Author: Peter

bookmark_borderPost-307: Four Scenes from the Seoul Subway

Posted on by Peter
In brief. Four things I’ve seen on the Seoul metropolitan rail network (“subway”) recently.

Scene I. Backwards Cap Boy
Legs dangling off the seat, baseball cap in hand, a preschool-age boy is seated next to his mother (early 30s). Time to get off. The mother takes the boy’s cap and puts it snugly on him…backwards. He promptly changes it to “forwardside forward” (as a cap is meant to be worn to keep out the Sun). She promptly reverses it again. The mother is dressed very casually but seems to be well-off. She is wearing a baseball cap of her own, though hers is forwarside forwards. This time the small boy doesn’t resist his mother’s will and lets it stay backwards. The doors open and they walk off.

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Scene II. Inside the Digital Cocoon, Looking at Four Fruit Pictures.
A woman sits next to me, perhaps in her late 20s. As with almost everyone else who is seated, she is staring at the screen of her “phone” (an anachronistic term; it is actually an all-purpose digital cocoon). I don’t spy on what other people are doing inside their digital cocoons, but this time I happened to see as I was looking past her to try to see the station name. Her screen, I see, says this, exactly: “Which of these are oranges?” There are four pictures of fruits, one of which is oranges. She successfully selects the oranges, and I look away. I think this is the Rosetta Stone program. I am impressed that a Korean is using this. Most of those we can see studying on the train do dense and sometimes highly-esoteric grammar exercises.

Scene III. Abusing a Traveling Salesman.
As the doors close, a “pitch” begins. The man is in his 60s. He is trying to get people to buy a product he has in the cart he’s pulling. He starts explaining the benefits and how great a price he is offering. (The products these guys sell are generally fairly good). No one is budging. Everyone is ignoring him, as usual. His voice is weaker than many of these train salesmen’s voices. I feel a bit sorry for him. One dour bald fellow walks by, makes a kind of annoyed grunt, and says something that we might translate as “Goddamn it. These jerks keep bothering us on the train…” The annoyed bald man exits to another car (all the cars are connected). As even I heard it, the salesman will have heard this comment. He ignored it. No buyers in this car, the salesman collects his pride again and proceeds to the next car.

Scene IV. To Hold On, or Not to Hold On.
Morning. Aboard an express train into Seoul from Incheon. Standing room only. A shorter middle-aged man in a suit is standing directly under a dangling loop-shaped handle. He is not holding it. If the train comes to a sudden halt, he’d go flying, but the train rides are so smooth that most standing people do not hold on. The man is ensconced in his own digital cocoon (“phone”). I am standing in an awkward position and try ti hold the handle above his head, but sometimes let go. When not holding it, it hits him in the head. He turns to me, annoyed, and makes some comment I don’t understand clearly. This is very unusual as Koreans almost always ignore each other in public. Does he think it’s my fault? It’s the train motion’s fault! I hold it tightly, out of head’s way, for the rest of the trip…

bookmark_borderPost-306: Coup in Burundi and the Nilotic vs. Bantu Conflict

Posted on by Peter
A news story today:

Burundi coup bid: Groups seek Bujumbura control
Rival groups of soldiers in Burundi are vying for control of the capital Bujumbura amid confusion over the success of an attempted coup.

There is heavy fighting at the state TV building, where radio broadcasts have now gone off air.

One source said soldiers loyal to President Pierre Nkurunziza controlled key areas, including the airport. Coup leaders insist they remain in charge.

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Organized political violence in Burundi (average annual income, $900).
Few of us care at all what happens in some place called Burundi, which might as well be on the moon. But if it is another skirmish in Eastern Africa’s Nilotic vs. Bantu conflict that has been so important in East Africa for so many years, it’s worth some attention, maybe.

Surprisingly to myself, given my total lack of connection to the region, I developed an interest in East African affairs in one sense. When I was in university I became fascinated by the little-understood ethnocultural fault line there, and studied it a little bit. It seems to determine so much of the politics of the region and is a kind of long-running “clash of civilizations,” we might call it, between Nilotics and Bantus. All the countries in the region are affected. Burundi is just a flashpoint.

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As with Whites, Blacks can be subdivided into ethno-cultural-linguistic paragroups (say, like looking at Western Europeans in terms of “Germanics vs. Latins”; such a simple division paints with a broad brush but is, all the same, useful for understanding European affairs). This I have heard called “Meta-Ethnicity”. One big such division for Blacks in East Central Africa is Bantu vs. Nilotic.

Nilotics are tall, with long limbs and very dark skin. If “adjusting for nutrition” they are probably the world’s tallest, I’ve read. Physically, they look like ideal marathon runners, and they are. Manute Bol was a Nilotic from Sudan brought to the USA to play center in the NBA (7’7″ but his playing weight was only 200 pounds!). Obama’s father was from a Nilotic tribe in Kenya (that ancestry would explain why Obama appears as little more than a lanky stick figure when drawn in caricature). Nilotics were thought to originate in the upper Nile River area, hence their name. (The Tutsis of Rwanda and Burundi are Nilotics. Their Bantu rivals are the Hutus.)

Here is a picture of Rwandan president Paul Kagame (Nilotic) with Michelle (West African ancestry, close to the Bantus) and Barack Obama (half-Nilotic, half Northern European by ancestry). The ethnic difference is obvious between Kagame and Michelle.

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Here is the Rwandan president and his daughter with the Obamas. Nilotics like the Kagames would surely stand out in the USA as “foreign Blacks”.
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Here is Kagame with Democratic Republic of the Congo leader Joseph Kabila (of a Congolese Bantu tribe and as far as I can tell of clear Bantu ethnic stock; I note that he could pass for a U.S. Black).
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Paul Kagame of Rwanda with Joseph Kabila, leader of D.R. Congo
Bantus are West-Central African in ancestral origin, which makes them close kin to the USA’s Blacks, whose ancestors come from West Africa. The Bantus expanded all over central and southern Africa in relatively recent times (the “Bantu Expansion”), pushing more primitive groups into irrelevance, like the Pygmies of the Congo and later the aboriginal Khoisan “Hottentots” of southern Africa (whose amazing languages involve those “clicks” of the tongue). (I’ve read that defenders of Apartheid South Africa from its critics in the 1960s-1980s pointed out that the Afrikaners were hardly more “outsiders” to the southern cape region of Africa than the Bantu majority, the latter having arrived so far south on the continent only a few centuries before the first Dutch colonists did). The Bantu advance was not as successful in eastern Africa, where they ran into the Nilotics and others. Conflict, I presume, has festered there a long time.

According to the CIA Factbook, Burundi is 85% Bantu (Hutu) and 14% Nilotic (Tutsi). Burundi was long dominated by the Tutsis, but after the civil war of the 1990s and 2000s the Bantus (Hutus) took over partial political control.

I don’t really know upon what dynamics this centuries-running conflict really turns. The Nilotic Tutsis are in a superior position in most ways; Wealthier, more educated, more Westernized, and better able to govern a state. I am amazed at the difference in economic growth since the end of the civil wars in the early 2000s. Rwanda, Tutsi-controlled, has taken off. Burundi, with substantial Hutu control now, has limped along. Rwanda’s economy is now perhaps three times as big, despite starting from parity in the mid 1970s and despite the shock of Rwanda’s much bigger civil war losses.

