed, burped, rocked, changed and cuddled, the baby still howls.
Is it indigestion? Gas? Nostalgia for the womb? Nobody really knows. So in this city where 6 of 10 babies have at least one foreign-born parent and pediatricians come from every corner of the world, a cornucopia of colic cures serves as a kind of Rorschach test of child-rearing culture in migration.
Doctors cheerfully define colic as more than three hours of "unexplained crying" three times a week in an otherwise healthy infant. It affects anywhere from 10 percent to half of all babies in the first three months, and leaves glassy-eyed parents ready to try almost anything.
"You would boil pork rinds if someone told you it worked," said Felina Rakowski-Gallagher, a mother of two whose Manhattan boutique, the Upper Breast Side, caters to nursing mothers and serves as a hot spot for rumors of remedies at the front lines of baby care.
So far, no one is touting pork rinds as a cure for colic. But little New Yorkers are being comforted with Colombian cinnamon tea, soothed with Egyptian recipes for rosewater and calmed with infusions of anise seed, fennel, chamomile, or "hierba buena," a kind of spearmint plant that Latin American mothers and baby sitters seek out in supermarkets. Others are dosed with "gripe water," the elixir once bootlegged from the former British Empire, and now sold over the Internet in nonalcoholic versions with names like "Colic-Ease" and "Baby's Bliss."
Sure, methods from the heyday of America's machine age are still popular: place the crying baby atop a vibrating washing machine; run the vacuum cleaner full blast near the cradle, or take the wakeful infant on a midnight ride (preferably on a route without stoplights).
But now, with more immigrants in the city than ever before, so too are there more ancient anticolic traditions practiced down the block: Chinese acupressure, Haitian belly binding, Mexican swaddling, Indian oil massage, African cowry shell bracelets. And just as exotic foods from distant cultures enter the city's culinary mainstream, these methods are being examined and tried by the city's natives and nonimmigrant transplants, desperate for any way to stop the screaming.
At St. John's Family Health Center in the Elmhurst area of Queens, Dr. Lolita Uy has seen almost every colic remedy known to woman. Her basic rule: "Anything outside the baby is fine. Anything internal, I have to know."
Dr. Uy, who grew up in the Philippines speaking Chinese and Spanish, tends toward tolerance for such old herbal remedies as the chamomile tea that Leonel Hernandez, a 2-month-old of Mexican, German, Scottish and Puerto Rican descent, gets twice a day.
"It's supposed to clear out your system of gas or constipation," said his mother, Krystina Hernandez, 18, who was using a constant hip-sway, football carry and back-rubbing technique to keep Leonel's fussing at a low simmer. "His Mexican grandmother told me about it."
But Dr. Uy takes a dim view of the old version of gripe water, though it typically contained safe spices and herbs like fennel, ginger, dill, or anise, and is particularly championed by mothers and baby nurses from places once under the influence of British nannies - the West Indies, India, Egypt, Canada.
"One patient had a master's degree in biology and she told me, 'It's wonderful, whenever they give the gripe-water, the baby sleeps,'" Dr. Uy recalled. "Turns out, it contains 8 percent alcohol."
In the 1980's and early 1990's, such concerns prompted the Food and Drug Administration to order customs agents to seize cases of the stuff at the border. Now nonalcoholic gripe waters have their own followings. Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher is a second-generation convert - and an example of how old remedies recycle through migration.
Perhaps the only retired New York City police officer who owns a breastfeeding boutique, she was born in Berlin 40 years ago. Though her own colic was dosed with British gripe water, as her mother tells it, she was resolved to give her babies nothing but breast milk for the first six months. Then her second, Jack, wailed for weeks, and her mother screamed, " 'Give your son some gripe water or I'll kill you now!' "
"I did use half a dose on my son and half a dose on me," Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher recalled, "and there was a miracle."
According to a 2001 research review by American Family Physician, such colic miracles are clinically unproven, or owe a lot to placebo effect on parents. But to parents, placebo is not a dirty word. And one study did find improvement from an herbal tea of chamomile, vervain, licorice, fennel and balm-mint - herbs championed by various immigrant groups.
"We're talking about a population that isn't used to popping pills to deal with pain," said Juanita Lara, health access coordinator for the Latin American Integration Center. "They're used to drinking teas and rubbing oils. It's going to comfort them because of the warmth, because of the flavor."
For Maggie Wong, director of marketing at the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center in Chinatown and a first-time mother at 40, comfort came from doing acupressure massage of her baby's palm, as taught by an acupuncturist friend, or chanting the names of Buddha.
"It helps to calm me down also," Ms. Wong said.
At a time when mainstream medicine is marketing non-Western techniques from yoga to acupuncture, native parents seem more open to trying "natural" methods - or to buying trademarked approximations: a "Miracle Blanket" for swaddling, a "Lull-a-Band" inspired by a Guatemalan grandmother, a teddy bear that makes womb noises.
