Peter – Page 11 – Yule Tide

Post-227: The Arrival of Substitute Holidays in South Korea

Posted on September 8, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

Way back in April 2013 (post-36), I wrote about the new South Korean government’s proposed introduction of “substitute holidays”. Contrary to my expectation at the time, I have actually lived to see one (or will live to see one, if I survive to the coming Wednesday).

South Korea has two official “major holidays” (연휴), one in Fall and one in Winter. At these times, everything shuts down on the day of, and the days before and after, a three-day block. When the main day falls on Monday, it means Sunday is one of the block days, which is kind of a gip. This time, though, by national law, Wednesday is off, too. Korean employers often cavalierly break these kinds of laws relating to labor, but are much more hesitant to impinge on a “major holiday”.

The holiday that Koreans are currently observing is the East Asian Harvest Festival, called Chuseok [추석] in Korea and “Moon Festival” in other places, I’m told. Some Koreans call it “Korean Thanksgiving” as a two-word explanation of it to Americans. Its date changes each year in accordance with that other calendar they use.

By reputation, something like half the people in the Seoul region clear out and return to their hometowns at the major holidays, though especially the Winter one (what we call “Chinese New Year”). I myself will be visiting my friend J.A. in a city in the middle of the country, leaving Monday afternoon. We’ll see how much of a delay there is on the bus.

Post-226: [My Korean Essay] How to Maintain Your Health

Posted on September 5, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

Below is an essay I wrote in Korean. It was originally written on paper in about twenty minutes. I have transcribed it here and added an English translation below.

건강을 지키기 위해서는 좋은 음식을 먹어야 하고 운동을 해야 합니다
요즘 사람들의 고민 중에서 건강을 제일 중요하게 생각하기 때문에 우리가 건강을 지키는 계획을 세워야 합니다. 그럼, 어떻게 건강을 지킬 수 있습니까? 첫 번째 건강에 좋은 음식을 먹어야 합니다. 두 번째 운동을 자주 해야 합니다. 이렇게 하면 우리의 건강이 좋아질 수 있습니다.

첫 번째, 무슨 음식을 먹는지에 대해서 이야기할 겁니다. 음식이 중요하니까 건강에 좋은 음식을 항상 먹으세요. 날마다 채소를 다섯 개 이상 먹어야 합니다. 왜 이렇게 먹어야 합니까? 채소에 있는 비타민이 중요하니까 채소를 많이 먹어야 합니다. 인간의 몸에 비타민이 없으면 죽을 수 있습니다. 그리고 초코릿하고 설탕이 우리 건강에 나쁩니다. 초코릿이나 사탕을 많이 먹으면 뚱뚱하질 수있습니다. 뚱뚱한 사람들이 예쁘지 않고 병에 자주 걸립니다. 뚱뚱한 사람도 운동에 나쁩니다.

그러니까 이제 운동에 대해서 더 이야기합시다. 날씬 사람들이 운동할 수 있지만 요즘 사는 사람들이 보통 운동을 싫어서 운동을 안 합니다. 그런데 운동이 건강에 중요합니다. 날마다 우리의 다리를 이용해서 튼튼한 다리로 쉬운 생활이 지낼 수 있습니다. 그리고 좋은 몸이 있는 사람은 일찍 안 죽습니다. 우리는 매주 세 번 이상 운동을 해야 합니다. [2014.9.4 인천부평에서 쓴 글입니다]

[My Translation of this essay:]

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Q. Write an essay of two paragraphs about the following subject: “What should we do in order to maintain our health?”

In Order to Maintain Health, We Have to Eat Good Food and Exercise
These days, “health” is the most important of people’s concerns, and so we need to make a plan to keep ourselves healthy. How, then, can we maintain our health? Firstly, we need to eat healthful foods. Secondly, we need to exercise frequently. If we do these things, our health can get better and better.

First of all, I will talk about what kind of foods we eat. Food is important for us, so we have to always eat healthful foods. We need to eat at least five servings of vegetables per day. Why should we eat like that? The vitamins in vegetables are important, so we need to eat a lot of them. Without vitamins in a human’s body, it can cause death. Also, chocolate and sugar are bad for our health. If we eat a lot of chocolate or sugar, we can become fat. Fat people don’t look good and they often get sick. Fat people are also bad at physical activities.

Therefore, let’s now talk some more about physical activities. Thin people can exercise, but as people living today usually dislike exercising, they don’t do it. However, exercise is important for our health. We use our legs every day, so if we have strong legs, we can have an easier time in life. Also, people with strong bodies will not die early. We should exercise at least three times a week. [End of essay] [Essay written on Sept. 4th, 2014 in Incheon]

This essay was written in an unusually-quiet coffee shop in the Bupyeong neighborhood of the usually-noisy Seoul Megalopolis. Included here are some corrections for grammar by my Korean friend, H.J., the intrepid IT entrepreneur. I was helping him with an English thing at the time. He may soon work at one of the world’s most famous companies, the one which stole an obscure mathematics term and made it world-famous. You know the one I mean.

Update, September 12th: I didn’t realize it, but it turned out this essay was due to the teacher. Here is my final submitted essay. I received an above-average grade for the class, it seems, but the teacher marked many mistakes on it, anyway.

Post-225: “Brutally Unforgiving of Small Mistakes” (Talking about TEPS)

Posted on September 4, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

This summer, my friend Jared wrote the following:

TOEFL and a Korean middle school English test are quite different animals. TOEFL is a fairly well-designed test, intended for university level, that seeks to determine a student’s communicative competence in English. TEPS (Korea’s special home-grown English test) and the middle school tests that seem to follow the TEPS lead are not tests of English communicative competence. Instead, what they most resemble is perhaps the types of tests in Greek and Latin that high-schoolers did around a century ago. With frozen idioms and artificial texts, they quiz you on minutiae of grammar and vocabulary and are brutally unforgiving of small mistakes that the TOEFL, by design, essentially ignores.

Jared doesn’t say it directly, but TOEFL is a product of the USA, of the same company that makes the SAT, GRE, and AP exams. TEPS, on the other hand, is an exclusive product of Korea.

If a student forgets to write -s on the word “drive” because it happens to be in the third person singular, the TOEFL scorer may take note, but the impact on the final score is minimal as long as the writer’s ideas are clear. In the tests my students take, however, a missed -s can mean a hit to the final score that fails to get one into one of the elite high schools. [July 2014]

Experience leads me to conclude that this is, indeed, the “(East) Asian Way”.

I have been, now, on both “sides” of the classroom (as a teacher and as a student [teaching English; studying Korean]) in South Korea, and this kind of atmosphere prevailed in all the places I’ve been. I had one Korean teacher in particular who would run a typical teacher-centered class, but at a snail’s pace because she spent so much time seeming annoyed at the smallest of mistakes and stopping everything to unmercifully slam down on each and every mistake in front of the entire silently-onlooking class. This was really demotivating; people became afraid to say anything for fear of mistakes and public shaming. This is also something explicitly we were told not to do in our ESL teaching certificate program.

Back to TEPS. I never taught much TEPS, but I did teach TOEFL, usually as my main responsibility. Generally, native speakers were not assigned to TEPS classes. And thank God for it as TEPS classes were considered the worst:

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In TEPS classes, student behavior was worst, motivation lowest. Boring and frustrating. The class boiled down to a teacher browbeating teenagers to inanely memorize a set of highly-abstract, obscure, obtuse rules (the “minutiae of grammar and vocabulary” to which Jared refers above). TEPS classes inevitably become “training for the test” with hardly even the pretense anymore that it’s “studying”, “learning”, or “developing communicate confidence”.

You can get an idea of how TEPS would be particularly aggravating for students and teachers from this sampling of TEPS questions (from here):

~~A Math Class~~. A TEPS English class. (From here).

* Choose the best answer for the blank.
1. Hours after the storm had passed, the water of the lake still looked dark and _________.
(a) murky
(b) blurred
(c) obscure
(d) faded

2. After working __________ hard for years, Mike finally had the director position within his grasp.
(a) crucially
(b) dedicatedly
(c) utterly
(d) identically

* Identify the option that contains an awkward expression or an error in grammar
(a) A: Guess what? I finally won my first tennis tournament!
(b) B: Congratulations! I guess all your practicing really paid off, right?
(c) A: Definitely. I’m that glad I put in those extra hours at the gym.
(d) B: I bet! Now all you need to do is keep practicing and keep winning!

Now, I submit to you that even native English speakers will often be unsure of the answers to these kinds of questions.