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Comparing recent economic growth of Tutsi-dominated Rwanda with Hutu-dominated Burundi
The killings in Rwanda in 1994 were perpetrated by gangs of Hutus (Bantus) massacring Tutsis (Nilotics), though the reverse happened plenty, too, it seems, over the years. Political rivalry and violence in the states of that part of Africa often involve a Bantu vs. Nilotic subtext, definitely in one-third-Nilotic Kenya (where political violence on ethnic lines has killed thousands in recent years) and in the eastern Congo with its byzantine wars.

I recall once reading an excerpt from Obama’s autobiography in which he relates some of his (Nilotic) relatives in Kenya talking about this tribe and that tribe and their different characteristics — some good, some bad. Obama, at the time a “[Black] Community Organizer” in Chicago, seems to have been puzzled that all Blacks in Africa were not defiantly united on the basis of race with a collective clenched fist raised in the air directed towards Europe and the USA (or something). Obama passes over his relatives’ strong ethnic remarks with mild mockery.

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The BBC writes that “so far […] these historic ethnic tensions do not appear to have been a factor in the coup attempt.” The army is a very Tutsi (Nilotic) institution in Burundi, it seems,  and still today by law it is 50% Tutsi and 50% Hutu (Bantu) (Despite a 85% Bantu majority). The president is a former Hutu rebel militia leader. The man being reported as the coup leader is Major General Godefroid Niyombare, also a Hutu.

bookmark_borderPost-305: Annoyed by “Avengers II” (Leading to an Inquiry on the Nature of Quality and Group Thought)

Posted on by Peter
Incoherent story. What’s going on? What’s the point? Who are these characters? Why should I care? Who’s bad and who’s good? Even that’s not clear. Too fast, as if in fast forward mode. Too many unexplained, confusing, and seemingly pointless fight scenes. Frivolous.

These are some thoughts I had while watching “Avengers II: Age of Ultron”. I didn’t like it. I saw it in the movie theater after coming upon a free ticket via a friend.

Free or not, I wish I hadn’t watched it. I could’ve used those two hours better. I realize this is a harsh judgement. I’d heard others speak highly of the movie, and it seems it got many more good reviews than bad ones. How is this possible? The movie really was lousy on its own merits.

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I ask, did others really think it was a good movie? To what extent is this another of life’s “Emperor’s New Clothes” situations? In other words, maybe they “liked” it because it’s a big budget movie, hyped up for a while before release, and (so) they’re supposed to like it. Maybe they want to feel part of the winning team; this movie will make millions in profit. Isn’t it plausible that these kinds of influences might boost an average reviewer’s rating by a full star or two?

This raises questions about the nature of Quality. If the majority say that X is of high quality, is it? If we all expect X to be of high quality, is it? (Self-fulfilling prophecy.) Is there an “Objective Quality”? Alternatively, is Quality purely subjective? This is the kind of question that obsessed the central character in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” a book I read in 2012 upon recommendation from my friend Jared. Maybe we can even call it a core philosophical question of the past few thousand years.

Not to get too abstract. I think what may explain this phenomenon of mostly positive attitudes towards this (what I cautiously call an “objectively bad”) movie is that it has a core loyal base of noisy partisans. I mean comic book fans (of which I am not one). They will be tireless partisans on behalf of “The Avengers,” which is a kind of comic book Dream Team. Saying the movie was “really lousy on its own merits,” as I did above, would be a kind of blasphemy to them. A tightly disciplined core group of partisans can shift a narrative in their favor, given a disorganized “opposition”. I think this is applicable to almost any social dynamic in life. As Andrew Jackson said, “One man, with courage, makes a majority”.

But the movie really was bad. I’ll be the “one man, with courage” to say it.

Here is what one American reviewer wrote on movie website IMDb.com, which I agree with in full:

No one was more disappointed than me
It hurts to rate this so poorly, but it certainly deserves the low marks. There were so many things that ruined this movie for me.

1) The Storytelling – Or lack thereof. There was not a compelling story to be told here. Ultron wants to blow up the world, the Avengers try to stop him. That’s all the audience ever really knows about this story and it felt flat and unfulfilling.

2) Plot? – The movie opens with our heroes in the middle of a battle for reasons that are largely unimportant. That pretty much sums up this whole film

3) The Love Interest – Totally underdeveloped. We’re basically told by the script writer that these two people are in love, but never are we SHOWN that they’re falling in love. It rang completely hollow.

4) The Humor – There were WAY too many jokes in this movie, and that wouldn’t have been all that bad if so many of them weren’t eye rollers. Many of them left me groaning.

5) Ultron – This guy appears out of nowhere and is woefully underdeveloped. Plus, he’s supposed to be some kind of AI but he’s constantly cracking off stupid one-liners and making facial expressions that I thought were inconsistent with what and who he was supposed to be.

6) Character Overload – There were WAY too many characters to do any of them any justice. I would have liked the film to focus on a smaller group of characters and their relationships with one another, instead, we got a who’s who of the entire Marvel universe leaving a lot to be desired.

I could go on, but my heart is still aching and I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I see that a lot of people liked it and I’m happy that they did. I only wish it hadn’t been such a colossal disappointment for me.

bookmark_borderPost-304: The UK Election 2015 Decided by “Local Nationalism”

Posted on by Peter
The UK’s general election of 2015 has come and gone. The Conservative Party won. They had been governing in coalition with the Liberal Democrats since 2010, but now have enough seats to govern alone, in the majority.

Every pre-election predicted a “hung parliament” (no party having a majority), with Labour probably able to govern in coalition. One poll even put the odds of a hung parliament at “100%”. All wrong. The Conservative Party won an outright majority of seats.

The other big story is the “sweep” of Scotland by the left-wing Scottish National Party, which calls for Scottish independence. This is the first election in which they have done so well. The result must be a carry-over of political energy from the failed independence referendum of 2014 (see posts #228, #229, and #233). Anyway, the polls got the Scottish result right. It was predicted they’d win nearly every seat in Scotland and they did.

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UK Parliament Election Results 2015
What explains the rise in support for the Conservative Party in England?
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From my reading and thinking, nationalism explains it.

Given the opinion polls all predicting a close outcome, there was much talk in England, it seems, of the “anti-British, far-left” Scottish National Party becoming junior partners with the Labour Party in a new coalition. This would inevitably lead to a “Scottish Tail Wagging the Labour Dog” situation in parliament. And what a strong tail it would be. The SNP is aggressive and goal-oriented, while the Labour Party seems to me to be limping along on political inertia from decades ago, generations ago. It seems to lack a clear vision or purpose. Britain is no longer some kind of old-style Oliver Twist industrial economy. What is the purpose of labo(u)r politics? Today’s Labour Party seems to be all about maximizing welfare handouts. This calls to mind the classic criticism of democracy made since ancient times. A party much more disciplined, focused, and relevant in today’s world, the SNP, would exert a huge influence on a Labour government. (I say all this as an outsider who has never even been to the UK, of course.)

A Labour-SNP coalition ruling Britain would be a humiliation for England, akin to a kind of foreign occupation. Millions of English voters shifted their votes to the Conservatives, given this prospect. A full 600,000 more votes were cast for the Conservatives in 2015 than in 2010, but this is magnified much more when taking into account that the Conservatives lost a lot of their own right wing (probably over three million) to the UKIP party (often called a UK version of the USA’s “Tea Party,” which calls for the UK’s immediate exit from the EU). This means millions of English votes shifted to the Conservatives from other parties.

The two decisive turns in the election (the rise of the SNP and the rise to majority status of the Conservatives) are both, probably attributable to local nationalism. The rise of UKIP, which got an amazing four million votes of 31 million cast when almost none of its candidates individually stood a chance (“throwing your vote away”) is also clearly attributable to a kind of rising nationalism.