Others have married into the real thing, like Gabriele Ortiz, 40, who described herself as "half-Jewish, half-Italian, like a good New Yorker," and said it was her Mexican husband who taught her to swaddle their baby, Madeleine, and calm her with a nightly bath.
Even for hybrid New Yorkers, some remedies seem just too exotic. One Brazilian immigrant mother whose firstborn cried until 3 a.m. for the first three months was urged by her Trinidadian housecleaner to settle his digestion with a surefire home remedy: a tea made from cayenne pepper. She demurred.
"I was desperate, but not that desperate," said the mother, Danielle Curi, 36. Native or immigrant, there may be no substitute for experience, said Dr. Sandy Saintonge, a pediatrician at New York Hospital Queens, whose family is from Haiti. She has counseled patients from every continent on colic, in the process collecting an international repertory of home remedies.
Then, 18 months ago, she had her own child.
"I wasn't prepared for the crying," she confessed. Eventually, she called her older sister, a nurse and experienced mother, who gave her the best advice: "Just ride it through. It will not last forever."
So the doctor put on her music headphones, held her baby close, and danced through the tears.
On the return of standards from the Revolution
Stripes, Stars and Dollar Signs
By GLENN COLLINS
The war veterans who once revered them and followed them - and then lost them - are all long gone. But now, their battle standards, taken by the enemy, have at last returned to American soil after two and a quarter centuries.
The flags are believed to date from the Revolutionary War and to have been seized by a notorious British cavalry officer, Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton.
On Oct. 28, the four flags arrived in New York from the south of England, where they had been privately hung as wall trophies by Tarleton's descendants.
Their sudden re-emergence, like the awakening of a martial Rip Van Winkle, has caused a stir in military and historical circles, to the intense satisfaction of Sotheby's, the auction house. It hopes to sell the flags next year for a total of $4 million to $10 million.
Such an improbably grand price for four faded pieces of fragile, hand-stitched and hand-painted silk derives from their origin as "sacred and vivid relics of the birth our nation," said David N. Redden, a vice chairman of Sotheby's in Manhattan.
"Flags of such rarity and history have never come up for sale," said Mr. Redden, who has an auction tentatively scheduled for next June 14 - Flag Day.
The flags arrived from the Hampshire home of Capt. Christopher Tarleton Fagan, 70, who said his great-great-great-great-uncle was Banastre Tarleton (the first name is pronounced Ben-AS-ter).
"There is no question that they are authentic," the captain said from home in a telephone interview, explaining that the flags have adorned the walls of Tarleton descendants for at least a century. He provided a photograph from the early 1900's showing the flags - flanking a stirring portrait of Colonel Tarleton by Sir Joshua Reynolds - in the smoking room of Breakspears, the family home. Captain Tarleton Fagan's grandmother, who died in 1952, bequeathed the Reynolds painting to the National Gallery in London.
One of the four flags is believed to be from a Connecticut cavalry regiment, which lost a standard to Tarleton's troops in Westchester County in New York on July 2, 1779. The other three flags, from a Virginia regiment, are thought to have been captured near the border between North and South Carolina on May 29, 1780.
Unlike most surviving flags from the era, two of the standards have vibrant colors. Two measure about a yard square; the others are close to four feet square.
"It's the first I've heard of it," said Susan P. Schoelwer, chief curator at the Connecticut Historical Society Museum in Hartford, referring to the Connecticut standard. The historical society has another rare flag from the same unit, the Second Regiment of the Continental Light Dragoons.
"To have a flag come on the market, with a history like this, is pretty remarkable," Dr. Schoelwer said.
The Smithsonian Institution currently has on view another battle flag from the same Connecticut regiment and possesses two other Revolutionary flags and the fragment of another.
"This is an incredible find," said Walter H. Bradford, acting chief of collections at the United States Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C., which under federal law maintains the Army's flag collection. "They are extremely rare. The Army would be very interested in acquiring them. We don't have those kinds of funds, but we could accept the gift of a private individual."
The flags' arrival has occasioned some expressions of reverence.
"The connection with Veterans Day is very important," said Salvatore F. Tarantino, captain and commander of Sheldon's Horse, a volunteer Connecticut cavalry troop that is a quasi-official modern descendant of the unit that lost a flag to Tarleton.
"It's as if these flags were captured for all those years in England," Mr. Tarantino said, "and now they have come home, and with them the spirit of the men who had to give them up."
Bedford, N.Y., was one town Tarleton's troops raided. The executive director of the Bedford Historical Society, Evelyne H. Ryan, said, "It is thrilling that this artifact from 225 years ago, that had been grabbed and stuffed into a sack and carried with Tarleton's troops, still exists."