In #1, (a) and (c) could both plausibly be correct. In #2, (b) and (c) might both be right. In the last question, the answer is certainly (c), but there are plausible situations in which even this sentence, as is, might be correct. Consider: “You were shouting really loudly after winning the tennis tournament! Are you really *so* glad you won?” “Definitely. I’m *that* glad I put in those extra hours at the gym!”

Another friend, J.A., who recently moved out of the Seoul area for the first time, has proposed a conspiracy theory: As multiple answers can be right, people with the right connections can be tipped off on which are just “right” and which as “really right”. In other words, it makes cheating easier. I don’t know about this, but I think it’s on the right track. These kinds of tests are perhaps equal parts competence in English and dedication to memorize enough to be able to predict which answers will be correct in certain types of questions. Again, it’s frustrating and seems a bit ridiculous.

Here is a TEPS story I can end with: Around the end of my first month in Korea, one evening back in 2009, the head teacher (who was disgruntled to begin with), teaching a particularly-badly-behaved TEPS class of ninth graders, lost control. The class, as I say, was nothing-but-lecturing about inane questions like the above, and the students were not interested at all. They’d been causing her problems for a long time. That night, after 9 PM, at one provocation, she began yelling; she really let them have it; it was so loud that we heard it far off in the teachers’ room. I think she cried during this episode, as well. Crying in front of students is crossing the Rubicon into serious loss of face. She quit that very night.

(A postscript is that this TEPS-induced abrupt quitting worked out well for me. The woman was replaced by a man., the first male teacher, besides me, at this small institute. This was my first Korean friend, Lee J.S., whom I have, regrettably, lost contact with.)

Post-224: My Great-Grandfather’s Piece of World War I

Posted on August 2, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

Note: This post was updated Nov. 11th, 2014 (including a recollection posted as a comment), along with post-242

A century ago this week, somewhere in Connecticut, a 17-year-old named Earle Hazen on summer break from high school heard the news: The great powers of Europe were declaring war on one other! It was August 1914.

Earle probably read this news in a newspaper, as this was before even radio. He’d not have been able to predict that a century later, his great-grandson (me) would be typing these words about him, wondering how he learned of the war.

Of course, what we now call “World War I” didn’t immediately affect him, nor many other Americans. The USA insisted on staying out of that irrational and deeply cynical war in its first few years. President Wilson famously ran for his second term in 1916 under the slogan “He Kept Us Out of the War”.

In time, the war came for us, too. Spring 1917. The very week that the USA declared war on the German Empire in April 1917, my great-grandfather, Earle Hazen, turned 20. As this is prime conscription age, he ended up in the army.

Earlier this year, my cousin N.D. and I found a picture of Earle Hazen in the attic of the old house in Connecticut. The girl in the picture is our grandmother (born in 1921). Judging by her age here, this picture seems to be from around 1930. My cousin N.D., upon seeing this photo, insisted that Earle Hazen at that time looked a lot like N.D. does today.

My great-grandfather Earle Hazen (right, with glasses)
with his wife and daughter (my mother’s mother). Circa 1930.

(This circa 1930 photograph is from about the same time as the Civil War veterans video in post-41.)

What do I know about Earle Hazen? I know the following:

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Earle Hazen’s parents were born in Vermont and moved to Connecticut, where he was born in 1897. His father was listed as a farmer in the 1910 census. The Hazens seem to be of “Colonial Yankee” ancestry. His conscription card lists him as having had blue eyes, dark hair, and being of average height. Earle was a baseball fan, I think the Red Sox. On the 1920 Census, his job was listed as “shipping clerk” at a hardware factory. He probably met his wife there, as the Census man listed his wife’s job in 1920 as a “packer” at a hardware factory. We can suppose it was the same factory. The 1930 census records Earle’s job as, much more interestingly, “pool room manager”.

Not long after finishing up with his bit in defeating the Kaiser, Earle decided that the logical next step was to marry a German (what else?). (She’d come to the USA in 1907 at age 8 with her older sister.) Their daughter is my grandmother.

Few still living today can testify much to Earle’s personality as he died so long ago. Those who know handwriting analysis (not me) might be able to glean something from this:

Signature of Earle Hazen, from my grandparents’ wedding guest book

As for his “piece of World War I”:

Earle Hazen is the only one of my four great-grandfathers who served in that war. (Another great-grandfather, in Iowa, was of prime service age in 1917 but was exempted for being a farmer, I think. His cousin of the same name served.) Earle Hazen was in the U.S. Army’s “151st Depot Brigade” (3rd Company) which was stationed at Camp Devens in Massachusetts. Here is a photograph somebody is selling of another of the 151st’s companies in 1918:

The depot brigades were designed to administer the new army camps. This Earle Hazen did not go to Europe.

Purpose of U.S. Army Depot Brigades in WWI
The role of the Depot Brigades was to receive and organize recruits, provide them with uniforms, equipment and initial military training, and then send them to France to fight on the front lines. The Depot Brigades also received soldiers returning home at the end of the war and completed their processing and discharges. [Wiki]

Camp Devens During World War I
Camp Devens [was] established on September 5, 1917 as a temporary cantonment for training soldiers during World War I. It was a reception center for war selectees and became a demobilization center after the war. Two divisions (the 76th and the 12th) were activated and trained at Devens during the war. [Wiki]

Camp Devens processed and trained more than 100,000 soldiers [in 1917 and 1918] [Fort Devens Museum]

Camp Devens Barracks, 1917 [From here]

Camp Devens happens to have been the first U.S. Army camp affected by the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919. You know, the one that killed millions across the world. The Army didn’t see it coming, so no precautions had been taken when it hit Devens. The influenza ravaged the Devens men.

Influenza Pandemic Kills Many at Camp Devens
From September through November 1918, influenza and pneumonia sickened 20% to 40% of U.S. Army and Navy personnel. […] Braisted pinpointed the arrival of the epidemic in the United States to Tuesday, August 27, 1918, at Commonwealth Pier in Boston. Influenza reached civilians in Boston and on September 8 [1918], arrived “completely unheralded” at the Army’s Camp Devens, outside of the city. Within 10 days, the base hospital and regimental infirmaries were overwhelmed with thousands of sick trainees. [From here]

As Earle Hazen was probably there in September 1918, maybe he came down with it, too. Extra doctors were sent to Camp Devens to deal with the crisis. Here is a letter one doctor wrote to a friend, dated September 29th, 1918:

My dear Burt,
It is more than likely that you would be interested in the news of this place […]

Camp Devens is near Boston, and has about 50,000 men, or did have before this epidemic broke loose. It also has the base hospital for the Division of the Northeast. This epidemic started about four weeks ago, and has developed so rapidly that the camp is demoralized and all ordinary work is held up till it has passed. All assemblages of soldiers taboo. These men start with what appears to be an attack of la grippe or influenza, and when brought to the hospital they very rapidly develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis [bluish skin coloring] extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible. One can stand it to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day. [From here]

The Influenza Pandemic killed over 50,000 U.S. soldiers, a similar number as died in combat. Thirty six percent of the soldiers stationed at U.S. camps were hospitalized with the influenza and even more no doubt caught it but were not sent to the hospital because of only mild symptoms (everyone reacts differently to a virus).

Whether or not Earle Hazen caught the influenza at Camp Devens in fall 1918, he served out the war, was discharged in early 1919, I suppose. He lived 41 more years and is buried in New Britain, Connecticut. I visited earlier this year:

World War
Earle Hazen
3d CO 151st D.B.
Died July 31, 1959
Age 62

He is buried in the enormous Fairview cemetery in New Britain, Connecticut. Here is a part of that cemetery:

Earle Hazen Obituary, July 31, 1959

Post-223: Kinsfolk by the Millions (Or, My Y-Chromosome Story) (Or, What the Heck is “R1b-U106”?)

Posted on August 1, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

Map of frequency of my Y-chromosome (father’s father’s father’s…etc.) [From here]

My Y-chromosome line is R1b-U106, determined by a professional test my father did last year. Above is a map of its distribution in Europe today. The darker the color, the more men native to that region have this Y-chromosome.

My father had this Y-chromosome, as did his, father, and his father before him, and so on. Every man’s Y-chromsome is passed on in the same way as we pass on surnames. All those with R1b-U106 will share the same male ancestor (father’s father’s father’s father’s….etc.). Nobody really knows how long ago or where that man lived.