Following the election, a British journalist specializing in the Middle East, Patrick Cockburn, wrote an article about this, “Modern States are Fragile in the Face of Local Nationalism” (Originally published in The Independent):

Knowing [Middle Eastern] countries has given me a strong sense of the fragility of nation states when confronted by strongly rooted local nationalisms. The glue holding together nations is always a mixture of myth and self-interest which tends to become ossified and discredited over time. [….]

The triumph of the Scottish Nationalist Party on Thursday and the annihilation of all other parties in Scotland has led to lamentations on left and right over the likely passing of Great Britain as a unitary state. There are panicky whiffs in the air as people who had scarcely noticed there was such a thing as the union between England and Scotland come to realise that it may soon be dissolved and wonder what the future will hold. It is ironic to recall that a decade ago British officials talked glibly about “nation building” in Afghanistan and Iraq, without a thought about the staying power of their own nation. [….]

What is striking about the coming dissolution, be it partial or total, of the British state is the lack of resistance to this from its political establishment. It is but one more element in the decline of British power in the world over the past decade.    [Continues]

I’m mostly talking about things I don’t know well here, that is to say about the UK and its politics.

I can say that I think I do understand the principles at work behind what Cockburn calls “the coming dissolution, be it partial or total, of the British state”. All the same ingredients exist in today’s USA!

bookmark_borderPost-303: Stop Being So Polite!

Posted on by Peter
Even the simplest of Korean sentences can be said in, say, ten different ways, not in terms of rephrasing (as in any language) but using the exact same words. They slightly shift things (especially sentence endings) around to adjust desired levels of politeness, formality, and intimacy. These shifts are explicit in Korean and are a big part of the Korean language, important in day-to-day use. This is one reason why Korean is ranked by the U.S. State Department as “Category 5” (the hardest languages for Americans to learn).

When a Korean is speaking to me, he or she will often shift to a certain form of polite speech. Words shifted to a polite register sound different from the basic forms of the words I know, so in the heat of the moment it causes confusion. Each split second of slight confusion can easily add up to losing track of the point. They’re trying to make me feel good (being polite), but it actually makes me feel…bad. I wish they’d stop being so polite!

This reminds me of something in New York City. In visits there I saw lots of signs that said things like this:  “Accumulation of Refuse on the Premises is Prohibited”. Why not just say “No Trash”!? In this case, this over-formal language is just not a good idea because many people will frankly not understand it.

bookmark_borderPost-302: Do Facts Matter? (The Baltimore Case)

Posted on by Peter
I am consistently surprised by how many people do not seem to care about data or the facts of a given matter. The Baltimore case in April 2015 is another example. (I wrote about this in #299 and hope not to again.)

Facts matter.

Here are the important facts that have been largely ignored in the narrative that has been created and consumed by millions across the world. (“A happy-go-lucky young Black man is arrested for no reason, beaten by police for no reason, had his spine broken by the police, as all his desperate pleas for help went ignored.”)

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Facts on the Freddie Gray Case
          (1) F.G. was an active drug dealer from his teens through age 25 (at death). This we know from his arrest record, with repeated arrests for drug possession and distribution.
          (2) His arrest record is lengthy. The Washington Post reports he had “at least 12” arrests; other sources say 18 arrests. They include: drug possession, drug distribution, assault, burglary, trespassing, destruction of property.
          (3) He spent a good portion of his nearly nine year adult life in jail and prison for his various crimes.
          (4) He was arrested five times in 2015 (=five arrests in just over 100 days).
          (5) He attempted to run away from police just before the final arrest, was caught, restrained, and became very angry, shouting abuse at the arresting police.
          (6) Still angry, his behavior inside the police van was bizarre: “A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray ‘banging against the walls’ of the vehicle and believed that he ‘was intentionally trying to injure himself.” [Wash Post]
          (7) The police stopped the vehicle and took measures to restrain him further to prevent the apparent self-harm.
          (8) When it was clear he’d fallen into serious medical trouble, the police promptly brought him to a hospital, where he died a week later. (From the way some of the irresponsible and riot-inciting elements of the media report it, you’d think the police had executed Saint Freddie and dumped his body in a ditch outside of town, perhaps following a Ku Klux Klan ceremony — No, rather, they rushed him to a hospital.)
          (9) Freddie Gray filed multiple frivolous lawsuits to try to gain cash payouts. He even had one of these lawsuits pending as of March 2015.

So, what are reasonable people to make of these facts?

First, if you are in an encounter with police, for God’s sake just cooperate. This is the basis of civil society. Don’t resist violently, run, or shout abuse at police, and problems tend to disappear.

Second, and more specifically to this case, given Freddie’s criminal character and history of filing frivolous lawsuits, it’s very possible that he saw that (especially) in the recent political climate of media-promoted “racialized police abuse” stories, he could get a big cash payout by filing a wrongful injury lawsuit against police. This explains his bizarre behavior in the van. I’m open to other explanations, but this seems to fit the facts much, much better than the allegation pushed by many that Freddie Gray was “murdered by police because he was Black.” (Three of the six officers involved were Black, anyway, we’ve now learned, further discrediting this slanderous fantasy.)

I say that facts matter. Reality matters. It is reckless to ignore reality. It is reckless to empower people like the socially-destructive Freddie Gray and people like him.

Reckless. If it’s really now Open Season on police, especially White police, then the police, not being fools, will be wary of working too hard. One wrong move, they know, will end up getting them crucified before the mob, with the media playing the part of the Pharisees, orchestrating the crucifixion. No, it’d be far better to let certain criminal activity slip by than try to stop it and risk political crucifixion, loss of job, loss of income and health insurance and pension, loss of dignity, and even potential prison time (as for these six officers, who were charged in response to the rioting). I don’t think the agitators here really want to live in a world without police.

Some might concede, “Okay, Freddie Gray may have been a bad guy; he may, after all, even have injured himself and partly caused his own death, it’s not clear; but look, police brutality really is a growing problem.” Is it? What do the people who says this base this allegation on? Is it on a few stories hyped-up in the media for (it seems to me) political purposes? What are the facts?

Someone has found the numbers. Between 1976 and 2013, “justifiable homicides by U.S. law enforcement” have remained steady. There has been no recent rise. Each year, between 300 and 462 people are killed by police in shootouts and that kind of thing. Policing is a serious business. (Meanwhile, between 14,000 and 25,000 regular murders have been committed annually in the same period). One ironic fact in the data is that when controlled by crime rates, Whites are actually a little more likely to die in encounters with police than Blacks (see link).

Do any of the above facts matter?

Meanwhile, this charming war-story from the rioting:

“[A gang leader] described how he and some Bloods [gang] members stood in front of stores that they knew were black-owned business, to protect them from looting and vandalism. […] Instead, he said, they pointed the rioters toward Chinese- and Arab-owned stores.”  [New York Times]


bookmark_borderPost-301: Greek Palestine

Posted on by Peter
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“Agora of Athens” by Raphael
Two related quotations:
Professor G.B. Stones:
The “Monty Python” view of Palestine [of New Testament times] as a sort of Jewish state under Roman occupation misses out on the fact that, culturally speaking, it’s a very Hellenized country. It was part of Alexander’s empire already, so it’s been under Hellenic influence for three centuries [i.e., by the time Jesus was born].
Peter Adamson (Interviewer):
As a matter of historical possibility, do we think that Paul could have read Stoic texts? Or is the idea more that Stoicism was “in the air” in his intellectual environment?

