Category: Friends

bookmark_borderPost-431: an Easter with Mormons

Posted on by Peter

(2200 words)

Easter 2023 was a good experience, but it unexpectedly came with a hundred or more Mormons.

The Mormons were there by invitation of the Lutheran pastor. He invited members of other churches for an early-morning gathering outdoors. None took up the offer, except the Mormons. They took full advantage and sent well over a hundred of their number to the gathering. The Lutheran hosts had a small showing from their own church, whose main is service is 10am. We were far outnumbered by the Mormons. The gathering went well in an objective sense, and the church hadn’t seen such a crowd in a long while.

I noted that the Mormons read Bible verses with wordings I had not heard before. The Mormons said the word Amen like “Ey-men” while the Lutherans said “Ah-men.” Not one of the Mormons showed up dressed less than as for a job interview. They had a choir that sings very well.

The Mormons who were sent were almost all in their twenties and thirties with a few older male leaders. I guess there are no female pastor-equivalents in the Mormon church. The Mormons divide people into congregations based on age and marital-status. It does seem it was young-single and young-married congregations who were sent to this gathering, as it is those congregations that are in the immediate area. I am told that when a young-single congregation member marries, he or she is mandatorily transferred to a different congregation. Whenever one learns anything about the Mormons, such as the method of sorting people into congregations and limiting the member’s own choice in the latter, one tends to sense something “off” about the whole thing. On the other hand, I think non-Christians feel the same thing about encounters with any Christians.

Nothing specifically bad happened at this early-morning Easter gathering. One could even say much ‘good’ happened. While lots of people seem to love to point out that Mormons are “nice people,” the whole thing left me with a vaguely uncomfortable or dejected feeling.

The experience itself was the opposite of dejecting, for it is a rare person indeed who can feel dejected when such a large crowd of enthusiastic people is around and in the generally-positive spirits that Easter always brings (that even for those with no Christian connection at all who do “Easter egg hunts,” such as the big one that happened at the White House today, drawing thousands of children to the South Lawn). The dejection comes from the thinking about the thing.

The Lutheran pastor, who is new (this is his first Easter), made a point to say: “This is not an inter-faith gathering, this is an intra-faith gathering.” What he said was a highbrow of saying: “I declare that Mormons are Christians.” The polite Mormon elder thanked him for signaling that he, the pastor of a traditional Christian congregation, is willing to say that Mormons are Christians. The subtext of these few words is thick and generations deep. Few if any in the 19th or 20th centuries would have said such a thing.

Mormonism is not traditional trinitarian Christianity. Traditional Christian denominations have never considered Mormons to be Christians, unless the label “Christian” is extended so wide such that Jehovah’s Witnesses are also in, along with “Moonies” and other such groups. And to take another few steps in that direction, what’s the big deal against Islam? They also think highly of Jesus, right? There are all kinds of connections there, why not join up with them?

Our traditional view is that the Mormon doctrines make them a separate religion, and in certain historical periods a menacing one, which had undermined social norms, treated the majority as hostile, and in other ways used the strategy of a small or diasporic group to get ahead. They are “nice people,” but aren’t we also nice? Or at least used to be. White-Protestant Middle America types were once considered much like the Mormons are today, but generally without the negatives and clannishness.

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The Mormon religion has assuredly drawn from the strength and prestige of the Christian religion, and asserts a place for Jesus. But, then, some brands of Christian-influenced Hinduism also reverse Jesus (so it is said). Our traditional view is that the Mormon movement in the mid-19th century left behind traditional Christianity and created a new religion in the desert, one alternately considered a serious threat or too small and eccentric to really be a serious threat.

From accounts I’ve read of overland emigrants from the U.S. East to Oregon and California, many or most of whom passed right through Mormon strongholds, the whole Mormon religion in its early years was depicted in deeply unflattering terms, with regular scenes of Mormon males propositioning westward-bound emigrant women to abandon their party and become third or fourth wives to his (Mormon male’s) growing harem; get on the winning team! They did often successfully coax such women; one doesn’t need to land ‘hits’ at any high percentage to eventually wind up with large female-to-male ratios. Such a social movement was, needless to say, an outrage to Protestant America as it was a potentially destabilizing force. If they had attempted the movement in the fully settled U.S. East and had no desert refugium to go to, they’d simply have been crushed.

Last year I read the published diary of an early-1850s emigrant woman a young bride and mother in her twenties. She recorded little observations along the way, except a gap when she lost her pencil and could not get a replacement on the trail for x weeks. This woman wrote of how glad she was to get past the Mormon area on the trail, after an unexpected stay in Salt Lake City of several months (many emigrants altered plans to winter at Salt Lake City, or work for wages a season there to continue financing the emigration or as advance-members of their group continued to California to send word when all was ready). Her diary entries were peppered with anti-Mormon comments throughout that period. They ran an oppressive, theocratic spy-state and cheated or persecuted outsiders (whom they called “gentiles”), she said. But when the diarist’s party did leave Salt Lake City, she recorded that her mother-in-law had herself become a Mormon and refused to leave with the party, so they left her in Salt Lake City.

When the Methodist movement was sweeping America in the late 1700s and continuing throughout much of the 1800s, it also met resistance and resentment. The difference was the Methodists were traditional Christians and did not run a parallel-society like the Mormons did.

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One cannot easily deny that the Mormons present an image that seems wholesome, functional, and productive — much like our entire society used to be. It’s very possible that their current domestic strategy is to target disgruntled or demoralized Christians and in coming years try to take over traditional churches. It’s not a process that would happen in one year or ten. That I see pairs of them with suits and nametags and books in hand around here suggests they are serious about domestic evangelism.

I think my uneasiness is that celebrating the most important of the Christian holidays, Easter, with Mormons is because it is a step in the direction of abandonment of our churches. I can foresee it all happening in part because it is hardly prophecy but more extension of what has already happened, the trajectory of the churches I’ve observed in my lifetime, in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and some of the 2020s.

On the bad-so-far “2020s” decade, I wonder how the Mormons dealt with Lockdownism… Most of the traditional churches embraced it, some with great passion, the social-panic and new Virus-centered defacto social religion taking the place of any nominal religion. I was virtually alone in urging against it and although my arguments were sound none were willing to listen. One of the local churches, I understand, never re-opened after embracing Lockdownism in 2020.