To the American soldiers of the Revolutionary War, the standards had similar resonance to that of Roman eagles. "The symbolism of the flags was very powerful," said Marilyn Zoidis, a senior curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Troops pledged their allegiance to states, counties and regimental banners, she said, since "the American flag was not taken into battle at that time."
Dr. Schoelwer said, "The position of flag bearer was a great honor, and many individuals sacrificed their lives to protect their flags."
Colonel Tarleton has been credited with the capture, in 1776, of George Washington's Continental military rival, Gen. Charles Lee, surprised in his nightshirt and slippers at a tavern in Basking Ridge, N.J.
Tarleton was renowned for his daring and for the ferocious speed of his attacks. But he was reviled by the Continentals as "Bloody Ban" and "The Butcher" for his role in the Battle of Waxsaws, near the border of North and South Carolina, on May 29, 1780.
It was in that conflict, Sotheby's says, that the three Virginia flags were captured.
Tarleton's cavalry overtook a Continental force of Virginians. Later, he personally reported that he gave them an initial summons to surrender and that they declined. A contemporary Continental account, however, described the subsequent melee as a "massacre" and said that despite the hoisting of a Virginian surrender flag, Tarleton's forces created "indiscriminate carnage never surpassed by the ruthless atrocities of the most barbarous savages."
In 1781, Tarleton lost half his army in the Battle of Cowpens, and he surrendered at Yorktown later that year.
Tarleton was accorded a hero's welcome upon his return to England in 1782. He was painted then by Reynolds, who depicted him in the heat of battle, with a pile of crumpled, generic Continental flags in the dust at his feet. Tarleton finished his military career as a major general.
In the telephone interview, Captain Tarleton Fagan said his ancestor "has been given a much worse name than he should have" for the Waxsaws bloodshed. "His horse was shot from under him, and his troops thought he'd been killed," his descendant said. Angered, they "went to town and butchered people - which was monstrous - and Tarleton got the blame for it."
The cavalryman's reputation was hardly enhanced by Hollywood's 2000 film "The Patriot," starring Mel Gibson, in which the exceptionally evil British commander, Col. William Tavington, was based in part on Tarleton. Captain Tarleton Fagan dismissed the film characterization as "pure make-believe."
A former British Army grenadier who served in Malta and Cyprus, Captain Tarleton Fagan said his family's flags had never been publicly displayed. A special export license was required to ship the antiquities from Britain.
Sotheby's claims that the provisions of the Treaty of Paris in 1782 would prevent anyone from suing to recover them as stolen artwork.
It is hard to let the flags go, Captain Tarleton Fagan said.
"But when there comes a time when their value becomes so disproportionate that you can no longer insure them and give them care, well, a decision must be made," he said. "It was a decision not taken lightly."
Chandler Saint, a historic preservationist in Litchfield, Conn., who has been an antique and fine-arts dealer, said he and several associates tried to buy the Tarleton flags several years ago. But he said the American Revolution "has never caught the public's imagination like the Civil War has."
Jennifer L. Jones, chairwoman of the Military History and Diplomacy Division at the National Museum of American History, said of Sotheby's: "They can put any price that they would like on them, but they are worth what someone is willing to pay for them."
Mr. Saint said it was possible that the Connecticut flag wasn't captured but instead was looted by Tarleton's troops. "It could affect the value, if the flag doesn't have the mystique of the great battle," Mr. Saint said.
Even if the Connecticut flag was looted, however, Mr. Tarantino, commander of the contemporary cavalry troop, said, "It was really used by the soldiers who won our independence - it is an authentic piece of the Revolution."
Many of those interviewed hoped the flags could remain in the United States. "They don't mean as much to anyone but Americans," Mr. Redden said. "I'll eat my hat if they don't remain in the country."
On being French, and other things
What Makes Someone French?
By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS, Nov. 10 - Semou Diouf, holding a pipe in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood amid the noisy games of checkers and cards in the dingy ground-floor common room of a crowded tenement building and pondered the question of why he feels French.
"I was born in Senegal when it was part of France," he said before putting the pipe in his mouth. "I speak French, my wife is French and I was educated in France." The problem, he added after pulling the pipe out of his mouth again, "is the French don't think I'm French."
That, in a nutshell, is what lies at the heart of the unrest that has swept France in the past two weeks: millions of French citizens, whether immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional French society, which has resisted adjusting a vision of itself forged in fires of the French Revolution. The concept of French identity remains rooted deep in the country's centuries-old culture, and a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair.
Though many countries aspire to ensure equality among their citizens and fall short, the case is complicated in France by a secular ideal that refuses to recognize ethnic and religious differences in the public domain. All citizens are French, end of story, the government insists, a lofty position that, nonetheless, has allowed discrimination to thrive.