Professor G.B. Stones (Durham University):
I find it more plausible to think that it was “in the air”. He clearly has very profound rhetorical training. He writes Greek that is indicative of a high level of Greek education.

These comments fit into the debate over to what extent Christianity was “Western” in orientation from the beginning.
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Both comments can be found in the first few minutes of History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Episode #108 (“On the Greek Church Fathers”). This is a series of audio recordings (podcasts) started in December 2010 by this Peter Adamson, an academic. A new episode is released semi-weekly.

I discovered the podcast series just recently and like the ones I’ve heard, though I can’t follow what he’s saying a lot of the time, I must admit. As of this writing in April 2015, he’s up to episode #221 about somebody living in the 1100s AD called Hildegard of Bingen. (At this rate, the series might finally finish recording in the 2020s.)



bookmark_borderPost-300: Luther on the Book of Revelation

Posted on by Peter
The two acquaintances I mentioned in #298 (“The Beginning is Near”) belong to a certain Korean church or (church-like entity) with very unorthodox teachings “based on” wild interpretations of the Book of Revelation. They say Revelation specifically prophesies the coming of their own leader (a Korean man born in the 1930s), who is a kind of Christ-like figure in their belief.

I don’t much trust people who talk too much about the Book of Revelation. As I see it, that book and its dream-like apocalyptic imagery is (at best) fuel for wild yet idle speculation under the cover of allegedly divine revelation.

I’ve heard that Luther had similar things to say on it. Here is Luther’s highly critical preface to Revelation:

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About this Book of the Revelation of John, I leave everyone free to hold his own opinions. I would not have anyone bound to my opinion or judgment. I say what I feel. I miss more than one thing in this book, and it makes me consider it to be neither apostolic nor prophetic.

First and foremost, the apostles do not deal with visions, but prophesy in clear and plain words, as do Peter and Paul, and Christ in the gospel. For it befits the apostolic office to speak clearly of Christ and his deeds, without images and visions. Moreover there is no prophet in the Old Testament, to say nothing of the New, who deals so exclusively with visions and images. For myself, I think it approximates the Fourth Book of Esdras; I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it.
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Luther’s Preface to Revelation, continued:

Moreover he seems to me to be going much too far when he commends his own book so highly [Revelation 22]—indeed, more than any of the other sacred books do, though they are much more important—and threatens that if anyone takes away anything from it, God will take away from him, etc. Again, they are supposed to be blessed who keep what is written in this book; and yet no one knows what that is, to say nothing of keeping it. This is just the same as if we did not have the book at all. And there are many far better books available for us to keep.

Many of the fathers also rejected this book a long time ago; although St. Jerome, to be sure, refers to it in exalted terms and says that it is above all praise and that there are as many mysteries in it as words. Still, Jerome cannot prove this at all, and his praise at numerous places is too generous.

Finally, let everyone think of it as his own spirit leads him. My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book. For me this is reason enough not to think highly of it: Christ is neither taught nor known in it. But to teach Christ, this is the thing which an apostle is bound above all else to do; as Christ says in Acts 1[:8], “You shall be my witnesses.” Therefore I stick to the books which present Christ to me clearly and purely.

[1522 “Preface to the Revelation of St. John” in Luther’s translation of the New Testament. Pages 398-399 in Luther’s Works Volume 35: Word and Sacrament I (ed. E. Theodore Bachmann; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1960).]

bookmark_borderPost-299: Baltimore Race Riots

Posted on by Peter
“Ideas have consequences,” someone once famously said.

And so it happened that race riots have struck, again, in 2015, in Baltimore:

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I try to imagine what a Martin observer, looking on, would think.
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The Martian would observe, over the past few years, the steady promotion of a certain idea in respectable halls of opinion in the USA. The idea is that there exists a darkly sinister yet enormous conspiracy to oppress Blacks, up to and including murdering innocents in large numbers, and, further, to let the murderous (White) police off scot-free.

Many regular people believe this vicious slander (and others pretend to, for certain personal or political reasons). The Martian would see people in the highest levels of government promoting this idea, more-or-less explicitly. People from the most prestigious and tone-setting positions in the national media (say, the New York Times Editorial Board), too, the Martian would see constantly pushing the idea.

The Martian would be baffled. Why would top officials in a government promote ideas that undermine the authority of their own police, and more generally undermine the entire system they lead, that they control? He would conclude that such a bizarre system cannot be sustainable.

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Another baffling thing for the Martian: The authorities do not assert authority. Police were ordered, it seems, to withdraw during the rioting and allow a certain amount of destruction without interference. No one wanted to order any assertive police action. Think of the headlines! “Peaceful Protestors Killed by Police”. 

And so hundreds of buildings and vehicles were destroyed, who-knows-how-many-millions’-worth looted, and the loss of prestige as the entire world sees another U.S. race riot.

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“Community organizers” from the Nation of Islam and New Black Panther Party and others have been showing up. One such “community organizer” is Deray McKesson (formerly the “Senior Director of Human Capital with Minneapolis Public Schools”). He was interviewed on CNN. The host kept asking him to condemn the violence of the people he was partly leading. He refused, saying variants of this from hisTwitter: “Property damage is not violence, it is property damage. Violence is when people are hurt, injured, harmed. The police have been violent.” (In fact, two dozen police were hospitalized with injuries from brick-throwing rioters. The police’s steady-retreat tactics will have reduced their casualties).

Another Black activist interviewed on TV said (something close to) “People in our community are angry. And just wait until we don’t have a Black president anymore, then things will get worse.”

What the Martian would think upon hearing this, I won’t even begin to guess.

bookmark_borderPost-298: The Beginning is Near

Posted on by Peter
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This is a surprising and pleasing image to me. Maybe it’s best to view it from the bottom to top, but viewing it all at once is nearly as good.
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Recently, a couple of Koreans of my acquaintance belonging to a certain “End Times” church have been pressuring me to join an intensive Bible Study with their church, which I have not done. The premise of their Christian-esque religion is that a figure called “The One Who Overcomes” is foretold in the Bible (The Book of Revelation), and that this prophesied figure is a Korean man alive today, the leader of their church, in fact, and that the Korean “One Who Overcomes” will lead the Elect (most of whom live in South Korea and all of whom are members of this particular church) to salvation as the rest of the world comes to an end.

This is a small church but very active and aggressive. It is another in a long line of such churches in Korea. My impression is that the “religiously unaffiliated” in Korea have such a negative impression of Christianity due to these highly visible, aggressive, “fringe” churches that Korean Christianity has reached a glass ceiling.

Another such church had its Bucheon regional headquarters (I think) on the top floor of a particular building at the bottom of which I have often eaten cheap meals. This one proposes that a “God the Mother” is foretold of in the Bible and that she is — yes, a Korean woman, and, yes, alive today. My friend James from California (himself a devout Christian who graduated from a Lutheran college in the USA; previously mentioned here in #128, #178, #212, #225, #227) once went up to that headquarters, at their invitation, and promptly annoyed them by questioning all their premises. One reason cults can succeed in Korea is that you’re supposed to unquestioningly listen to an authority figure. I myself was accosted three or four times on the street by them and shown a video presentation.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are also here, but are much more agreeable and rarely if ever aggressive, in my experience. All of these groups tend to “target” Westerners. But one doesn’t: In certain areas of Seoul, you can often see a pair of well-dressed thin young White men, ties and all, carrying books and folders. These are Mormons, and they seem to have quite many missionaries in Korea. I once even saw a pair at a mega-grocery store in Bupyeong, Incheon. I once studied with one a Brigham Young University student who had previously been a Mormon missionary in Korea. I recall that he told me his main strategy during his tour of duty as a missionary was to sit next to old women who were alone on the subway and say something in Korean, which would delight them, and then he had an opening to do the Mormonism pitch. His Korean was very good, especially his speaking. Never have I met a White man who can speak Korean so well. Practice, practice, practice.