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Whoever that Stone Age man was, he has millions of descendants alive today: 20% of Englishmen, 19% of German men, 17% of Danish men, 13% of Swiss men, and an astonishing 35% of Dutchmen. Also, 15% of White American men. This means that in the USA, about 15 million men have this Y-chromosome line; tens of millions more in Europe. (Sample sizes for these are not big [Wiki], so give or take).

Famous people known to be R1b-U106 (from here):

U.S. Civil War General (and later President) Ulysses S. Grant,
U.S. President Polk,
The royal Bourbon line of France, including the king they beheaded after the 1789 French Revolution (multiple descendants tested to determine this).

Because this just deals with a shared patrilineal ancestor some large number of generations ago, it actually doesn’t tell anything directly about a person’s overall ancestry. For that, another test is needed (which is not yet totally reliable).

Note on Names: The R1b-U106 Y chromosome variant is sometimes called R1b-S21, other times called R1b-M405, and formerly called the totally-unmemorizable “R1b1b2a1a1”. That’s what we get for the field of genetic testing being so new. From what I can tell, by 2014, R1b-U106 is now the dominant name.

Post-222: Good Journalism, From Iraq/Syria

Posted on August 1, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

In Malaysia last year, I curiously bought and read a few of the English newspapers. Malaysians with whom I spoke generally disparaged the big papers as government mouthpieces (This despite, many of them, often reading them).

We can make plenty of criticisms of the U.S. media, too. I feel generally disappointed by U.S. journalism.

What is good journalism? Somebody named Robert Picard gives this definition, more eloquently than I could:

[Good journalism] is…labor intensive; it involves collecting, analysing, structuring and presenting information. The best journalism comes from knowledgeable and critical individuals determining what information is significant, backgrounding and contextualizing it, and thinking about and explaining its meaning. […]

Good journalism involves engaging language and fluid prose, but it is not merely a well written and good story; it is not necessarily evident in stories that make the most popular list of stories or are most shared on social media. Good journalism involves stories that have import, impact, and elements of exclusivity and uniqueness; it wrestles with issues of the day, elucidates social conditions, facilitates society in finding solutions to challenges, and is independent of all forms of power. Good journalism is rational and critical; it is infused with scepticism, but not cynicism.

I was glad to discover Patrick Cockburn earlier this year, whom I consider a very good journalist along the lines of the above. He is an on-the-ground Middle East correspondent who writes for a British newspaper, The Independent. I learn a lot from his articles, which are archived since 2001 (when he was in Afghanistan) at Unz.com. The latest:

Isis Winning Its War on Two Fronts
Militants have conquered Sunni regions of Iraq and are now consolidating their hold on north-eastern Syria
By Patrick Cockburn • July 31, 2014

In the early hours of 24 July a Saudi volunteer belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) drove a car packed with explosives towards the perimeter wall of a base manned by 300 soldiers of the 17th Division of the Syrian army near the city of Raqqa in north-east Syria.

As the Saudi raced at high speed towards the wall he was given covering fire by a barrage of artillery shells and rockets, but he did not quite make it. His car was hit by Syrian army fire and blew up with an explosion that shook buildings miles away in Raqqa city. The plan had been for 40 Isis fighters to burst through a breach in the perimeter wall made by the suicide bomber. A further 600 Isis fighters were to follow up the first assault, if it made headway.

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A second Saudi suicide bomber in a truck drove towards the base, but his explosives also detonated prematurely when hit by Syrian fire. Even so, the Syrian army detachment appears to have been too small to defend the base and 50 of them were ambushed and killed as they pulled back. A Twitter account linked to Isis later showed horrific pictures of the heads of decapitated soldiers stuck on the spikes of what looks like a gate.

It turned out that the assault on the 17th Division was not even Isis’s main assault which was directed against Regiment 121, a major Syrian army stronghold outside Hasakah City in north-east Syria. The regimental commander General Mozid Salama was reported killed and pictures posted by Isis show captured T-55 tanks, artillery pieces and multiple rocket launchers. Omar al-Shishani, a Chechen rebel commander, issued a statement saying the battle had gone on for three days, during which there were “dense missile, air, artillery, tank, machine gun and sniper fire on small mujahedin assault groups”. He added that 50 guns, including a 120mm artillery piece, and two tanks had been captured by his forces.

The fighting was among the most severe between the Syrian army and the armed opposition for a year. It put an end to a conspiracy theory that President Bashar al-Assad’s army and Isis secretly collaborated and never fought each other. The victories of Isis, which has taken over much of eastern Syria in the last three weeks, have established its position as the dominant force among the Syrian rebels. It has driven the al-Qa’ida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra out of the oil province of Deir Ezzor and other groups are disintegrating as their fighters defect to Isis, attracted by its astonishing victories in Syria and Iraq since the fall of Mosul on 10 June.

There is no sign that Isis is running out of steam in either the Syrian or Iraqi parts of the caliphate declared by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on 29 June. In both countries its fighting force is growing in numbers and effectiveness, if not in popularity. In Mosul its blowing up of the Sunni mosque above the Tomb of Jonah, as well as the destruction of at least 30 other Sunni and Shia shrines, has dismayed local inhabitants.

“Believe me the destruction of the ancient mosques and the persecution of the Mosul Christians have left everyone here helpless,” writes a Sunni woman living in Mosul. “We are very angry and bitter.” But the anger is mixed with helplessness and there is no sign of a counter-revolution by the Iraqi Sunni against Isis which is becoming militarily more powerful by the day. Arabic television stations like al-Arabiya and Al Jazeera, see hopeful signs of Isis being displaced by the Sunni tribes, neo-Baathists and ex-army officers as happened in 2006 during the American occupation. But this time around Isis is expecting a stab in the back and has taken counter measures by demanding that all swear allegiance to the caliphate and arresting those it suspects of disloyalty.

Its run of victories makes Isis difficult to displace and there is no sign of these ending. It is increasing its stranglehold on Baghdad and a government counter-attack to recapture Tikrit failed dismally. Shia volunteers who answered a call from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to help the army are streaming home disillusioned and complaining that they suffered heavy losses when they fought and were left without food, arms and ammunition. Nouri al-Maliki, whose maladministration is considered responsible for recent disasters, is still Prime Minister. For many Shia he is the beleaguered leader of their community whom they see as betrayed by the Kurds who expanded their quasi-independent zone by 40 per cent after the fall of Mosul.

Isis has seized most of the wholly Sunni parts of Iraq outside Baghdad, where there are large Sunni enclaves, and south of the capital where there are strategically placed Sunni towns. Advances into mixed or purely Shia districts will mean harder fighting and heavy casualties. Isis, which so far has made few military mistakes, may feel it is easier to take ground in Syria, particularly north of Aleppo from which it made a tactical withdrawal earlier in the year. It may want to eliminate or bring under its sway other rebel groups so, as in Iraq, there is no opposition military force around which its enemies can rally.

Isis has been lucky in that its advances in eastern Syria have taken place as international attention is absorbed by events in Ukraine and Gaza. The Shia political leadership has taken refuge in wishful thinking that the Sunni community is open to a power-sharing deal and regional autonomy. In fact, there is no evidence that Isis or its Baathist allies want to end a war that so far they are winning. Isis might not be able to storm Baghdad by a direct assault but it could reduce it to mayhem by bombs or by blockading it. “If the fall of northern Iraq was the first act of this tragedy, then I suspect there is second act still to come,” said one Iraqi observer.

(Reprinted from The Independent by permission of author or representative) [via Unz.com]

Post-221: Watching the Grapes of Wrath (1940)

Posted on July 27, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

The Grapes of Wrath was released in March 1940, not long before (both sets of) my grandparents got married. Perhaps they saw it while on a date on some Saturday night back then.I think it would’ve especially drawn the sympathy of my father’s parents (who married in Feb. ’41), as they were also involved in farming at the time, in Iowa, not far from the Dust Bowl.

I watched this movie in 2014 for the first time.

Grapes of Wrath is based on a book. I read it in high school. Most of it, anyway. I gave a poorly-thought-out and poorly-delivered presentation on the themes of the movie, to the disappointment of our 11th grade English teacher, Mr. Mo***. Oh, I admired that man. He may have been more of an influence on my thinking than I realize. I’d like another shot at that presentation. I can do better now.

The movie has a simple plot: Expelled by the bank from their long-held farm in Oklahoma, westward the Joad family goes, to California. They want work. Ill fortune awaits. The local “company thugs” mistreat them, exploit them, lie, cheat, and treat them cruelly. The family begins to disintegrate. Tom Joad reacts by becoming a kind of political radical outlaw (this is toned down in the movie) and the ending is uncertain.