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At some point in the 2010s, I remember it hitting me that most of our churches today are really “unitarian-universalist,”regardless of what they call themselves or what they would assert about themselves if queried. I notice the change in all kinds of little ways but that the church now says “All are welcome to receive communion,” with not even the mildest of references that some kind of standard is in places, something like “all Christians” or some basic statement of faith. It’s all people. This is an overt non-standard that seems a sign of lack of self-confidence.

If a decline process can’t be reversed, one might predict a consolidation of churches. Some observes would think it a surprise this hasn’t happened yet. For me, the large number of Christian churches persist because the church-affiliation-driving individuals in a family have attachments to different specific Christian traditions that are meaningful to them above-and-beyond the practical matters of running churches. Often it’s family-ancestry and/or personal upbringing. Sometimes those things are modified by formative experiences. These religious-associations or identities have historically been so important that any proposed working definition of “ethnicity” that excludes church-affiliation entirely cannot be said to be worth much.

Ethnicity is an important but fluid concept over time and space, and one useful way to “track” ethnicity tends to be church-affiliation. These things have meant a lot to people and they still have meaning to people today, even “young” people. One such person I think of often is E. S. of Australia, who I may never see again and who I am sure is not reading this. She was from a German-Lutheran family with many generations in Australia. She signaled that the Lutheran church or the identity was important to her. While there are many other positives to E. S., a church-identity is a good sign, a rock upon which something can be built; historically, it was so. It was as if E. S. (born about 1989) were catapulted into the 2010s (which is when I knew her all-too-briefly) from another era, an era when life had more meaning and we could be proud of who we were. That she felt adrift is no sin, for the West of this late date doesn’t seem to be made for people like us. I felt an affinity for E. S. that was probably not reciprocal.

One of the great early Protestant missionaries to Korea, Appenzeller, was from an old Dutch Reformed family in Pennsylvania, and respected the tradition, but at age eighteen or nineteen in the 1870s he had a religious experience with in company with some Methodists and within a few years entered a Methodist seminary, and is forever known as the pioneer Methodist in Korea. It is said he personally always had great sympathy for Calvinists (which his own family was back in Pennsylvania), including his Presbyterian rivals on the ground in Korea.

The Protestant churches are the rock upon which the leading elements of Western Civilization, as we’ve known it for five centuries, has existed and progressed. The churches were definitely the basis of the United States. Observing their decline leaves me sad and dejected, that weak feeling in the “pit of the stomach” you hear people talk about when you feel unconfident about something and it’s bothering you.

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I have heard people bash the churches plenty, often in the same sort of the same way I’m doing but usually in a less-informed way. One friend, G. S., in younger years loved to bash the churches and say they were a source of our discontent. G. S., too, coincidentally, was from a Lutheran family of long roots in Pennsylvania, continuing some themes of this essay. G. S. was difficult to talk to at times because he tended against yielding points or compromise, and when I talked to him about the churches he would reveal that he didn’t know much about them. He was not a church-attender after childhood. He didn’t even know if his childhood church was ELCA or LCMS or other. He had never heard these terms, as I remember. (Having visited G. S.’s parents on several occasions, I feel confident they’d be ELCA.) He still felt confident in saying the churches were a root-cause of our problems. I viewed that as immature, and ten or twelve years later maybe he has moved on from that view.

The networks of ideologues that seem to be present in the upper leadership of the churches are really social-justice activists, and if one only looks or hears from them, it does seem very off-putting to a typical young male. For the kind of person who seems to end up in leadership of these church-bodies (denominations), the “church organization” is really a left-wing NGO. Their output is not distinguishable from secular NGO’s.

There are many positives about the churches, even though I cannot deny that the overall picture leaves me tending towards pessimism. The rank-and-filers in churches, ordinary members and attenders, are seldom like the ideologues in the central-organization leadership. People attach themselves to churches for specific reasons and those church-communities become part of their civic-life. It’s generally a positive to be more socially engaged in such things than not.

My ambivalence for the church I am most familiar with is sometimes reinforced by single observations. An affirmative-action policy was in place (mandated by the ideologues up top) by which any nonwhite person and persons whose mother-language is not English is given favoritism. Of course it’s to “increase Diversity.” That is how every institution seems to work in the USA, which  leaves so many of us pessimistic, observing the clear signal that we are not wanted. I have tried suggesting in a roundabout way that a church should be about empowering its own members. “Inreach” is as important as “outreach.” People are inspired to great things by feeling part of something. The Mormons, as best I can tell, very much do do that.

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Easter: the greatest of the Christian holidays, the culmination of a week of important days in the Christian calendar. To explain the themes of the holiday without the doctrines, the idea of “rebirth” may suffice. The calendrically synchronous tie-in with spring is also obvious. The tradition of wearing light-colored clothing on Easter also signals spring.

In some sense, Easter is the approximate starting point of the best of the social calendar of the year in northern-hemisphere temperate areas, with months of relatively long days and good weather  ahead. It is hard to be truly pessimistic at this time of year. This specific experience of Easter 2023 was a mix of the positive and negative.

bookmark_borderPost-424: Maddy’s Taproom, r.i.p. (2011-2020)

Posted on by Peter

“Maddy’s Taproom,” a bar, previously of downtown Washington D.C.

I remember when I saw that it had been abandoned. It was late in 2020. There it was, boarded up. Closed permanently. “Retail space available” signs were up.

I later learned that Maddy’s Taproom had closed several months earlier, in July 2020. It had been doing fine as of February 2020.

The picture I use here is lifted from the Internet. It is what the street-corner entrance looked like in the 2010s. Now imagine boards of plywood over all the glass-windows and doors. Now imagine me, on the sidewalk diagonal across, seeing the place in its permanently-closed-and-boarded-up condition for the first time. It was a sad moment.

I had some memories and some passing appreciation or fondness for this place, Maddy’s Taproom. That day I passed by in 2020, I didn’t know that the place had gone down. Gone. Another victim of that great monster, the year 2020.