But as far as the One Who Overcomes and all other End-Timesians. I completely reject all End Times scenarios. I am not willing to cede intellectual ground on this End Times issue. Any End Times theorizing can only be destructive, as I see it. When End Times thinking outgrows the metaphorical dank cellar of the cult and enters the semi-mainstream and then inevitably intertwines itself with geopolitics, that ought to alarm us. This is one of the problems with the USA’s relationship with Israel, as I see it. Some so-called Christian churches in the USA today preach a kind of worship of Israel mixed in with End Times theories. (Which is cause and which is effect is open to debate.)

I know one person who is a candidate for a Master’s degree in Psychology at Columbia University. I wonder about the psychological motivations of “End is Near” people. I like the “Beginning is Near” more.

bookmark_borderPost-297: Pointless War Story, Tokyo Bay 1945

Posted on by Peter
I arrived by boat in Japan and left by plane. About seventy years earlier, some unknown American had a brief experience in Japan the precise reverse of mine in the sense that he “arrived by plane and left by boat,” and in a more dramatic fashion. His story is told through the eyes of a Japanese watching:

After discussing the war generally, [the Japanese professor in his 60s] began, with seeming reluctance, to speak of his own war experience as a university draftee who had used all his family’s influence to avoid call-up until he was finally tapped for coastal-defense duty late in the war. One day in July 1945, he went on, the intensity of his voice increasing with each sentence, he found himself in charge of an emplacement of ancient coastal guns just as an American flyer [pilot] parachuted into Tokyo Bay. As the downed American swam towards his position, the youthful candidate-officer found his mind racing. What should he do? Kill him, or take him prisoner? Suddenly, he was spared the choice, for right there in the middle of the bay, a U.S. submarine surfaced, scooped up the pilot, and submerged again, taking him to safety. At that moment in his story, the scholar broke off almost breathlessly, and said, “You see, that’s the only kind of thing you’ll hear. Pointless stories. It’s too late to talk about crucial issues. All the people in decision-making posts are long dead.”

Quite dramatic for a pointless story.

It comes from a book I’d bought cheaply in Tokyo (200 Yen or $1.65 at today’s exchange rate). It’s called Japan At War: An Oral History” published in 1992, an original English publication by an American, Dr. Theodore Cook. The interviews were conducted in 1988-1991 in Japan. He says he “selected people from [the ranks of] general to private, prison-camp guard to journalist, dancer to diplomat, idealistic builder of ‘Greater East Asia’ to ‘thought criminal,’ who talk revealingly of their wars”.

The pointless story has two incredible points to it, as I see it. One, he considered killing a potential prisoner-of-war upon capture. Two, the pilot’s manner of rescue, as described, seems so surreal that if I saw it in a James Bond movie I’d think to myself, “Gee, they’re really pushing it now”. The author makes some more comments about why this little anecdote is not so pointless. A photograph of the page is here.

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This business about killing a captured airman in war seems especially cruel. I read that the Imperial Japanese government, late in the war, in its increasing paranoia and desperation, put captured American airmen on trial for war crimes (the bombing of cities) with possible death sentences, which were often imposed. In this kind of atmosphere, some must’ve also been killed without pretense of trial, on the spot, and a conscripted coastal defense position leader may have felt a kind of social pressure to do the same. (Just another chapter in a long-ago-concluded war.) The professor, recalling this moment in summer 1945, existed in that world. The war swept up everyone. Multiply these kinds of situations by the thousands for every day of the war, and that was the war.

So, as to pointlessness. The professor’s idea can be taken further, if we want. Maybe almost all the stories from almost everyone’s lives are pointless. This is one view, and a depressing one. I reject it. We all have our personal narratives and experiences; we were “there”, somewhere, some time; we were part of it, something, whatever “it” was, whatever it’s still shaping into.

I also recently bought a tattered old copy of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. His relations of his early life are full of pointless stories, too, but they are greatly enjoyable and help us understand the man and his time and place.

Likewise, I understand that in the 1970s my father did an audio recording of his grandfather (born in the 1890s in Iowa, to parents born in Denmark) asking for, to carry forward the theme of this post, whatever pointless stories he had to tell. I don’t know the full extent of this recording and have never heard it, but I have seen a partial transcript. He described how the original members of his family came to enter the USA. This was more of a retelling of a story his own father had told him, though, I suppose.

An idea that came to me as I’ve been writing this. Q. What is life? A. Life is a series of pointless stories.

bookmark_borderPost-296: It Came Out of the Sky

Posted on by Peter
Towards the end of 1969, a few months after the first human moon landing, an album was released in the USA called “Willy and the Poor Boys” which featured the now iconic song “Fortunate Son”. Another song on the album was “It Came Out of the Sky”.

Below is that song, its lyrics, and some comments on it that occur to me. (As of now, for copyright reasons Youtube blocks the song on mobile devices but it can be heard on desktops.)

I see the song as saying this: People tend to react to new, unknown phenomena or developments based narrowly on the way they already see the world, the way they’ve always done things. Few, if any, can really break free of this mental constraint. (I think this makes the song a musical version of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.”)
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It Came Out Of The Sky Lyrics

Oh, it came out of the sky, landed just a little south of Moline
Jody fell out of his tractor, couldn’t believe what he’d seen
Laid on the ground and shook, fearin’ for his life
Then he ran all the way to town screamin’ “It came out of the sky!”

Well, a crowd gathered ’round and a scientist said it was marsh gas [1]
Spiro [2] came to make a speech about raising the Mars Tax
The Vatican said, “Woe, the Lord has come”
Hollywood rushed out an epic film
And Ronnie the Populist [3] said it was a communist plot

Oh! [Guitar]

Oh, the newspapers came and made Jody a national hero
Walter and Eric [4] said they’d put him on a network TV show
The White House said, “Put the thing in the Blue Room”
The Vatican said, “No, it belongs in Rome.”
And Jody said, “It’s mine but you can have it for seventeen million!” [5]

Oh, it came out of the sky, landed just a little south of Moline
Jody fell out of his tractor, couldn’t believe what he’d seen
Laid on the ground a shakin’, fearin’ for his life
Then he ran all the way to town screamin’ “It came out of the sky!”