Here are some screenshots I took:

Original Poster for Grapes of Wrath (1940)

DVD case for Grapes of Wrath (2000s)

Tom Joad walks “down that lonesome road” towards his (soon to be former) home in Oklahoma

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Tom Joad meets Preacher Casey, who has turned away from the church and to alcohol

Tom and Casey enter the old Joad homestead, but everybody’s gone

A local man holds dirt in his hand, declaring that he’ll never leave (the bank has expelled the Joad family and others)

The above picture I find interesting. The man is squatting (and did so for a long while on screen). This is something I think I have never seen a White-American do. It is something East-Asians commonly do, but Whites “can’t”, I believed. I find it very difficult to do this myself. I suppose that in 1940, people were a lot thinner, so it was easier.

The Joads go to California

Water sold at 15 cents a gallon on Route 66

I was curious as to whether 15 cents a gallon is a good price or not. Water sold at 15 cents a gallon in 1939 (the movie was filmed in late 1939) would cost $2.57 in 2014 dollars according to this inflation calculator. What would a gallon of water in similar circumstances (roadside) cost today? $2.57 seems reasonable.

Woody Guthrie, the famous folk singer in the 1930s and 1940s, lived among the Dust Bowl refugees and Oklahoma native, wrote a song after seeing this movie. Here are some of the lines from his song about what happened to the Joads and their friend Preacher Casey in California:
___________________________________________________________________
From “Tom Joad” by Woody Guthrie (1940)

They stood on a mountain and they looked to the west
And it looked like the promised land
That bright green valley with a river running through
There was work for every single hand, they thought,
There was work for every single hand

The Joads rode away to the Jungle Camp
There they cooked a stew
And the hungry little kids of the Jungle Camp said,
“We’d like to have some, too”
Said “We’d like to have some, too”

Now a deputy sheriff fired loose at a man
Shot a woman in the back
Before he could take his aim again
Preacher Casey dropped him in his track, poor boy,
Preacher Casey dropped him in his track

They handcuffed Casey and took him to jail
And then he got away
And he met Tom Joad on the old river bridge
And these few words he did say, poor boy,
These few words he did say:

“I preached for the Lord a mighty long time,
Preached about the rich and the poor,
Us workin’ folks must all get together
‘Cause we ain’t got a chance anymore
We ain’t got a chance anymore!”

Now the deputies come and Tom and Casey run
To the bridge where the water run down
But the vigilante thugs hit Casey with a club
They laid poor Casey on the ground, poor Casey
They laid Preacher Casey on the ground

Tom Joad, he grabbed that deputy’s club,
Hit him over the head
Tom Joad took flight in the dark rainy night
And a deputy and a preacher lyin’ dead, two men,
A deputy and a preacher lyin’ dead

Tom run back where his mother was asleep
He woke her up out of bed
And he kissed goodbye to the mother that he loved
He said what Preacher Casey said, Tom Joad
He said what Preacher Casey said

Everybody might be just one big Soul
Well, it looks that way to me
Everywhere that you look in the day or night
That’s where I’m a-gonna be, Ma
That’s where I’m a-gonna be…

Post-220: Jewish Classmate, Reminisced

Posted on July 26, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

Fall 2000. Lunchtime. School cafeteria. Within sight were probably a few trend-followers wearing very, very baggy pants (a fashion that is, thank God, long gone). A few of us had finished eating and were wandering around out of doors, just outside the cafeteria. J.A., my Jewish friend, was there. I brought up the latest Israeli vs. Palestinian fighting then occurring. He said a few things which I’m sure he was repeating from his Jewish School teachers or parents. How to solve the problem once-and-for-all. Something about a “two-state solution” which I didn’t understand at the time.

(J.A. also remarked, either on this occasion or another, something about the “real problem” being the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, a comment I also didn’t understand at all, so simply accepted, on his authority as a Jew, without comment.)

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J.A. is one of the few Jews I have known closely in my life. We were friends in middle school and high school (after briefly being “enemies” in middle school).

J.A.’s father was an investment banker or something. …I know, I know: It sounds like I’m making it up, playing to a Jewish stereotype. He is the only classmate I ever had whose father had such a “high-flying” job, that I knew of. It’s a credit to Arlington Public Schools that such man would send his son to a public school and not to a private school. J.A. himself didn’t look at all like a Jewish stereotype. He was tall and red-haired, with the build of a swimmer (and he was one). I haven’t heard from him in ten years now. I am sure he’s been to Israel, probably more than once.

Reading the news lately, writing #218 and #219, and reminiscing about that period in fall 2000, I see that nothing has changed in 14 years. Nothing! (Just as nothing had really changed from the 1980s up to year 2000, I suppose, when I first became aware of this issue.)

Back on the firm ground of the present. The Gaza death toll rapidly approaches 1,000 dead in the past three weeks.

Palestinian Shijaiyah neighborhood, Gaza City, after Israeli bombardment (July 26 2014, AP)

Post-219: Dilbert and Dave Barry on the Middle East

Posted on July 24, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

Dave Barry once wrote:

Wall Street [is] always making up preposterous explanations as to why stock prices rise and fall, such as “tension in the Middle East,” when of course there is always tension in the Middle East. When we finally have a nuclear war and there is no life left on Earth except cockroaches, the cockroaches in the Middle East will be tense.

And in the same spirit, a Dilbert comic strip from July 1989:

This was twenty five years ago. Two of the three “reusable headlines” hold up well (certainly “Unrest in the Mideast”). “Home prices rise” was true most of the time. Here is an Economist on U.S. home prices 1987-2013:

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USA housing prices, adjusted for inflation, 1985-2013 [Economist] [Link]

There it is, the famous “Housing Bubble”. Prices rose dramatically from 1997-2006. But then in 2008-2009, as prices crashed, the exact opposite of Dilbert’s “eternal headline” was regular news. In 2014 we’re back to “normal”.

Oh, I remember those early and mid 2000s. As far as I could tell, everybody really did believe, somehow, that home prices would rise forever, as if by magic. Late night TV had “how to get rich quick in real estate” shows, one after another. Buy a property and then sell soon(er or later). Housing prices will have had risen some amount, say 10% in a year, for a net profit of many thousands of dollars. Do the same a dozen times, and you’ve made a small fortune! It might as well’ve been manna from heaven.

Post-218: Gaza in the “Mirror” (Spiegel) (And the Abyss Stares Back)

Posted on July 21, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

Last month, unknown assailants killed three Jewish teenagers in Israel. This month, Israel decided to kill 650 Palestinians (so far) in revenge bombings. “That’ll shown those…unknown assailants.” Uhh…

It seems that nobody has determined who killed the teenagers or why. Oh, and between the three deaths and the 650 Palestinian deaths [and thousands of woundings], Israel used gestapo tactics to jail hundreds more Palestinians, killing ten or so in the round-up, which inspired some other Palestinians to launch a few useless rockets in anger.

All the same, the “Gaza Conflict” of summer 2014 I view mostly with indifference. I don’t support either side, and see it as senseless and a bit tiring (this happens so often). What does Respectable Opinion say?

Spiegel “Pressekompass” July 21 2014 on Gaza Conflict [Link]

Der Spiegel (‘The Mirror’ in German), the news and politics magazine, did an analysis of a few newspapers’ editorial stances on the July 2014 Gaza attack. The axes of opinions:

Vertical:
(top) Hamas’ actions are understandable
(bottom) Hamas’ actions not understandable

Horizontal:
(left) Israel’s response is disproportionate
(right) Israel must respond in this way

Top-right quadrant: “Everybody’s right”.
Bottom-right: “Pro-Israel” (Israel justified, Hamas not)
Bottom-left: “Everybody’s wrong.”
Top-left: Pro-Palestinian (Hamas justified, Israel not).

The icons represent different newspapers’ editorial opinions during the July 2014 crisis:

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The Guardian is alone in the “everybody’s right”. quadrant (top right). Al Jazaeera, predictably, says Israel is wrong, but is neutral on Hamas. The blue dots are Spiegel users’ unscientific opinions, and the red arrow is the average. My own dot I’d put on the left side somewhere.

Predictably, all three German newspapers in the survey are on the “Israel is Right and the Palestinians are Wrong” side (bottom right quadrant). (It’s hard to imagine anyone in today’s Germany, other than marginal political radicals [or Muslim immigrants], offering any criticism of Israel.)