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(4750 words)

Maddy’s Taproom, as I say, was a low-priced bar. What I recall of the inside is wooden tables and chairs, a few booths, low lightning, working toilets, and cheap beer. There was some kind of low music but it didn’t interfere with conversation. The clientele that I encountered there was mellow, unpretentious. Nobody around had a particularly bad attitude. It was a relaxed place. It was a pleasant place. That is why I steered people there occasionally. It is why I am writing this “ode” or recollection and commentary on the place.

Continue reading “Post-424: Maddy’s Taproom, r.i.p. (2011-2020)”

bookmark_borderPost-413: On Australia, Brisbane, Korea, and China

Posted on by Peter

(This began as a country-size comparison, continued into a latitude comparison, and freely drifted into a discussion of Brisbane, Australian politics, the US-Australia alliance, China, and more. These are loosely related topics but, I hope coherent-enough thoughts. The whole amounts to 4000 words and covers the gamut of the usual fare which I put to digital-paper here.)

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I came across this Australia vs. USA size comparison. It’s a map-over-map overlay and is NOT latitude-aligned but is effective at showing the relative sizes:

Another map I find purports to align the latitudes, “flipping” the familiar shape of Australia for purpose of the latitude-matching.

In other words, if Australia were in its exact same relative position but mirrored onto the northern hemisphere and tossed above South America, it would be here:

I didn’t realize Australia was nearly the same breadth as the United States, coast to coast. I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about it one way or another, though,

For practical purposes, the USA is much bigger in that most land in Australia is unusable and therefore empty. Australia’s size is impressive on a map, but measured in arable land, the continent USA has Australia beat by 4x or 5x as of today.

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Brisbane

Brisbane is the place in Australia I can claim some acquaintance with, from personal experience and indirect experience through people I’ve known.

Brisbane is half-way up the eastern coast.

They say the name (Brisbane) as BRIZ-bin, and not Briz-BANE as some might guess (and, please, no “Bry’s Bane”).

I spent three days in/around Brisbane in August 2015. My cousin (M. W.) had moved there in January 2015, stayed several years, and is now somewhere in Oregon, after a total of four or five years in Australia. I think the last year or so was somewhere other than Brisbane. I can’t remember. I haven’t seen her since the day she dropped me off at the Brisbane Airport to proceed across the Pacific.

I’m quite sure I have written elsewhere on these pages about my August 2015 return-trip to the USA, to date the most memorable such trip I’ve done. I was leaving Korea after one of my successful stays there and a visa expiration. Australia was one of my stops on the way back to the USA.

(The tickets were a true win-win, a series of one-way tickets with the cheap carriers, strung together by finesse and boldness of action. I was able to spend time on the ground in Malaysia, Australia, Fiji, a very brief visit to Christmas Island (Kirimati), Hawaii, Seattle, before arriving back at Washington. The final price of all these together was not much above a direct ticket. Given that I got all this “free” travel worked in, that was the win-win.)

(As for Kirimati, a.k.a. Christmas Island, the airport was cut out of jungle and had exactly two buildings, large shacks, one for Arrivals, one for Departures. Or so I remember it. They didn’t let thru-passengers get off the plane. The scenes I remember were of mysterious figures, carrying unusual equipment, emerging slowly and piecemeal from the “Departures” shack. These were passengers who recently completely their scuba-diving or whatever sea-based adventuring they’d been up to and were re-entering the world.)

It’s a good thing I am the controlling editor of that which gets published here, because this is already digressing two levels down, a digression within a digression. I will allow it. No complaints. You, reader of the present of future or distant future, get what you pay for. Complaints allowed only if you paid for this. Onward we go.

Given that I’ve already written about the Brisbane trip itself, I’ll add something new: Several Brisbane connections from Korea.

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Brisbane Friends

Brisbane inserted itself in my life several times in the mid-2010s.

I don’t know why or how. I did not seek it out. But I met a series of people from that one city. All met independent of one another, all in Greater Seoul. There are three I can think of now. If there were others, I didn’t know them well enough to remember their place of origin.

One was G. D., whom I met in 2014 in Bucheon, my home for two years ending in September 2013. G. D. was then unhappily toiling in the hagwon world. I was glad to be able to help a Western foreigner having trouble in Korea who felt alienated and alone. I was lucky enough to be on the receiving end of this kind of assistance in my early days there, and soon G. D. was well-enough integrated into life.

Another was Martin B., whom I first encountered briefly in mid-2015 but really got to know in 2016 and thereafter. I have always gotten along with him and even admired despite his flaws.

The third is E. S., whom I met in, I think, June 2017 in Seoul, within the same general setting as Martin (ILC) but unconnected thereto except by citizenship and place of origin.

Of the three, Martin is still in Korea today but the the two are not.

Martin occasionally mass emails his thoughts to a hundred or more on his email list (seemingly always altering the list slightly). I don’t know what percentage of his mass-emails I am on, but they’re occasional. I enjoy reading them and he has a particularly unique writing style. He often drifts into territory few others would in such mass communications, relating to personal problems. Martin is now I think over 60 and has been in Korea over twenty years.

I am unclear what E. S. is doing.

E. S. was ambitious in mid-2017 but had never been to “Asia” before and reminded me a lot of myself when I was new. She was sent to Korea on some kind of scholarship in 2017. I was working at a low-level but prestigious academic-type job in summer 2017 in Seoul. E. S. is one of the people with whom I hoped to stay in contact, but have had limited success. I returned over the winter 2017-18 (ahead of a study trip to Japan), but E. S. had just left Korea, after completing six+ months there, and as best I can tell was back to Brisbane, air-dropping back into the usual.

E. S.’s interests at the time overlapped greatly with the world I was in, in the late 2010s, certainly in 2017, 2018, and even into 2019, but I think began fading in 2019.

One forms portrait-impressions of people and what they are up to at any given time. People with whom you fall out of touch, the portrait is faded, maybe not well sketched, but still exists. The last firm impression I have of E. S. is that she was hoping to fall comfortably into some kind of government employment. To what grander purpose, I don’t know.

What is the meaning of my having known three separate, unconnected Brisbane people, all in Korea?

Adjusting for unconnectedness and population size, Brisbane must be among the highest per-capita rates of personal origin-place for foreigners I knew above acquaintance level in Korea. Hong Kong and Singapore likely easily outrank Brisbane, but that’s almost a given.