[Notes and Comments]
[1] The government often classified purported UFO sightings as “marsh gas” (whatever that is). The lyric is not “a government spokesman said it was marsh gas,” though, but rather “a scientist.” Scientists have always had an interest, on behalf of pride in their field, in insisting that all phenomena can be explained with presently-known information and theory.
[2] This is Spiro Agnew, Vice President at the time, under Nixon. Why they chose “Spiro” for making a speech about raising a “Mars Tax”, I don’t know.
[3] “Ronnie the Populist” must be Ronald Reagan, then governor of California (elected Nov. 1966, served till Jan. 1975) and conservative spokesman (from the 1950s), later president.
[4] Walter Cronkite, fatherly news figure many years ago. Who Eric was, I don’t know.
[5] “Jody,” a country-bumpkin figure here, is the only character in this song who doesn’t spin the UFO’s arrival for his own personal agenda. He just runs off to alert the others, attracts a crowd of locals, and then worldwide attention. Jody, though, seems uninterested in the UFO, and in the end all he cares about is this potential huge cash payout he asks for. An apparently genuine alien spacecraft (if that’s what “it” of the song is) should be in the national interest to study and understand. That they put in this lyric at all (“you can have it for seventeen million”) shows how confident the USA was in 1969 in itself and its institutions; Here we have this guy, Jody, a nobody, who comes across a UFO landing, would (it is implied) have his rights respected enough to be paid for the UFO, rather than having the UFO seized by the army and Jody punched in the stomach for protesting or jailed for a while (as might happen elsewhere). In the end, this is meant to be a comedic song, but comedy has to be plausible. I don’t think that implied respect for the rights of a “Jody”-like figure is as plausible in today’s USA.

bookmark_borderPost-295: Believing in Islam

Posted on by Peter
I heard somebody from the UK make this comment a while ago:

“I’ve met people who don’t even believe in God, but they believe in Islam.”

He was talking about Muslims living in the UK, I think. What this means is open to interpretation.

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From what I gather, Political Islam is one of the great unexpected developments of the past century. A hundred years ago, around WWI, Westerners believed that Islam was an enfeebled religion, a remnant of the medieval past that had long since  faded in vigor and lacked the ability to revitalize itself. My impression is that modern Political Islam was born in 1979, but that even then few people of Western Christian origin paid much attention or worried much about it. As late as the 1990s, it was not a significant issue in American consciousness.

I make some sweeping statements about things that happened before my lifetime, there. I can say this: I’m reasonably sure that neither of my grandfathers, at least, paid any mind to Islam (as a “political” force in the world), any more than they’d have paid to Buddhism, say. They were both born in the late 1910s. I heard them say very many things in the 1990s, when I was a boy, but not one word about Islam or Muslims. I remember being at my grandparents’ house in Iowa when Clinton ordered one of the bombings of Osama Bin Laden, and we saw it unfolding on CNN in their living room. This event elicited no comments from my grandfather about Islam. I remember around the same time my grandfather telling me about a letter he was writing to the local congressman, I think, against the idea of ceding control of the Panama Canal (then still U.S.-controlled) to a Communist Chinese company; something like that. But never one word about Islam.

bookmark_borderPost-294: Finding a John Donne Poem

Posted on by Peter
I turned a piece of paper over and found this:

Go and Catch a Falling Star
By John Donne

Go and catch a falling star,
    Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
    Or who cleft the devil’s foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
            And find
            What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

I don’t seek out poetry, but if it seeks me out, I’ll give it a try. But — Nope. Couldn’t understand it. Can you?

I was talking with a nice Korean young man (born 1988) who is an English Literature major at a university in Seoul. We were scribbling on the back side of the paper; on the front was this poem.

I read it again and a third time. Slowly an idea took shape in my mind: Adventure. Could it be? — a poem praising the adventurous spirit, both physical and mental, eternal curiosity, relentless seeking after new knowledge; maybe on the fantastical side, but approving. Life is the eternal pursuit of knowledge and experience, and also full of fool’s errands, and maybe, ultimately, every single thing is a fool’s errand, but that’s okay. Something like this took shape in my mind. Poetry is hard. I said simply in English, “I think this poem means ‘Adventure is good.'” He flatly replied: “No.” A little condescendingly, he explained the real meaning:

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He said it criticizes women for being foolish and unserious in life. I didn’t understand how he could get that from those nine verses. And multiple interpretations of any poem are surely possible!

The paper was a handout he’d made for his class. He’d had to explain the poem, longform lecture style.

At home later, I find that this poem actually has three stanzas (here). Here is the rest:

If thou be’st born to strange sights,
    Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
    Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
            And swear,
            No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.

If thou find’st one, let me know,
    Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
    Though at next door we might meet;
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
            Yet she
            Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.

I see now why he said that.

It’s hard to sift through the Shakespearean phrasings and obsolete grammar forms, but the meaning is clear, I think, if we recognize the phrase “be true” as meaning “loyal in romance” which was still used in old songs from the 1960s I have heard.

Why was only the first stanza on his handout? Did he present that stanza alone and talk all about the poem being about women (something he will have read in a commentary on the poem in Korean, I expect)? Now that would be disorienting. (I know that a lot of language classes in East Asia operate under the watchful eye of the Emperor’s New Clothes Principle, though — Lots of confusion while everyone pretends they know what’s going on; many pass courses and tests by memorizing and not true working competence.)

bookmark_borderPost-293: Jordan Am a Hard Road to Travel

Posted on by Peter
“Jordan Am a Hard Road to Travel” is a traditional American song out of 1800s with many versions. One version is by Jimmie Driftwood, a prolific songwriter out of Arkansas, active from the 1930s-1990s. The lyrics are nowhere to be found online. I’ll transcribe them and put them up here.

The song was recorded in 1959. It tells the story of a man who went to California during the Gold Rush.

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Jordan Am a Hard Road to Travel
By Jimmy Driftwood / 1959 / “The Westward Movement” album

Oh!
There was an old man
from the county called Pike
And his name was Jolly ol’ Higgins

The darned ol’ fool
Who went an’ bought an ol’ mule
And was bound for the California diggins

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[Chorus]
Pull off your overcoat
‘n’ roll up your sleeves
For Jordan am a hard road to travel!
Pull off your overcoat
‘n’ roll up your sleeves
For Jordan am a hard road, I believe.

Well,
He took some bacon
An’ he took some beans
An’ he took some raw corn whiskey

He woulda took more
But he couldn’t pile it on
For the darned ol’ mule was so frisky

On he went
Through the mire and the mud
Till he came to this ol’ Platte River

In he plunged
Head over heels
And the bacon and the beans were lost forever

[Chorus]

Well,
If ever I marry
In this wide world
I’ll marry the ferryman’s daughter

So my wife can stand
In the prow of the boat
And my children can play in the water

If ever I marry
In this wide world
I’ll wed sweet Sally Gordon

She owns half the land
In the You-nited States
And a farm on the other side-a Jordan

[Chorus]

If you’re wondering
Who I am,
My name is jolly ol’ Higgins

I’m the darned ol’ fool
Who went ‘n’ bought the old mule
And I’m bound for the California diggins

[Chorus]

__________________

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Pioneer Trails, mid-1800s USA
Trails along the Platte River start at Council Bluffs, Iowa
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A section of the South Platte River today (Photograph by Lori Potter, Kearney Hub newspaper [Kearney, Nebraska]).
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Painting of a pioneer crossing the Platte River
Comment: I can imagine this simple-seeming song being painfully indecipherable to those not familiar with folksy old-style American English and with the Bible. “Jordan” refers to the Jordan River of Biblical times; here “crossing the Jordan” is a metaphor for hard struggle. Also: Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River; “Jolly ol’ Higgins” is submerged totally in the water, too!

A credit to Jimmie Driftwood that he ends the song with Higgins still on the journey out to California, even after losing all his supplies. Jimmie Driftwood (1907-1998) was a product of 1910s and 1920s America, a time when (I think) the American spirit was optimistic and self-confident. He supposedly wrote many of his songs as aids to teaching his students U.S. history. His first career was as a teacher. His most famous song of all is probably Battle of New Orleans, sung by Johnny Horton.

bookmark_borderPost-292: On Lee Kuan Yew, Founder of Singapore

Posted on by Peter
Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in 1965.