France's Constitution guarantees equality to all, but that has long been interpreted to mean that ethnic or religious differences are not the purview of the state. The result is that no one looks at such differences to track growing inequalities and so discrimination is easy to hide.
"People have it in their head that surveying by race or religion is bad, it's dirty, it's something reserved for Americans and that we shouldn't do it here," said Yazid Sabeg, the only prominent Frenchman of Arab descent at the head of a publicly listed French company. "But without statistics to look at, how can we measure the problem?"
Mr. Sabeg was born in Algeria when it was French territory and moved to France with his family as an infant. His father worked as a laborer and later a mechanic to put him through a Jesuit boarding school, and he went on to earn a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne.
He scoffs at the notion of a French identity based on what he believes is a fiction of equal rights and France's reluctance to engage in debate about the gap between ideals and reality. "France doesn't know how to manage diversity," he said. "It doesn't want to accept the consequences of a multiethnic society."
Like most French schoolchildren, he was taught that his ancestors were Gauls and that "in 732, Charles Martel, the Mayor of the Palace, repelled the Arabs in Poitiers."
French leaders admit failings but insist they are working to bring equality to all citizens and have embarked on an oblique public debate about what it means to be French. But that debate is still bounded by fidelity to ideals of the French Republic. President Jacques Chirac told reporters at Élysée Palace on Thursday that the government "hasn't been fast enough" in addressing the problems of discrimination, but that, "no matter what our origins, we are all children of the Republic."
Further to the political right, the debate has taken on another cast: the far-right National Front party released a computer-generated video on its Web site this week that showed Paris in flames. "Immigration, explosion in the suburbs ... Le Pen foretold it," the banner over the video reads, referring to the party's patriarch, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The idea behind France's republican ideal was that by officially ignoring ethnic differences in favor of a transcendent French identity, the country would avoid the stratification of society that existed before the French Revolution or the fragmentation that it now sees in multicultural models like the United States. But the French model, never updated, has failed, critics say. "France always talks about avoiding ghettoization, but it has already happened," Mr. Sabeg said, adding that people are separated in the housing projects, in their schools and in their heads.
The country's colonial legacy has only deepened that alienation. Rachid Arhab, one of the only well-known minority broadcast journalists in France, says that he lives with the resentments touched off by the bloody war of independence that Algeria won against France in 1962. "Unconsciously, for many French, I'm a reminder of the war," he said, adding, "now they see images of second-generation Algerian children in the streets burning cars and buildings, and that brings out the resentment even more."
Mr. Arhab himself is a study in the country's ambivalence toward what it means to be French. He was born in Algeria when the country was French territory and so was born French. He moved to France as an infant, but lost his French citizenship when he was 8 in the wake of the Algerian war - like many French-Arabs from Algeria, his parents didn't understand that they had to apply to retain their citizenship in France. Mr. Arhab didn't become a French citizen again until 1992. Yet he said, "I feel profoundly French."
But even the language of identity has its barbs. Mr. Arhab said that when he hears people refer to him as French "of Algerian origin," it carries with it the subtext that he is not really French.
He said earlier generations like himself have had it easier than the frustrated youths in the housing projects today, because his generation had closer ties to their homelands. "When someone says to me, 'you're not French,' I can take refuge in my origins," he said, "but the young can't do that."
Most second-generation Muslim immigrants are generally no more observant than young French Catholics. But the legacy of discrimination creates the conditions for young people who feel neither French nor North African to seek an identity in Islam - often anti-Western, political Islam.
"I've known discrimination all of my life," Mr. Sabeg said, adding that the prejudices only grew stronger the more prominent he became. In 1991, he led a group of investors in taking over CS Communication and Systémes, a publicly listed company that he now runs. When he applied to the government to become a defense contractor, a ministry official told him, "You're called Sabeg, that's a problem for us," meaning that he was of Algerian descent.
Rumors soon began circulating that he was an Algerian spy. It took him three years to win his first contract from the Defense Ministry. He never found out who was behind the rumors. "It's like a snake, you see the tail as it disappears, but never the head," Mr. Sabeg said, adding that the rumors continue.
So far, the government's efforts to reach out to minority ethnic youth have been half-hearted, constrained by the republican ideals that have turned affirmative action into a taboo. But private efforts are beginning, skirting the rules.
Karim Zeribi, a former soccer player and political adviser, said a study he carried out earlier this year found that résumés sent out with traditionally French names got responses 50 times higher than those with North African or African names. In the wake of the study, Mr. Zeribi established an agency in April called Act for Citizenship, which canvasses minority neighborhoods for qualified job candidates and markets them to corporations.
"We want to create a network for these people where there is none," Mr. Zeribi said. Still, he said, his young candidates are regularly asked if they are practicing Muslims when they are interviewed for jobs.
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