At the height of the TEFL industry in South Korea in the late 2000s, statistics had it that there were nearly as many E-2 visa (language teaching visa) holders from Canada as from the United States. The USA of course had nearly 9x the total population. It shook out to mean Canadians were around 7x as represented, per capita, as Americans. (This was just for the E-2 people, of which I was one, and did not count the gyopos, usually meant to mean “Korean-Americans,” U.S. passport holders of Korean ancestry, but in fact for visa purposes it was for a wide net of countries).

Something about Canadians pushed them to Korea much more often. Does the same apply to Brisbane? I have no idea. My experience is probably not scalable.

If there is something special about Brisbane, what is it?

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Geography

Brisbane turns out to be at the midpoint between the 27th and 28th Parallels South. The exact midpoint of the two parallels (i.e., “27.5” degrees South) passes right through the middle of the University of Queensland campus.

The same parallel here in the northern hemisphere (27.5 North) passes through (among other places) central Florida, meeting the Gulf of Mexico at a place called Manatee Beach, a pleasant-seeming beach community at the southern end of the Tampa Bay area.

On the western coast of North America, fronting the Pacific, the 27.5 North line (the mirror-image latitude of Brisbane) passes 20 miles south of a place called Bahia Tortugas, Mexico (part of Baja California) (apparently the town is NOT “Bahia de Tortugas;” what are they doing with this sloppy Spanish?) (Bahia Tortugas has no English wiki entry and a very spare Spanish one explaining that nothing much goes on down at Turtle Bay except fishing, but tourism or eco-tourism is a natural growth market).

Brisbane is, therefore, at a latitude promising a really favorable climate. From the times I’ve occasionally checked its weather, it does not disappoint. I was there in late August, southern hemisphere winter (the equivalent period would be late February here in the northern hemisphere) and it was pleasant and summer-like.

This seems almost a stereotype of Australia fulfilled, the image of Australia as processed through millions of pairs of ears countless millions of times since the early 1980s with the “Land Down Under” song, its tone and themes:

This highly favorable climate is a mis-match with the kinds of people who settled and built it up, Europeans from mostly much higher latitudes. (I had to correct my original “more northerly climes,” which doesn’t work in the case when northward means towards the equator…!).

In E. S.’s case, some of her ancestors come from around 51 degrees North latitude in central Europe. None of those people were acclimated to the sunny climes of the Australian coast at such cheery and creamy latitudes.

Am I getting at anything here? I’m not sure. The point I think I’m approaching is, if something is special about Brisbane, the climate could have something to do with it. This sounds like amateurish armchair analysis, I know, but it’s at least something.

I took myself on another digression for ten minutes and calculated my own ancestral median, out of curiosity. In latitude terms it falls around 55 degrees North, give or take.

(And the median lat-long coordinates, a single hypothetical point denoting the geographical median of my ancestors’ birthplaces several centuries ago, falls somewhere in the western Baltic Sea, or possibly lands one of the islands of Denmark — which, conveniently, is where my paternal line traces to about two centuries ago (the island of Fyn). This high median latitude comes from my father’s side’s Norwegian ancestry; none of my mother’s ancestral lines go too far south.)

In any case, latitude and climate don’t exactly align (Europe is warmer than its latitude suggests it should be), but sunlight stays consistent across latitudes. Brisbane is getting Florida coast or Baja California sun.

I was told by some locals that Queensland, Australia, is the per-capita skin cancer capital of the world. Looking at the map I see Brisbane is flanked by something called Sunshine Coast and on the other side by Gold Coast (at whose airport I arrived in 2015).

This all lends itself very much to outdoor activities, in addition to the long tradition of low-population and thus elbow-room. This combined with Northwest European cultural traditions meant Australia was always going to be something special once it got rolling, and if it had a strong enough sponsor, which ended up being so with the Britannia Rules the Waves-era UK.

This is probably getting closer now to a good explanation for why Brisbane ended up tossing so many more of its people, per capita, to a place like Korea in the 1990s-to-2010s era, than other places, but the right combination of words has not occurred to me to drive the point home in one sentence,so I’ll stop dancing around it and move on.

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Population stock

It’s so easy to look things up, but sometimes the picture you get is not quite right, and data must be interpreted with caution.

From the latest census results, it seems the Brisbane region’s population stock is around 60% White Australian today, by which I mean those descended from the pre-1970s (White) population.

Around 2% identify as Aboriginie. I remember seeing a few people who looked part-Aboriginie on a ferry heading to an island off Brisbane, but I don’t recall seeing any in the center of the city itself.

(Tangent: I remember when Australia hosted the Olympics in 2000. I remember them making a big deal about Aborigines in their opening ceremony, or so my impression was and so my memory tells me now. I remember finding it a little strange at the time. The Aborigines were there first, true, but so much attention was given that you’d think they founded the Australian state itself and its core institutions and culture and then somehow lost control to White immigrants. At my age at the time (2000), it’s not something I had any kind of fully formed opinion on one way or another, just impressions. The 2000 Olympics along with the Simpsons late-1990s Australia episode formed my early views of Australia; the Simpsons episode is delightful in how brazenly anti-Australian it was, mocking of Australia, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they quietly banned that one there.)

If White Australians + Aboriginies together form just over 60%, that leaves the rest (35-40%) as recent immigrants or descendants thereof.

Degree of personal-identity Australianization no doubt differs from person to person among this group, and there doesn’t seem to be able simplified narrative to latch onto. But it does seem the 35-40% is tilted towards actual foreign-born. The rate of personal-identity Australianization is still going to be relatively low in the 2020s for that reason alone. What the 2030s and 2040s and beyond holds is harder to say.

But no group seems particularly dominant among the 35-40% of recent origin, almost as if immigrants were selected by lottery to ensure a relatively random draw. I am sure that is not the case. And of the 35-40%, it seems something between a third and a half are White themselves, broadly speaking.

When all is said and done, the total of what Canada’s statistical agency calls Visible Minorities in the Brisbane region must have broken the 25% barrier sometime the 2010s, certainly so by the close of the decade. I would assume this would follow the US pattern, the 25% applying in the region as a whole but being higher in core areas of the city proper and lower in “suburb”/”exurb” areas. This aligns with what I recall from 2015.