I expect all/most U.S. newspapers would be “Israel is Right, Palestinians are Wrong”, too. This is the default opinion in the USA. We regularly see movies telling us how heroically persecuted Jews are, so that’s a part of it. There is something more going on, though, I think. “Israel is our only ally in the Middle East, surrounded by hostile enemies”. That’s what they say. This image creates a subconscious and powerful “civilizational nostalgia” for eight or nine hundred years ago or so. The Crusader Era. Crusader kingdoms that our ancestors set up in the 1100s-1200s AD in the very same place. Hey, the comparison is there to be made.

Crusaders.
(From the “Kingdom of Heaven” movie of 2005 [stolen from here]).

With the crusades comes the Middle Ages, romantically imagined to have been a golden age of social harmony. Knights. Chivalry. You know. We gentiles of Western-European ancestry (still a majority of the USA population, and a large majority in the heartland) are susceptible to “nostalgia politics” just like (I guess) everybody else.

“Heraldic Chivalry” by Alphonse Mucha

Of course, the difference between Israel and the Crusader States is that Israel is not Christian, and, inconveniently, many Palestinians are: Fully a million, in fact, of the total of 10.5 million total Palestinians in the world are Christian, most of them living outside “Palestine” due to the expulsions, according to Wikipedia. (I was surprised to learn that there are even six active Lutheran churches in the occupied Palestinian territories, see ELCJHL.org.)

Post-217: Introducing “I am Cappuccino” (using Korean)

Posted on July 20, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

Here is an assignment from my Korean class, kind of a free writing activity (for once). Choose a product and write a little summary of it. Guidelines, simple: Where was it bought? / Price? / Good points? / Bad points?

I wrote what is in black. Red is the teacher’s. Below is the final text in Korean (corrected) with my English translation.

캔 커피 [개요쓰기]
이것은 40분 전에 제가 이 건물 안에 있는 자동판매기에서 산 캔 커피예요. 이름이 “나는…카푸치노”이어서 우유가 좀 있는 커피예요. 키가 큰 여자 사진있지만, 그 사진은 작아요.

이 캔 커피는 값이 싸요. 오백원이에요. 커피가 맛있어서 마시고 기분이 좋아져요. 카페인이 많아서 졸리지 않아요. 그렇지만 캔이 작이어서 마실 수 있는 커피가 적고 설탕이 많아서 건강에 나쁠 수 있어요.

Can of Coffee [Product Summary] (Translation)
This is a can of coffee which was bought by me forty minutes ago in a vending machine in this building. As its name is “I Am…Cappuccino” it must be the kind of coffee which has some milk in it. There is a picture of a tall woman on the can, but the picture is small.

This can of coffee is sold at a cheap price. It is only 500 Korean Won [50 U.S. cents]. As the coffee tastes good, after drinking it you’ll feel better. There is a lot of caffeine, so you won’t feel drowsy. However, the can is a bit small so there is not much coffee to drink, and furthermore there’s lots of sugar, so it may be a bad for your health.

The can of coffee about which
I wrote a summary in Korean

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Looking back on this little assignment, I can make a few other general comments:

(1) Not Really From a Vending Machine. I actually bought it in the building’s convenience store with my Japanese classmate Toru씨. I’m not sure if I didn’t remember this, or whether I just really wanted to use the word “자동판매기” (jah-dong-pahn-meggi, vending machine) which I think sounds funny.

(2) Sugar? In fact, I didn’t check the sugar content. I was in a rush to finish in the ten minutes allotted. I just assumed.

(3) A Lot of Caffeine? The can includes 65mg of caffeine, as you’ll see in the photo. In Korea they always put the amount of caffeine on the front of the caffeinated products, which I find nice. If you’re like me, you try to maximize the caffeine-per-dollar value. I don’t really think 65mg is “a lot” of caffeine (as I wrote in the assignment). For a man of my size (185 pounds or 84 kilograms, I think), my impression is that it will start to noticeably perk you up only well above the 100mg level.

(4) The Can is Tiny. It can fit in your pocket. The can is 175 ml, a bit less than 6 ounces, so half the volume of the smallest soda cans we sell. In my memory in the USA, I don’t remember such tiny cans of drinks being sold to adults. Judging by how common they are in Korea, they do brisk business.

Post-216: Earliest Memories: World Cup, O.J., and a Tragic Defeat at the Hands of a Small Girl

Posted on June 30, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

I continue to watch World Cup 2014 more than is advisable. With my friend J.H., I watched a 1 AM to 3 AM game in which the Netherlands defeated Mexico in dramatic fashion. Mexico is out.

I feel a special attachment to the World Cup, as I started explaining in post 215 (“World Cup USA 1994”).

I have told people that two events of mid-1994 constitute my first strong “socially/culturally/politically relevant memories”**. These are: (1) World Cup USA ’94, and (2) The O.J. Simpson trial. I remember being in California for a period in June 1994, to see my brother graduate from high school. I remember the TVs being dominated by two things: The O.J. Simpson murder and the World Cup (then ongoing in the USA). I went to Disneyland on this trip, and my mom broke her leg about this time.

** — (This is not exactly true, because I also remember the Clinton election of Fall ’92, in which the now-totally-forgotten Ross Perot got an astounding 20% of the national vote. I have no memory of the California Race Riots of April ’92, nor of the the First Iraq War of early ’91 [it only lasted 72 hours anyway], nor of the Berlin Wall in November ’89 or anything else, really, about the Collapse of Communism.)

So much for “politically relevant” memories. How about earliest memories of any kind? One stands out. It goes something like this:

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                A Memory
            Small boy. It’s me. Short blondish hair.
            Small girl. Long hair. Noisy but pretty.
            A toy car. Nice! Red. Yellow. Fun. I can have fun!
            No. She takes it. She keeps it!
            I want to try! Maybe I can wait.
            Why won’t she share??
            What do I do? I can’t do anything. Sad.
            I wander away. I’m sad.

So there it is. This has stuck with me so many years, but it’s not a very positive memory, is it. A memory of defeat, dejection, helplessness. It was caused by a girl, whose name and face are long forgotten to me, “hogging” the object of my curious desire. It was one of those toy cars that a small child can fit into and drive around using the feet to propel the car forward. This was at some kind of early childhood play center in Arlington, back in the 1980s.

Still yet today, I can see through the eyes of that young boy on that day. He had no idea what to do. He just wanted to try the car. He just wanted to experience some joy in his young life. This other girl, she grabbed the car and kept it for herself. The boy slunk away and pondered life’s unfairness. The boy felt sorry for himself. He didn’t fight.

The sort of toy car that was lost

Post-215: World Cup USA 1994

Posted on June 28, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

I remember World Cup 1994.

Now that it’s 2014 and the World Cup is here again, I realize that 1994 is no short time ago.

U.S. World Cup Team 1994

I remember this team. The wild-looking #22 in the back is Alexei Lalas. He is now a commentator. The little Black guy, #13, was Cobi Jones, who amazed us by his sprinting ability in those days. #18 is Brad Friedel, who is still playing today in the English Premier League, at age 43. I saw him on the BBC as a commentator when watching a game with my friend J.H. We were confused by his accent. Half of his sentences sounded British, half American. #1 was Tony Meola, the starting goalie, whose name I thought was very cool. Looking back on this team, there is only one player who is obviously Mestizo in ancestral origin, #7. Only two players are Black, and both are very light-skinned. This strikes me about how I perceive that the USA has changed. If this team were fielded in 2014, my feeling is that the coach and so on would be accused of racism!

This team performed the best, by far, of any U.S. national team ever up to that point.

There was no Internet in 1994. This probably meant life was more authentic. I played soccer in those days, too. I was in school but June and July, World Cup time, are vacation. I was so excited that I hardly knew what to do with myself.

The World Cup was not only going on, you see, but in my own backyard. I think some of the games were played at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. and there I was living quite nearby. I went to a game. I am almost sure I did. I have no idea who played, other than two minor teams. Exasperatingly, I am not 100% sure if this is a true memory. I remember seeing a bunch of attention-seekers dressed in bright red-white-and-blue costumes and making a lot of noise at the stadium. Is it possible I saw it on TV? No, it can’t be. A memory of TV cannot be so vivid. Is it possible the memory was of the 1996 Olympic soccer and I went to that instead?

I remember being alone in a car with my friend and then-classmate Pedro, listening on the radio to the USA vs. Brazil game. As it was radio, our clarity of understanding was less than optimal. I remember our huge celebration when the USA scored a goal. Imagine the deflating feeling when we realized that it was actually Brazil that scored! The USA lost.

Post-214: World Cup 2014 and Southern European Political Pessimism

Posted on June 25, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

I wrote the following to my (one and only) Singaporean friend, A.L., yesterday:

“The World Cup is seriously negatively affecting my life!”