Singapore’s government in ’65 was led by a man born Harry Lee, educated at Cambridge. By then, he was using the name Kuan Yew. He’d led Singapore since 1959, when full self-government was granted by the British. Lee Kuan Yew did everything he could to prevent the expulsion from Malaysia, I’ve read. When it was finalized, he went on television, in front of the entire nation-to-be, and as he announced the expulsion, he wept. He wept!

Singapore was unable to feed itself or even provide itself with water, and so he understandably feared that Singapore would be reduced to a pathetic walled-off island ghetto, a kind of Southeast-Asian Gaza. No wonder he wept.

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Lee Kuan Yew in the 1950s
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Fifty years later, Singapore is one of the world’s premier cities.

I’ve been through its airport once, but so far never outside. It felt like a several star hotel, that airport did. (By contrast, I regret to admit that U.S. airports today tend to feel like second-rate bus stations.) By all accounts that I’ve read and heard from others, Singapore is efficient and well-run, with the main criticism being that it’s rather boring.

With the death of Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015), the Singaporeans of my acquaintance seem truly sad. One, resident in Korea, took the time to go to the Singapore embassy in Seoul and sign a book of condolence (whatever that is) on Friday of the mourning week. Another, who returned to Singapore some time ago, spent hours in line to view the casket, it seems finally getting to view it past 3:30 AM. It is hard for us to imagine the attachment they must feel to him. He led the government for over thirty years and heavily influenced things for over twenty more. His party has never been out of power. His son is the new prime minister.

That Singapore is a one-party state (defacto) with authoritarian overtones (e.g., its very high per capita usage of the death penalty, limited freedom of the press) doesn’t seem to bother the Singaporeans I have known, that I can tell. Lee said that this was the nature of Asians — they want and need strong government.

Lee viewed multiracial society as inherently unstable, it seems. He was an advocate of Singapore maintaining a primarily Chinese racial character (without persecuting the minority races), with a comfortable Chinese racial majority. (If any White American public figure of today said anything comparable [“We need to protect the USA’s majority-European racial character”, e.g.], we all know that he would be mercilessly demonized by the media and would likely be expelled from public life.)

Lee said: “I have to amend [British parliamentary democracy] to fit my people’s position. In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion. Supposing I’d run their system here, Malays would vote for Muslims, Indians would vote for Indians, Chinese would vote for Chinese. I would have a constant clash in my Parliament which cannot be resolved because the Chinese majority would always overrule them. So I found a formula that changes that…”

“There are some flaws in the assumptions made for democracy. It is assumed that all men and women are equal or should be equal. Hence, one-man-one-vote. But is equality realistic? If it is not, to insist on equality must lead to regression.“ Lee wrote this. A typical Westerner of today would feel uncomfortable, weak in the stomach, at hearing this kind of talk; it is akin to blasphemy for the true-believing Westerner. “The problem…is the system of one man, one vote when we have to get quality leadership to the top. If we leave it to natural processes it will be a contest of television performances as in the West. And the best television performers and rally entertainers are not necessarily the best leaders who can deliver good government.” I challenge anyone to argue that this is not a rational and sound criticism of democracy.
So let’s say that Lee Kuan Yew got away with saying a lot (things Western public figures are no longer allowed to say). On the other hand, Singapore hasn’t had much time for individuals’ free speech. I have read U.S. journalist Robert Elegant’s 1990 book Pacific Destiny,  a survey of each the countries of East Asia, with discussions of their recent pasts, cultures, politics, economic situations, and likely futures based on then-current trends, interspersed with the journalist’s own extensive experiences all across East Asia. The writer, Elegant, tells of his decades-long-running animosity with Lee Yuan Yew. “We have known each other since 1954, but not have been terribly fond of each other,” Elegant wrote this around 1989. (Elegant is an impressive figure: a White American, Yale educated, fluent in Chinese and Japanese, and a journalist for U.S. news magazines and newspapers from the 1950s through at least the 1990s.) It seems that this animosity was kindled by Lee Kuan Yew’s regular defamation lawsuits against Elegant. Elegant sometimes published things critical of the Singapore government, you see. Other journalists had the same problem.

Elegant respected Lee all the same, and the Singapore chapter in the Pacific Destiny book is mostly a mini-biography of Lee Kuan Yew. Elegant comments on this by saying something like, “To discuss Singapore is to discuss Lee Kuan Yew.” He boldly attributes Singapore’s success to the man. Lee is cordial in the interview for the book (Elegant published long quotations of all his interviews in the book, recorded on a tape recorder). Alas, Lee respected Elegant, too, as perhaps the USA’s most eminent journalist in Asia of that era.

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Excerpt from the Singapore chapter of “Pacific Destiny” (1990) by U.S. journalist Robert Elegant. ‘Moira’ refers to the author’s Australian wife.
Reading Elegenant’s various comments about Lee Kuan Yew, the idea comes to my mind for a comedy movie, following this pair from their first meeting in 1954 through say 2014, “documenting” their long-running feud.

The entire Singapore chapter of Pacific Destiny is good (the entire book is good). Here is another excerpt:

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At one point, Elegant describes the first time he met Lee Kuan Yew. It was 1954. At some kind of Chinese political rally in then-British-Malaya. The atmosphere is lively; one rousing speech in Mandarin after another. Poor ol’ Harry Lee, aspiring politician, can’t understand Mandarin (Elegant himself, fluent in Mandarin, is observing the scene from the back in his capacity as a journalist). A nervous Lee paces around, mostly staying in the back, trying to blend in and hoping no one notices his lack of understanding of the other speeches. Now it’s his turn to speak. Up goes Harry Lee to the podium. He begins to speak, in English. Suddenly, booing! Lee gets shouted down by the more macho ethnic Chinese in the audience (who is this clown using English?) and that’s the end of that!

This bizarre scene, viewed in the right light, can be a metaphor for Singapore itself. The very same man who was booed off the stage in 1954, had, a few decades later, achieved world fame and acclaim as a respected statesman. He will be a secular saint to Singaporeans for many, many years to come.

I admire Lee Kuan Yew, from what I know about him. Whatever his faults, he had the  intellectual and moral courage to say what he believed was right and not waffle around, bending this way and that with each passing breeze. This is true leadership and is admirable.

bookmark_borderPost-291: “It Works Good” (Or, a 1974 Prediction about the Evolution of English)

Posted on by Peter
I didn’t exist yet in the summer of 1974 and I wouldn’t for some time to come. No matter. Through the Internet, I can look back at the news published across the world even years before I was born and in places I’ve never been.

On Thursday July 11th, 1974, the Milwaukee Journal (circulation then 400,000) ran front-page stories about the Watergate scandal. That’s too boring to me to re-read. Towards the back of that day’s paper, a certain letter to the editor was also published. (Don’t ask how I found this.) I’ll republish it here, over forty years later, because I think it’s rather clever. It makes certain predictions we can analyze, given the passage of almost forty-one years now.

The writer was a young man called Jack Chiang. From certain things he says, I would guess is from Hong Kong, and would further guess he is today 60s; possibly early 70s. I wonder what he’s made of the past four decades.

Here is the letter:

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In My Opinion
English Is a Fine, Expressive Language, but Please Be Kind to the Learners

If you hear a foreigner say, “He don’t like it,” don’t laugh. There is no big deal. If he says, “I have five hundreds dollars,” don’t feel funny. There are many mad dogs in English waiting to bite foreigners. Only those who learn it as a foreign language know the pain of such bites.

Just think how difficult English sometimes is. We say “spaghetti” but “noodles;” “two sheep” but “two dogs;” and “I do, he does,” but “I did, he did.”