We are now 15% of our way into the 2020s, though, and the number of Visible Minorities may be pushing fast towards the one-third mark, especially among the active, core-age population. This is just my reading of the data I see and maybe I’m missing something.

It seems East Asians, broadly defined (including Filipino), are still below the 10% mark and may be so for some years to come, with maybe half of that of Greater China origin. Nothing like parity between Chinese and White Australians is ahead in the near term — not in Brisbane, anyway.

Anyone who knows how Overseas Chinese operate knows they don’t need numerical majorities to start to dominate, if that’s their play. It’s a complicated matter (for one thing, there are all kinds of different Chinese on the scene, Taiwanese, Southeast Asia Chinese, Hong Kongese, and PRC-Chinese are, I assume, a minority).

This Overseas Chinese matter is subject to a bit of a taboo in our culture today, and I assume the same holds in Australia, whose system of cultural-political taboos seems to closely resemble the USA’s own. My experience working at a think tank in 2019 gave me several insights into Australia, which got me thinking about the matter, anyway. Why do think tanks exist if not to inspire thinking? I understand the taboo and respect its power — I’m not stupid, right? — but these things do deserve thought.

Both Martin and E. S. are of self-identified German ancestry. Martin speaks German fairly well but seems self-taught, by which I mean he did not inherit much/any language but learned by force of will in classes or self-study over the years.

It seems both Martin and E. S. had several generations of nativity in Australia, but retained some coherent sense of German-Lutheran ancestral identity. They fit in the “around 60% White Australian” aggregate-grouping there but even that aggregate category obscures some differences which may be important.

The third Brisbaner I knew, G. D., also fits in the 60%; G. D. never mentioned any other origin and appears likely predominantly if not wholly British Isles origin.

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Fear of China

I mentioned just above that when I worked in the Asia policy-related think tank in 2019, I got a feel for just how much the Australian state and security apparatus fears China today. They do. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Disregard the words of any official or unofficial spokesmen for the Australian state (or security apparatus) who tells you that they don’t fear China.

Maybe Australia will “flip” at some point in the second quarter of this century and side with China (that is, against the USA). This would be an extreme move and I have a hard time imagining it, though it suggests the plot for some kind of action/spy movie.

Much more likely than “flipping” would be neutralization, what was once called Finlandization in the US-Soviet Cold War setting,

If Australia willingly neutralizes (detaches from the US without joining Team PRC-China) before 2050, it’ll be later (2040s) and not sooner (2020s, 2030s). Even then it would require an entirely new generation to come into positions of influence and would only be assured if the U.S. (Navy) undergoes some shock or other problems by which it loses the ability or will to continue its security guarantee to Australia. That combined with new people significantly less committed to the US alliance, that’s the trigger for Neutralization.

People talk about the “two aircraft carriers” threshold. I made up the term, but not the thinking, which goes like this: If China can sink just two U.S. Navy carriers, the entire strategic board is turned over and pieces go flying everywhere. The board game must be reset. Picking up the pieces, realignments can be rapid.

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Pro-America Australia

Americans hardly think about the U.S.-Australia alliance.

This is one of the many dogs that don’t bark in U.S. discourse. In global terms it’s a fairly major thing but gets zero press in U.S. media. Australia is much more likely to get coverage for wildfires or coral reef or crocodiles than for anything geopolitical or related to the US-Australia alliance.

I get the feeling that Australians cling tight to it, that they implicitly think of the ties to the U.S. as a cornerstone of their state itself. Australia voluntarily extends its their own sovereignty, partially, to let the U.S. in a bit.

I remember conversations to that effect at the think tank. A big reason no one ever thinks or talks about the U.S.-Australia relationship (in mainstream political / foreign affairs discourse, excluding certain academics or specialists) is because the Australia give the U.S. everything it wants and more — basing agreements, everything. This all sails by everyone’s awareness because there was never any controversy to get it in the news.. Don’t mistake non-coverage and non-awareness for non-importance.

On the other side, I know from sometimes watching Australian news that they pay close attention to even minor matters in U.S. affairs. I was surprised to see how much they follow U.S. news, as if Australia were a part of the USA itself. (In one case in 2019, I remember the Australian anchors repeatedly referring to Trump as “the president,” as in a rendering like “Today the president traveled to Europe in order to…” What? Which president? Why not “the American president”? Or maybe “President [Name]”?)

One can ask why Australia is so pro-America. To me it’s got to be because Australia has always viewed itself as an outpost of Western civilization in a distant part of the world and therefore in need of assistance. It didn’t matter the extent to which this became much less true with time, for the thought-pattern was set. And if there was a long respite, it really does again apply, vis-a-vis PRC-China, as we head into the mid-21st century.

When the UK abandoned its global security commitments between the 1910s and 1940s/50s, and as the U.S. inherited the same by the 1940s, the impetus for the relationship was obvious, and has been for eighty years.

There are many other similarities between the two peoples, at least traditionally.

This brings us back to the immigration question, and what it means for Australia itself and the core nature of the regime there, and therefore the US alliance. The most obvious group of interest must be the ethnic-Chinese in Australia. (This breaches the taboo, I know, but at a high enough level you are allowed to; this venue probably does not earn such an exemption, so I proceed with caution.)

I was under the impression that Chinese of various sorts, by no means all “PRC-Chinese,” were a major population element within Australia now. I know several Koreans who went to Australia, and if the image it has in Korea is anything like what it has in China, that is a major pool of potential immigrants. I am certain Australia makes it harder for PRC-Chinese to come than most of the wealthy smaller East Asian states, including South Korea.

As for Brisbane itself, to continue my amateur analysis of that city, they have some Chinese but really not that many. There must be comparatively many Chinese in the big population centers down south to balance it out.

I once calculated Australia’s Chinese-immigrant population at nearly 10x as large, per capita, as the USA’s own (not-insignificant) Chinese population. This doesn’t seem to hold for Brisbane.

It doesn’t need to be some ethnic sedition lobby at all. It may simply be a policy establishment of immigrant-stock technocrats with sundry personal-ancestral origins, who feel little need to maintain the traditional ties to a distant benefactor like the USA which in the past was tied to Australia by mutual European-colonial heritage and more.