How might I describe my mornings these past two weeks? A drowsy haze of soccer punctuated by frustrated sleep and confusion. You see, the games are shown from 1 AM to 8 AM. “Life is too short to sleep through the World Cup”, is my feeling. I don’t follow soccer whatsoever otherwise, so this may not be my most rational decision.

Dutch player Robben, who resembles Captain Picard, shoots past a Spain player. (Netherlands won 5-1).

This Sunday/Monday, I got to sleep at 12:30 AM and woke up at 3:00 AM, shaved/showered, packed up my things, and walked over to my friend J.H.’s home to watch the Korea game and then the USA vs. Portgual game. Korea had a terrible first half in which they conceded four goals and lost. They are probably out. As for the USA game, I had to leave before the second half began to go to our class’ last day. The USA and Portugal tied due to a last-second Portugal goal, which I thus missed.

Political Influences on World Cup Results; Speculative
The appeal of the World Cup is definitely “political'” in the sense of it being all about national pride. Within Europe, I cannot help but think of the political situation since the 2008 Economic Crisis.

FIFA Ranking Table, June 5th 2014

Southern Europeans
The European “PIIGS”, who fast approach a decade of unending economic unpleasantness and pessimism, did remarkably poorly in the Group Stage:

           Spain: Out. Two losses.
           Italy: Out. Two losses.
           Greece: Out. Two losses.
           Porutgal: Probably Out. Nearly two losses (tied USA at last second).

Now, consider that Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece respectively rank #1, #4, #9, #12 in the world!

“On paper”, as they say, each of these teams should be in the final 16, i.e., the second round in the World Cup. Three are out for sure and one teeters on the brink. What, then, is the statistical chance, in a 32-team tournament, that the #1, #4, #9, and #12 ranked teams are all eliminated before going onto the second round of 16 teams? The odds have to be very low, in which case we can speculate about a general explanation. Here is mine: As the contest is heavily influenced by national pride, teams from politically-pessimistic societies do more poorly than they should.

Vis-a-vis the “PIIGS”, who are more politically optimistic?

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Netherlands’ Robin Van Persie scores a “header” goal

Northern Europeans
With one glaring exception, Northwestern Europe has done very. Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and England are all there. England was knocked out (and somewhere a dog was biting a man; England usually does poorly at the World Cup; England couldn’t even beat Costa Rica this time).

Germany: Probably advancing
Netherlands: Definitely advancing
Belgium: Definitely advancing
Switzerland: May advance with a final win
England: Out; scored only two goals in three games.

There is talk that certain of England’s potential players refused to play for the national team as they’d prefer a vacation, which points to a kind of cynical political pessimism and anti-patriotism, too.

I saw a surreal vieo-game-esque goal by Dutch star Van Persie, in Netherlands’ 5-1 win over Spain.

The USA has done better than I expected. The German coach of the USA team, Klinsmann, was widely mocked for declaring that the USA “definitely will not win” the World Cup. The USA will play Germany one of these days. (Maybe the most curious thing about the USA team is that it seemed to have zero Hispanic starting players. The USA is approaching 20% Hispanic, but it’s hard, in some ways, to even notice [in media, sports, TV, movies, music, politics], except at the street level in certain regions.)

The South Korea team of 2014 performed poorly and will probably be eliminated. They have one Round One game left. I compare this to their great performance in 2002. The South Korea of 2002 was, in my opinion, much more politically optimistic than the South Korea of 2014.

The TV on which I watched one of the World Cup 2014 games

Today, I woke up at 4:50 AM to watch the Japan vs. Colombia game. I am writing as Japan has just lost. They are out. Why did I watch?

Post-213: Letter to Mincheol Backfires (Or, the Ghost of Heidegger in a Korean Textbook)

Posted on June 18, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

A fictitious classmate named Mincheol invited me to go on a fictitious trip to Jeju (an island which is entirely non-fictitious). My task was to decline and give reasons why. Picture here and translation below.

[My Korean original, after corrections by Teacher Lee]
민철 씨, 제주도에 가지 마세요. 우리는 바쁘니까 여행은 좋지 않은 생각이에요. 시험도 있고 가족하고 약속도 있으니까 인천에 있을 거예요. 저는 여행을 못 가요. 가고 싶지 않아요. 글쎄요, 같이 가고 싶은데 못 가요. 다음 주말에 어때요? 다음 주말이 더 좋아요. 시간이 있으니까 다음 주말에 갈까요? 다음 주말에 가면, 아주 행복할 거예요. [Signed]

[English Translation]
Dear Mincheol,
Don’t go to Jeju Island. As we are so busy, going on a trip is a bad idea. We have an exam coming up, and we have obligations to our families, so we need to (here: “will”) stay in Incheon. I can’t go. I don’t want to go. Well, actually I do want to go with you, but I can’t. How about next week? Next week is better. If you have time, why don’t we go next week instead? If we go next week, I will be very happy. [Signed]
_________________________________________________
And the rest of the story: My attempt to sternly warn the fictitious Mincheol of his obligations to his studies and to his family failed; backfired. What do I mean, “backfired”? I mean this:

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I sent the above picture via the KakaoTalk messenger program to a Korean friend, P.R. (one of the people with whom I somehow communicate exclusively in Korean). P.R. wrote back as follows. (Note that the ‘ㅋ’ letter denotes laughter):

                Me: [Sent the above photo]
_                P.R.: ㅋㅋㅋㅋ이게뭐예요?
                P.R.: 민철씨가누구입니까?ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
                Me: 민철씨가 없어요 [grin] 숙제가이죠…내 “편지”가 어때요?
                P.R.: ㅋㅋ아주 그럴듯한데요~?
                P.R.: 민철씨와 꼭 여행을가고싶은게 느껴져요ㅋㅋ

                Me: [Sent the above photo]
                P.R.: Haha, what’s this?
                P.R.: Who is Mr. Mincheol? Hahaha
                (Whereupon I explain that Mincheol is not real and that this is an assignment for class)
                P.R.: Hey it’s pretty good, isn’t it?
                P.R.: It’s just that…Now I feel like *I* want to go on the trip with Mincheol. Hah!

Here is a (hypothetical) person, Mincheol, proposing going on a trip for leisure even with exams upcoming and other obligations. We can criticize Mincheol for being irresponsible, maybe, but I think the Western Mind would (in principle if not in action) more likely sympathize with Mincheol than with the writer, who seems dominated by social pressures and “sounds very Asian”. (Ironically, the writer is [of course] me, who is 100% European by ancestry albeit writing in an Asian language [Korean] and one which I don’t know well at that). Yet my letter rebuking Mincheol for the trip idea made P.R., a Korean, want to join Mincheol! The “Mincheol Life” is appealing (in this case to a highly-amused P.R.), because it is (may be) more “authentic”.

The Authentic Life. Martin Heidegger. The letter-writer’s persona is the kind which Heidegger (if I can make the grand claim of understanding him) might say leads an “inauthentic life”. The writer appeals to the “They” idea. “They say you shouldn’t do any leisure activities before an exam.” Who are “They”? There is no “They”. And yet it is everywhere. All the time. Most of what we do is controlled by the “They”. The Authentic Life, as I understand it, means escaping the clutches of this “They” (see here for more). It may or may not mean going to Jeju Island with Mincheol, though.

Post-212: In Which I Relate My Biggest Shock of 2011 (Or, A Martin-Luther-Related Surprise in Korea)

Posted on June 2, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

Luther Statue
Washington, D.C.
[From post-211]

Now, I don’t think I’d believe this story if I heard it from someone else, but I trust my own ears well enough. I was there. It was late 2011.

This was it, more or less:
Picture a long table, at the back of a reasonably-priced meat restaurant, in a nice and cozy corner of the Seoul Megalopolis. Beef and pork are on grills built into the tables, cooking, in the Korean style. The grill emanates comfortable heat. Eight or so White Westerners are sitting at this table, eating and talking. Most are coworkers, teachers at the same English language institute (hagwon). Among them is me.

Next to me sits C.H. from California (who is now in China). Others present included J.H., B.L., M.G., E.R., and finally A.S. All these people were born in the mid-1980s (except for C.H. who is a bit older), so are in their mid-20s at the time (2011), Everyone around the table holds a university degree.

A.S., from England, with his close-cropped red hair, is the focal point of my memory here. He was a big fan of one of the soccer teams in England.