Many sounds in English are very difficult for foreigners to pronounce. When a foreign couple were asked of their ages, the husband replied, “My wife is Dirty, I’m Dirty-two.”

Some people in Hong Kong often confuse the “sh” sound with the “s.” If you say  “Happy New Year” to a person from Hong Kong, do not feel offended if he happens to reply, “Shame to you!” In a Chinese restaurant, “fried rice” might become “fly lice.” One foreign student at Marquette said he was almost driven crazy by the unnecessary changes of tenses. He now uses the present tense to indicate different times of actions. It works. Nobody misunderstands him when he says, “I work yesterday and I work tomorrow.”

What is considered incorrect at one time may be considered acceptable at another. The people who speak such “poor” English might become the pioneers of the English of the future. Even today we seldom complain when we hear people say “it works good,” “the mass media is,” or “this is different than that.” Perhaps one day we will be able to say “You do, I do. You not do, I not do,” instead of “If you do it, I’ll do it. If you don’t do it, I won’t do it, either.”

One of the reasons why English is difficult is because of the many foreign words. Many foreigners — and sometimes even Americans — mispronounce such words as Illinois, Arkansas, Des Moines, detente,to name a few.

When I told my American roommate that the word “ketchup” is Chinese, that “ket” means tomato, that “chup” means sauce or juice, and that “tomato ketchup” is repetitious”, he replies “So is ‘stupid Chinese’.”

Fortunately, even learning English as a second language is sometimes fun — if we do not take the mistakes too seriously. In a college English speech class in Hong Kong, a Chinese student brought the house down when he began his speech with “Ladies and Gentlemans…” An American friend of mine always makes fun of me by saying — before we go anywhere together — “Let’s went.”

Of course, hundreds of millions of English speaking people can’t be wrong. With all its difficulties, English is still very expressive. Any foreign student who has studied English for a while would find delight in learning expressions like “sell down the river,” “barking up the wrong tree,” “beat the price down,” and “six of one, half a dozen of another.”

JACK CHIANG

Jack Chiang is a graduate student in journalism at Marquette. He taught Chinese conversation at Marquette Free University during the 1973-’74 academic year, and is spending the summer at Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.

[End of Quotation from the newspaper] [Original text]

Jack Chiang (probably born in the 1940s), whoever he is, gives four examples of “wrong English” which he suggests may become standard English in the future. The future has now arrived. I’m curious to see if he was right. Here are the four phrases, and my impressions of them, as an American English native speaker born in the 1980s:

(1) “It works good”. This sounds to me like an uneducated person’s phrasing. Probably we all agree this is a phrase that should not be written, and that if you want to say it in spoken speech, choose your company carefully. I don’t know how people reacted to “It works good” in the 1970s, but I doubt it’s made much more headway (if any) into standard English by the mid-2010s, now, than it had by the mid-1970s. “It works well” has held the line very well these past four decades, for whatever reason. Check again four decades from now, in the 2050s.

(2) “The mass media is”. He got this one right. Media has become a singular. “The media is” has become standard. And as well it should be! In Latin it’s a plural, but English is not Latin. The word functions as a singular in English. Checking Google, I find “the media is…” gets 27.3 million hits. Meanwhile, “the media are…” gets 10.2 million hits, and all the top results for “the media are…” we see to be language-learning websites discussing this very issue(!); in other words, there are not so many ‘living’ usages. Another of the front-page Google hits, as of this writing, for “media are” is a quotation from 1954. So much for “the media is” as incorrect English. One solid point to Jack Chiang.

(3) “This is different than that”. This one took me a little by surprise because it doesn’t even seem obviously wrong at first glance. I looked it up, and found this:

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If 30% of Americans prefer “different than”, it means it’s heard commonly enough to not be immediately recognizable as wrong. (I wonder what percent say “It works good”). In writing, “different than” does seem more wrong.

I have probably used “different than” in speech, but rarely in all but the most informal writing. It’s strange how that works. I did a search of this website (again via Google), and I find that I’ve used “different from” many times and have never used “different than”. The latter phrase appears once on this website (before now), as part of a quotation from someone else (post-#129).

(4) “You do, I do. You not do, I not do.”  I think Mr. Chiang probably meant this almost entirely as a joke. Even though the Chinese did get “no can do” and “long time, no see” into more-or-less standard spoken English, I can’t imagine any self-respecting English native speaker ever talking like, “You do, I do. You not do, I not do”.  At best, that sounds like Yoda from Star Wars. I don’t think Chinese grammar has had any influence on American English. Maybe if China becomes the world’s superpower, this odd phrasing proposed by Jack Chiang forty years ago may become less odd. Check back in a few decades.

And so Jack Chiang, writing in 1974, gets one prediction absolutely right (#2), one sort of right (#3), and two wrong, I think.

It’s only 2015. There’s a lot of future left to be had. And, say, why is “It works good” wrong, anyway?

bookmark_borderPost-290: First Impression of Japan

Posted on by Peter
I’ll write about my trip to Japan in small pieces.
Day One
Outside Hakata Station, Fukuoka, Kyushu Island.

Wheeling my suitcase along, trying to find my way in diminishing daylight, I am forced to stop a while and wait until the little red man gives way to the little green man and we are allowed to cross the street.

It is just then that the Quiet really hits me.

I look around. Buses, and taxis, and bicyclists, and pedestrians, some frantic ones and others less frantic; there is a force-of-nature-like surge of energy to all of it flowing together; overheard, billboards, neon in liberal doses. Behind me, one of the country’s major train stations with its adjacent shopping center. A typical big city. A typical Asian city. But where is the noise?

Yes, it is much quieter than it ought to be. Where is the noise…?

This is my first impression of Japan, and I like it.

This Quiet fit neither my previous experiences of such places nor my expectations. Maybe I should have expected such, from what others have told me about Japan over the years. I didn’t. How can a place with so many thousands of people (and running motors), in close quarters be…so quiet?

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Hakata Station in Fukuoka, Japan, early March 2015, sunset.

Let me try to answer my own question.

Urban noise, I suppose, is nothing more than the jumbling together of lots of small, extraneous noises, like a car honking off yonder, someone shouting at a friend in the distance, music blaring from an unseen speaker, loud conversations from passersby, a motor-scooter revving behind you and zooming by on a sidewalk, and these days, cell phone conversations. A lot of small things like that. And, come to think of it, probably the majority of these noises come from individual choices. Do I need to honk that horn? Do I need to shout at my friend? Do I need to play my music loudly? And so on.

I figure that in Japan in public, part of the social contract is “Don’t make noises for no reason”. This does not apply to entertainment districts or shopping areas, where noise is okay and encouraged. Outside those kinds of designated areas, I think this rule applies and is followed by Japanese loyally. When the sum total of thousands of individuals’ decisions “to not make unnecessary noise” are added together, we get quiet. It seems simple, but to actually see it is amazing. Many Americans also basically follow this principle, but many don’t. It only takes a few…

bookmark_borderPost-289: Back from Japan

Posted on by Peter
I have returned to Incheon, South Korea from Japan. Over two weeks with no regular Internet access, I lost the habit of occasionally writing here. It requires discipline to write here. After returning from Japan, I busied myself with moving to a new home. I spent a lot of time with my friend M.P., who has returned to the USA this past Monday.

I really need to write about Japan. There is too much to say. Let me say something simple. I liked Japan. I was all around the country, from Kyushu (about a week) up through Tokyo. My first impression was that Japan was, “per capita”, the quietest place I’ve ever been.

A lot more can be said; maybe later.