Some of the immigrants attracted to Australia are very talented indeed, and if they pull their weight or more within a near- or medium-term technocratic, business, and policy-making elite, why wouldn’t they entertain the idea of neutralization? It seems obvious.

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Australia and the Flu Virus Panic of 2020: Why?

One thing I don’t understand. Australia seems to have run among the most authoritarian Virus Panic regimes of anywhere in the Western world.

This frankly shocked and disappointed me, and the millions who viewed Australia as a bastion of rugged individualism (or something of that sort) who might stand up against the madness, a Sweden of the Southern Hemisphere. Why did the precise opposite happen, Australia diving deep into a a dark fantasy-land of paranoid virus hysteria and dystopic policy fanaticism? I don’t have a good answer.

At one point I spent time in an international airport, March 2020. The worst-off, sad-sack, camping-out-in-airport cases were Australians, whose government’s crazy policy stranded its own people, refusing them entry into their own country, over purported fear of a flu virus.

A few of the themes of this essay suggest some possible explanations to the puzzle.

Australia’s heavy rate of immigration has got to cause them some apprehension, even if they seldom admit it to each other or even to themselves. How could it not be so? This might be one reason they started down the dark path of embracing the Panic, good and hard, rather than going about life as normal as we all should have and accepted the losses inherent to a severe flu wave.

Early on, an important narrative strand in “Covid” discourse was “shut down the borders!” to which the most common response was: “Closing borders is racist; Whatever you do, do not do that!” — these being holdover positions from a normal Right-Left dichotomy but transposed awkwardly onto the demagogue’s blank-slate that was “Covid.” If the virus’ impressive global P.R. network could gin up enough scare stories, the border-shutdown people could push through their preferred policy.

I doubt this was even a conscious thing. It could as well be unconscious, preferred policies permeating a seemingly unrelated event (the perceived need to drop everything and panic!, over a flu virus).

In the USA, Lockdownism eventually became a Blue Team vs Red Team thing. This does not apply everywhere, and in many cases right-wing governments were fanatical Lockdowners (including the likes of Hungary), whereas the hero of the whole thing, Sweden, standing out within the OECD as the only national government to refuse to demagogue on a flu virus, had a left-wing Social Democrat and Green-led government.

Australia’s policy-makers — who led their country into artificial major recession, social disruption, and a long period of bizarre, dystopian lockdown and what is set to be two full years of a travel ban — were/are Center-Right.

It also seems likely that the Fear of China arc, which was clearly ascending in the 2010s in Australia, could tie-in with the Flu Virus Panic of 2020-21. Given that the virus “came from China,” this may have tapped into a Fear of China political vein in Australia, and caused what natural opposition to Endless Lockdownism there was to stand down at first, exactly when a hard line against Lockdowns were needed.

Then there is the US-Australia alliance itself, and the apparently significant US cultural/political influence on Australia. When our big agenda-setters decided that it was to be “Lockdowns Today, Lockdowns Tomorrow, Lockdowns Forever!” — this sent a signal to the satellite states in the US orbit to get with the program and start panicking along with the cool kids.

This essay has wandered into interesting territory, reaching some 4000 words. When I commit to writing one of these, I never quite know where it’ll go.

The bad news for Australia continues, with this recent headline:

Prime Minister Scott Morrison – who faces an election next year – has announced Australia won’t re-open borders until mid-2022

That means over two full years of major disruptions, especially hitting any Australian seeking to go abroad (or even get home, in many cases) and any foreigner trying to enter.

The whole thing feels like watching a society in the midst of mass delusion. The major bastions of VIrus Panic in the USA seem to have begun falling in May and especially by June 2021 we re-entered the world of Reality and its warm and comfortable shores. Some bitter-enders will continue the disruptions even longer, but for now it seems to basically be over for most people in most situations.

Australia’s decision to demagogue on the whole thing in early 2020, and turn authoritarian, over a flu virus which we knew with certainty by relatively early on was not a major threat, simply does not fit the image I had of the country and people and the character thereof, which I had developed my limited experience in the 2010s. I am still puzzled by it, but I’m puzzled and dismayed by almost every society’s reaction to it.

As for Brisbane, the city that I ended up with multiple nodes of connection to, the news is also bad. Two news stories I find:

Brisbane restaurant cluster linked to flight attendant rises to five cases
Three new community cases of COVID-19 have been reported in Brisbane, linked to a woman who tested positive after leaving hotel … 2 days ago

Scott Morrison proposes Brisbane COVID-19 quarantine hub, rejects Wellcamp Airport proposal

Yes, they’re still doing this….

Poor Brisbane! Poor Australia! Poor all of us.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

bookmark_borderPost-412: Reflections on Smartphone life, 2014-2021

Posted on by Peter

A recent trip to the repair shop got me thinking about my relationship to the smartphone and the digitization of most aspects of life which it represents/induces/necessitates. I’ll try to approach this indirectly through a small handful of memories.

I distinctly remember once, in Seoul, in spring 2014, being teased by a then-acquaintance from Europe, both privately and publicly, for writing out a map on a piece of paper. I didn’t mind the teasing nor his attempts later that day to show others my hand-drawn map. It got the job done, and who can argue with results? The mockery had nothing to do with results but of form: It was analog! Get with the digital age, was the message.

The reason I remember this little incident is I was surprised with the confidence with which he mocked me, as if in 2014 I were telling him I’d send him something by fax or give him a movie on VHS, something just laughably obsolete such that he couldn’t even imagine doing it. That was the tone. Obviously he did still use pen and paper in some cases, but for navigation in a city from A to B? Who would do that?

I had created this little hand-drawn map to navigate to the Seoul city wall, with the plan to hike the half length from West Gate to East Gate along the northern arc, which only this intrepid acquaintance was interested in doing on a Saturday morning. Finding access to the path from a certain meeting point was not easy. It involved twists and turns through alleys, and I planned it out at home and traced out the route on paper, making a sketch map. I had a hard copy of it.