It so happens that C.H. is a graduate of a Lutheran college in the USA. At our dinner, as the meat sizzles and all the “accoutrements” are nearby at the ready — lettuce, garlic, peppers (of which we stayed well clear), sauces, kimchi, and who knows what else — I begin to ask C.H. about his thoughts on the Lutheran church(es) in America and so on. He knows much more than I do about it. He was even in a Lutheran seminary for a short time.

Our English friend, A.S., listens in. He chimes in:

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He: [quizzically] “What are you two talking about?”
Us: “The Lutheran Church.”
He: “What’s that?”
Us: “Lutheranism.”
He: “….“
Us: “You don’t know what Lutheranism is?”
He: [puzzled] “Umm, no.“
Us: “It’s a kind of Christianity. It goes back to Martin Luther and the Reformation. Lutherans follow the teachings of Luther. [Matter of factly] You know, Martin Luther.” [The last sentence was not a question; it ended with a falling intonation].
He: “Oh, of course I know Martin Luther King. So it’s a church that follows Martin Luther King, is it?”
Us: “No, not Martin Luther King. Martin Luther. The one who lived in Germany five hundred years ago, who started the Reformation. That one.”
He: [blankly; gently shaking head] “I’ve never heard of him.”

He’d never heard of him! Imagine. Our English friend, a university-educated European, claimed total ignorance of Luther. I should add that there was nothing ironic or joking about his delivery.

This shocked me. How can a university-educated Western European man have never heard of Luther? Am I wrong to be shocked? Am I wrong to be troubled by this?

You know, previous generations generally didn’t even bother “Martining” him. They spoke of “Luther” in the way we still speak of “Lincoln” or “Darwin”. First name not needed. Just a short few decades later, a native-born Englishman, a product of England’s K-16 system, has never heard of him, one of the most famous Europeans ever to live.

With lots of meat left to be eaten, and not wanting to offend A.S., but genuinely surprised and disheartened a bit, I dropped the subject. I brought it up later with C.H. in private. C.H. attributed A.S.’ ignorance of the Christian Reformer to “secularism” in the UK. (Note: C.H. had had a small book published, around the mid-2000s, by one of the conservative Lutheran church bodies in the USA, which I sought out, found online, ordered, and read. That thin little book is now in the possession of C.H.’s good friend J.A. [who also went to Korea, is still there, and became my friend too]. I gave it to J.A. when I moved out).

I didn’t find C.H.’s explanation totally satisfying, because Luther is more than a religious figure. Luther is one of the towering figures of European history in general, as I see it. It’s like excusing a Swede who had never heard of Napoleon by arguing that Sweden is a pacifist country so “they wouldn’t have studied about a general”. That doesn’t fly. All Swedes, certainly the educated ones, ought to know about Napoleon. An educated Englishman ought, at minimum, to “have heard of” Luther. If you ask me!
______________________________________________
It so happens that A.S. was highly concerned with seeming “cool”. He was a good athlete, was basically pleasant to talk with, and had a certain charisma at times. He was a big fan of rap music, despite being a freckled, red-haired Englishman (a “ginger”, as he said). It occurs to me that knowledge of rap may correlate with ignorance of things like who Martin Luther was. Those who know all about Luther are generally going to be quite (relatively) ignorant about rap music. There is a correlation there. I have no data, but I’m sure of it.

It was once said to me that A.S. wanted very much to seem “working class” despite being “middle class”. This is a British thing I don’t too much understand. A Scottish teacher in the circle of people of my acquaintance at that time had said this. (The Scotsman’s given name’s first initial is R.; I’ve forgotten his surname — R.’s Korean sojourn ended in unforgettably-surreal circumstances a few months after the late 2011 dinner I tried to sketch out above, but R. is now doing well back in the UK, I’m told.)

I might offer this explanation: If A.S. were twenty years older, I’m almost sure he’d have heard of Luther. At some point in the last few decades, though, part of the “high status” package for Westerners has become “belief in moral superiority of other cultures over our own.” By the 1990s and 2000s, when this A.S. was being educated in England’s K-to-16 pipeline, his teachers and so on must’ve, by consensus, steered the kids’ education away from “Dead White Males” like Luther and more towards the Shaka Zulus and Mansa Musas and so on.

In post-211 I discussed the Luther statue in downtown Washington, D.C. Now I wonder, truly: How many of the seven million residents of the Washington, D.C. metro area today “have ever heard of” Martin Luther”?

I choose to live imagining that the typical educated, native-born Westerner is aware of Luther.

Post-211: Martin Luther Statue in Washington D.C.

Posted on May 12, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

The father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, in Washington, D.C.:

Luther Statue, Washington D.C. (Thomas Circle) / February 2014

Taking his “Here I Stand” pose, as he so often does when appearing in statue form, Dr. Luther is memorializing his glory days. You know, the Diet of Worms; his dramatic refusal to recant; his death sentence and midnight escape.

The statue is a replica of one which stands in Germany at Worms (pronounced “Verms”) according to Wikipedia. (On Worms being pronounced “Verms”: I may have gone all through confirmation class, at a Lutheran church, unaware that using the wobbly English ‘W’ in that name was not quite right).

More photos of the statue and vicinity are below (including one from the 1920s):

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This is very close to the heart of Downtown Washington D.C.

Have a look at a map pinpointing Thomas Circle. The Luther Statue is adjacent to it, on the north side.

Thomas Circle is named for a Union general from Virginia (George Thomas, who won fame at the battle of Chickamagua). General Thomas gazes southwards, towards his native state, perhaps in the direction of Old Town Alexandria, where a Confederate Soldier, also in statue form, still (as far as I know) stares back.

General George Thomas “The Rock of Chickamagua”
Thomas Circle / February 2014

The above are all my photos, taken in 2014. Below is Thomas Circle in the 1920s, with the Luther Statue in the back:

Thomas Circle, 1922 / From Library of Congress [link]

The trees on either side of General Thomas are still there in 2014, or at least trees of the same species.

Both of these statues are holdovers from a much earlier time. As I see it, there is no way either would’ve been granted statuehood in Washington, D.C. in the past fifty years. Yet there they boldly stand, even into the 2010s.

Post-210: Korea Costco Comments: “Your Pizza and Bake are Too Salty! It’s Serious”

Posted on May 8, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

Costco Ilsan [Korea], front door

I once had a Costco Korea membership. That was January 2013 to January 2014. I used it at the Ilsan and Youngdeungpo stores a few times. My conclusion was that Costco Korea’s negatives outweigh its positives. The prices are not better than the other “marts” like HomePlus or E-Mart, and you have to buy in bulk. It’s also a chaotic atmosphere in there. Visits are stressful, and it’s a long trip there.

There are two pluses, though:

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The positives about Costco are:
(1) The availability of certain specific American products unavailable or very expensive anywhere else,
(2) The food court.

Ilsan Costco foodcourt prices — 2,000 [$1.80] for a hot dog and soda

In general, the food court is hearty, delicious, and cheap. Hot dogs, pizza, chicken bake, etcetera. A pretty heaping meal can be had for $5 a person. (About half of the Korean patrons of the food court shamelessly pile up small mountains of onions [meant to be a light topping on the hot dogs] onto their paper plates. This is a strange habit.)

Costco in Korea has a place for “How are we doing” comments, which they publish:

The Korean says: “Dear customers, our business kindly wants to hear your opinions.”

Here are some comments they had posted during one of my visits. I photographed the comment sheets. They are under the glass, right under the red arrow in the photo above. I include the translations into English that were provided by the store, verbatim:

Park wrote:
Your pizza and bake are too salty. It’s serious.Pls, make them less salty.
여기 코스트코 피자 베이크 너무 짭니다 심각해요 안짜게 해주세요

Han wrote:
I bought a Westing House fan on July, 2012 but a remote control broke down. I request for A/S but it’s inconvenient. [A/S means service and maintenance]
웨스팅하우스 선풍기를 2012년 7월 구입했는데
1년도 안되 리모트컨트롤 고장 입니다
a s 요청 했으나 불편의 많음

Cho wrote:
Pls, build a Costco in Yangju.
양주에도 코스트코 입점하게 해주세요

Hotdog sausage is too salty to eat. Pls, improve it.
[Korean illegible in my photograph]

A combination pizza is too salty. Pls, make it less salty.
[Korean illegible]

When I park at outdoor parking, I have to pay parking fee. Why we have to pay membership fee and parking fee together?
[Korean illegible]

Six comments, and one is a complaint about a warranty, which is not the store’s responsibility. Of the remaining five, three are about the food being “too salty”. Costco provided a response something like: “We use a standard recipe from from headquarters and we are not able to change it”. I guess this is a polite way to say, “If you don’t like it, take a hike!”