I had a Smartphone at the time and “data,” but the data was on a pay-as-you-go plan, which meant when it ran out I had to pay to recharge, which was an annoying process; in any case, I didn’t want to use data when not needed. I also wanted to plan out the route to make sure I knew what I was doing. But something in me in spring 2014 was still profoundly uncomfortable with navigating by “phone” (as we end up calling such devices, which are used as telephones about 0.1% of the time for many people).

The sketch-map served its purpose wonderfully and we didn’t get lost.

I remember how amused he was by this map. He called it something like “the cutest thing I’ve seen all year.” Later that day he told others about it and insisted I show it to them. He was making fun of me, but I don’t remember taking offense, because I was in my own heart making fun of anyone who would be stunned at a pen-and-paper sketch-map.

I remember this even seven years later because it was in the transition period between when making sketch-maps like that was reasonably normal in the 2000s, and when it was laughable, given the always-on interactive map in your pocket (i.e., your “phone”), certainly so by late-2010s and in leading circles already becoming laughable in the mid-2010s. To have made an used a map like that by the late-2010s, it would have to extraordinary circumstances or maybe somewhere far outside a city where phone signals were unreliable.

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I have always had an ambiguous attitude about devices.

For whatever reason, I also didn’t get a basic cellphone until rather late, I think in the last half of my last year of high school. I never used SMS “text messaging” until 2007 and that especially because of one particular person, M. K.; as for Facebook, I registered an account in late 2007 but was seldom active, and very much actively avoid it now. Although I use the Messenger app to communicate with people I otherwise have no way to contact, I avoid actually signing in — the last I did was some time in 2019.

This is all related to another sometime internal discussion I have. When does the Internet Age begin?

There are a lot of landmarks one an point to but these generally amount to trivia. If you must choose a ‘0’ year or a ‘5’ year, which is the best to attach to the concept of “Start of the Internet Era”? Note this is really a social question and not a technical one. I know there was technically some predecessor to email even as early as the 1980s, and there was an active early Internet scene in the 1990s. But these do not do. I think it has to be 2010, by which time the infrastructure we understand as the Internet was really in place. The Smartphone wave in the years that followed rapidly gave us our world as we knew it for the rest of the 2010s and now into the 2020s (1.5 years down, not a good decade so far for me).

Mobile digital computing devices connected to the Internet had made rapid gains and by 2014, the idea of someone making and using a paper sketch map to navigate a tricky path to a destination was something to laugh at, for some. Five years earlier, it wouldn’t have been so.

As for my own relationship with the Smartphone. I had none at all until the very end of December 2013, when one was given to me as a gift. In the last days of that year, I was sick with flu and living in a tiny room in a goshiwon in Seoul (in what some Koreans have been known to call the worst part of Seoul due to the presence of Chinese and Korean-Chinese). It was in my windowless room in that place that I entered the Smartphone Age after recovering from the flu on or soon after New Year’s Day 2014. The “pen-and-paper map” incident followed a few months later.

This timeline, I should add, means that my entire cross-country (South Korea) hike attempt in September and October 2013 was done Smartphone-less. In fact, it was basically done without any phone. I had a non-smart phone I kept off about 99.9% of the time. It had a good dictionary (an “offline” one, which in the Smartphone Age became a rare commodity). In the 2020s, it seems hard to imagine someone similar to 2013-Me attempting the hike without Smartphone access, perhaps even trying t o navigate by Smartphone, which is probably not a good idea, but the point is I just imagine people would do so by default.

People aging into social consciousness in the past few years, and in the years to come, and my own children God-willing I have any, may think that smartphones were common much earlier than they were, and that the Internet Era was much earlier than it really was. Even into 2011, the Smartphone was still considered fairly unusual, even something for eccentrics. The attitude was already changing by then. The spring 2011 Arab protests were hailed by our media for being led by organizers with smartphones communicating on the run (an attitude towards political-dissidents’ use of technology which they turned against sharply by the late-2010s).

By the mid-2010s, the Smartphone was rapidly becoming the standard.

I remember a case of a birthday party in 2012 or 2013. A Korean male about my age and I were among the many invitees, at the notoriously difficult-to-navigate Bupyeong Underground. In recent years they’ve invested huge amounts of money in making it more navigable, but you’ll still get lost there. I somehow linked up with him on the way. The venue was Outback. We both got totally lost and spent about fifteen minutes going this way and that through the maze-like underground before finding the right way. One thing I think I remember is neither he nor I had an easy way to communicate with the party’s kakao groupchat because we did not have smartphones. In any case I am sure he didn’t have one, which surprised me for a Korean male in his twenties at the time, but so it was.

I distinctly remember being surprised in early-mid 2014 when A. L., a Singaporean classmate in my first-ever Korean class, told me she used Google Maps for absolutely everything in getting anywhere, for all navigation. This stunned me, and made me think the less of her, I think. Did it mean she couldn’t navigate on her own, but just followed the arrows on the screen? It seemed so, and that seemed ridiculous. I think she said as much, said she would be hopeless without Google Maps.

I remember wondering how much data A. L. was using, for in those days data was often bought and paid for in fixed amounts, and when it ran out, you were out for the month unless you bought more. I remember thinking it extravagantly wasteful when A. L. revealed she rented an unlimited-Internet emitter, at some high cost per day at the time, for all her time in Korea. This amounted to around two months at longest, and shorter trips at other times. I remember thinking this was technically possible but seemed inadvisable, an excessive expense, and probably bad for the soul.

By the end of the 2010s, it was increasingly the norm to outsource all navigation or geographical-anything to Google Maps or the local equivalent, but in 2014 was still within the transition period. She had been an early-mover in the general direction.

A. L. (the Singaporean totally reliant on Google Maps, same age as me), J., the male co-hiker from Northern Europe who made fun of my hand-drawn paper map, several years younger), and I were all classmates in what was for me my first Korean class, the start of several years struggling to learn Korean, off and on.

These two I mention had both mentally and socially transitioned to something like a full-digital life and worldview by early 2014 when I met them, to the point they could not conceive of analog-life in certain important ways, which means it had probably not been a recent thing (i.e., was earlier than 2013) for them. In these years of 2014 to 2016, my own lifestyle changed much as theirs had some years before that. I thought then, and I think now, that I was lucky to hold out as long as I did.