Post-209: Watching “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” (1954), an Anti-Korean-War Movie

Posted on May 7, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

A few weeks ago, I found a DVD of “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” which is set during the Korean War. It’s a classic, though an obscure one.

The war ended in July 1953. This movie was made in 1954 and released late that year.

The movie is set during that long, cynical stage of the Korean War without a clear and decisive objective and without the intention of victory. American policy was deliberately to “not win the war” starting in spring 1951. From then on, strategic policy was to fight for a status-quo stalemate. (Parallels to Vietnam are here for the taking.)

Now, “Bridges at Toko-Ri” is not what you’d expect. In theory, it’s about the war in Korea. In fact, we see hardly any “War” and even less “Korea” (i.e., there is very little combat and very little of the movie takes place in Korea itself).

The movie interests me for a lot of reasons. One is the differences between the 1950s-USA and the 2010s-USA. There are too many to comment on.

Here is one: During a “mission briefing” scene, almost every single character is puffing away on a cigarette. If you look closely below, you can see four or maybe five of the men with lit cigarettes. The leader is puffing on a big cigar. You won’t see this so much these days. It surprised me to see smoking on a Navy vessel in the first place. Apparently it was done a lot, but is on the way out according to “Smoking in the United States Military“wiki article.

[Screenshot by me]

The hero, Brubaker, is seated in the middle (he is the John-Wayne-looking character [actor: William Holden]).

Everything about this character/man fits a certain archetype in pre-1970-or-so American cinema that we seldom see anymore, I think: The “Artistocratic-Yet-Rugged Heroic American Male”: Admirable; honorable; noble. A certain accent, a certain manner, and a certain look. Today, this William Holden would much less likely be cast as the quintessential, timeless American Hero, and much more likely as the “quintessential” Villain!

But it is still 1954. A man like Brubaker is still a heroic figure to be looked up to.

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Brubaker’s wife [actress: Grace Kelly] at one point shows up for a surprise visit to the base in Japan,along with their two adoring daughters. They all go to a “natural hot springs” while Brubaker is on leave in Japan.

Do you see the symbol at the top on the door, of a circle with three wavy lines emanating from it? This is a sign I have never seen in the USA, but have seen quite often in Korea. Businesses use it to tell customers, “Come here for hot water”: So saunas, public baths, motels, yeogwan, and so on. That is South Korea, 2010s. This was Japan, sixty years earlier. Could this symbol originate in Japan, borrowed by South Korea?

Much else about the Japan of the 1950s seems “embryonically South Korean” (as I’ve known SK since 2009). Here is a shot of some of the pilots going to a bar off-base in Japan. This neon-dominated building looks South Korean, too:

That scene flashed a memory of April 2009 across my mind’s eye. It was my first night in South Korea. I remember one moment in which I sat there marveling, in stunned amazement, at an enormous neon wall before me. I wrote about this in post-47.

(These two things are trivial, but point to the bigger message of just how much South Korea [and maybe others in Asia, too] borrowed/appropriated from Japan — including the entirety of their “chaebol” economic model .)

For something completely different: I found this interesting. “Beware of Props and Jet Blasts”. This use of “props” has a funny double meaning, being as this was a movie. It means “propellers”, it seems, in Navy jargon.

It seems that I’ve forgotten, thus far, to mention anything about the plot. Alas, I’m not a very good movie reviewer. I have a cousin who’s quite good at it. If he were doing this, he’d have cut most of the junk above and led with something more like this:

Brubaker is a successful lawyer and family man. He flew planes in WWII. Brubaker is called up to fly again in Korea but is ambivalent about the war. The movie opens with his plane shot up terribly after a mission against the Communists. He manages to make it back over the water and bails out. He is saved by a helicopter crew. The admiral takes him aside after he is saved and asks about his experience of being “fished” out of the water:

Admiral: Well, those helicopter boys are pretty good fishermen.
Brubaker: As far as I’m concerned, they deserve every medal in the book. You’re out there all by yourself. You know you can’t last very long. You’re scared and freezing. You curse and you pray. Suddenly you see that mix-master whirling at you out of nowhere. […]
Admiral: Well, I’m mighty glad they pulled you out, son. […]
Brubaker: You do a lot of thinking at a time like that. Mostly about your friends who are back home, leading perfectly normal lives.

(This reminds me of my own daily thoughts in September to October 2013, hiking (halfway) across Korea. What, you might ask, crossed my mind on those long days in which I seldom saw another human being? I would never have guessed this, but the answer is: “Every person I’ve ever known, no matter how remotely“. People floated in and out of my head all the time: Fragments of long-disused memories; long-forgotten glories and long-forgotten quarrels; speculation about how people are doing today…And some were people I haven’t seen since elementary school. People I haven’t thought about in years.)

Back to the plot: As one of the best pilots in the Navy, Brubaker is assigned to destroy the bridges at a place called Toko-Ri. They are very heavily defended, and it’s clear that the pilots on this mission have a high chance of death.

Here is the scene in which the mission is explained, with the admiral’s justification, with the politics of the war and the entire Cold War itself weaved in gracefully:

Brubaker: Well, sir, the organized reserves were drawing pay, but they weren’t called up. I was completely inactive, and yet I was. I had to give up my home, my law practice; everything. Yes, I’m still bitter. [….]
Admiral: Nobody ever knows why he gets the dirty job. And this IS a dirty job. Militarily, this war is a tragedy.
Brubaker: I think we oughta pull out.
Admiral: Now that’s rubbish, son, and you know it. If we did, they’d take Japan, Indochina, the Philippines. Where’d you have us make our stand, the Mississippi? All through history men have had to fight the “wrong war” in the “wrong place”, but that’s the one they’re stuck with! That’s why one of these days we’ll knock out those bridges at Toko-ri.
Brubaker: [Nervously] Do we have to knock out those particular bridges?
Admiral: Yes, we must. I believe without question that some morning, Communist generals and [sarcastically] “commissars” will hold a meeting to discuss the future of this war. A messenger will run in and tell them, “They’ve knocked out even the bridges at Toko-ri!” That little mission will convince them that we’ll never stop! Never weaken in our purpose. And that’s the day they’ll quit.

The admiral is giving a fair view of the pro-intervention side’s philosophy (which, according to my reading, was a minority view in the USA at the time — Most Americans opposed the Korean intervention, especially after the firing of MacArthur). The admiral’s justification of the Toko-Ri mission itself doesn’t really make much sense, though. How will destroying a few more bridges end the war?

Brubaker, suitably, is the American Mainstream: Ambivalent about the war at best, leaning against interventionism: “Why am I here? Why don’t we get out of here? What’s the use?”

Brubaker, in another scene, tries to bail his helicopter pilot friend out of military jail after a fistfight:

Brubaker [smiling, hands in pockets]: He also saved the lives of four pilots.
M.P. Jail Official: Lieutenant, I’ve got a lot of monsters back there in that “birdcage” [a U.S. military jail cell in Tokyo]. Every one of them was a hero in Korea. But here in Tokyo, they’re all monsters.

Ouch. That seems to be a way of saying “Nobody cares what you did in Korea”. A pointless war.

Near the end of the movie, after a series of unfortunate events for the Americans, a fatalistic Brubaker addresses this issue again.

Brubaker: [Muttering] The wrong war in the wrong place. That’s the one you’re stuck with.
Helicopter Pilot: What’d you say, lieutenant?
Brubaker: Did you ever hear Admiral Tarrant go on about this war? About the chosen few who have to lay it on the line? I can see now he was right. You fight simply because you’re here….

[Spoiler Below]

Brubaker is hit by the Communists during the Toko-ri raid, and loses too much fuel to make it back to the aircraft carrier. He bails out near the coast, but still on land. The same helicopter crew that saved him in the opening scene shows up again. The helicopter is shot down by more Communists. They bail out and join Brubaker for a last stand. The helicopter crew members are killed one by one. In the final scene, Brubaker himself is killed shortly after making the speech above.

Post-208: Pyeongchang Olympics 2018

Posted on March 17, 2014 12:00 am by Peter

Who’d ever heard of “Pyeongchang” (평창) before the news came out that it would host the Winter Olypmics? Nobody, I think. Not me. It’s a small mountain place somewhere out there.

Here is a billboard I saw about a year ago, while visiting Gapyeong (가평) (see post-15), near Chuncheon (춘천):

Billboard for 2018 Olympics / Spring 2013 / Chuncheon, South Korea

Continue reading “Post-208: Pyeongchang Olympics 2018”