The Smartphone has changed my lifestyle, and from the perspective of 2014-Me, probably for the worse. Still I have made a point to make at least one several-day hiking trip per year. For it I prepare paper maps beforehand. This kind of travel is always more rewarding. As forday-to-day movements and places I know well, there is no need necessarily for any use of a map. (Except that I am so often looking at the bikeshare map for my hobby of bike rebalancing.)

I visited China in December 2019 and was surprised by how much stricter their Internet policy was than my previous visit in 2010. Basically I could not use the Internet at all in China in 2019 except in my hotel room, which I think was arranged by the hotel and connected to my passport. There was no such thing as a free public wifi. This meant absolutely no navigation-on-the-fly staring at one’s phone screen. To go places I needed a good paper map, or an offline digital map, or to navigate by feel and landmark. I used all three methods.

For all my talk of still hanging onto the pre-Smartphone spirit into the late 2010s, I must admit the experience of being forcibly offline in China was quite disorienting.

I was in China for some of the last days of the 2010s, December 2019, and was thinking a lot about the closing decade and what it meant for the world and for me. Had I used my time well? How had I changed? Those kinds of questions. But also observations on China, especially given my previous visit in 2010, the opening of the decade. One thing that certainly changed was the digitization of life, the smartphone in one’s pocket.

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What were the 2010s?

The decade seems defined as the age of digitization of lifestyles more than anything else. A lot of the social and political movements of the 2010s were tied fairly directly to the march of digitization, mobile Internet, and the Smartphone. The memory-anecdotes I’ve recorded here are little signposts in the sand from one person’s little corner of experience. I’m sure similar things happened all over.

It’s occurred to me that the Flu Virus Panic of 2020-21 occurred very specifically because of this digitization, and that therefore we have a very important meta-lesson to learn which has nothing to do with masks, lockdown orders (a tragic entry into Global English, which I’d retroactively nominate for worst new word of 2020), PCR tests, “social distancing,” or any of the other jargon of the Panic.

The meta-lesson is that digitization turns out to have been a risk to our health in ways few appreciated, for without it we could have avoided an artificial Great Depression-style economic contraction and major social disruptions hitting hard the young or anyone in transition, and the ripple effects will be with us for years.

Since so many still want to cling to the Panic and its various doctrines, I don’t expect this will be announced from on high anytime soon, but this is the bigger lesson than even my complaints about the insane virus restrictions and the weird Virus Cult that emerged. It was digitization that did this, and the same mechanism has done much else. Something about the smartphone seems to create moral-panics which end up doing damage and causing deadweight losses to society. We haven’t grappled with how do deal with this, nor d we even see the problem.

People have come up with cute renderings of this, something like “the real contagion spread via social media.”

People have also said the 2009-10 Swine Flu Panic never quite got off the ground, even though there were so many similarities to the events of ten years later, and a common explanation for the big reaction gap is: “The 2009 Swine Flu was not as bad.” I say: No one knew exactly how bad or not bad it was. People made the decision to panic — and push panic, hard, in March 2020, and to hell with the consequences — without full information. Panic had its own logic not tie-able to some specific magnitude of threat.

This leaves us asking what the big differences were between 2009-10 and 2020-21 in the nature of our society. It’s obvious to me that the biggest difference is the always-on, hyper-connectivity. Nothing like that existed in spring 2009 when the Swine Flu Panic peeked its head over the abyss. The soon-forgotten Swine Flu Panic looked frankly quite a lot like the early stages of the Corona Flu Panic of 2020.

I was on my way to Korea for the very first time. In Tokyo our plane was boarded by a team of doctors in some kind of hazmat-esque gear to check passengers for flu symptoms. They did this on board. We all remained seated. It all seemed ridiculous to us. I remember specifically someone laughing that they sent on hazmat-suited people. We were aware they were talking about Swine Flu on the news but really no one cared.

As I force my mind back to that day (it being my first time in Asia, I was a little dazed in general, and would drop into the deep water all alone at the hagwon by the next day), I also come up with this:

The Japanese medial quarantine team offered surgical masks to each passenger. There was some half-hearted announcement that we were encouraged to wear them. This was an American plane, possibly United, and I am confident in my memory that virtually no one wore the masks, ignoring the request. To wear surigcal masks seemed unsettling, even like something from dystopian fiction.

My memory tells me I pocketed mine and never put it on. It must have eventually ended its life in a garbage bin, possibly on Korean soil, possibly even in my new inherited apartment somewhere near Lake Park, Ilsan.

In any case and in short, no one cared about Swine Flu, even with this public health theater performance staged by Japan. (The Korean side was much more relaxed and simply handed out cards which effectively asked: “Are you Sick? Yes [ ] No [ ]. Check one. Thx. Bye.”)

The raw-material for a Flu Panic was there, but it never took off. The gap in experiences makes the time gap of eleven years (spring 2009 vs. spring 2020) feel more like fifty, or more. How can culture have drifted that far in eleven years, from casual mockery of an incipient Flu Virus Panic (2009) to an uncritical, semi-fanatical, monomaniacal embrace of the same (2020)? What happened to us?

The biggest difference, I propose, is the smartphone and the Internet, as we’ve come to know it. No one on that plane that day in 2009 had a smartphone. No one anywhere did (with possible/arguable exceptions of a handful of journalist- or CEO-types who, for several years, often carried a device known as a Blackberry; even in the late 2000s I wasn’t quite sure what a Blackberry was). That’s what happened to us.

Blogging as a medium, especially in the way I do it, is not really an activity of the Smartphone era, which is why I feel better about doing it. Of course, the same kinds of critics such as he who mocked my pen-and-paper map in 2014 have for years mocked the blog as a medium. What if the cool guys are wrong? What if diving into full-on digitization wasn’t as good as was thought?

bookmark_borderPost-381: Southern California observations; Anaheim, Robber’s Peak, Orange

Posted on by Peter

Nov. 2019: I passed through California for about five days.

(Observations about Southern California with pictures, and some springboarding off of them.)

Places I spent at least some time were: Van Nuys; the Santa Ana River trail in Orange County; Anaheim and “Anaheim Hills;” Orange (the city of); Santa Barbara. On a previous visit (late Aug. 2018), I went to Huntington Beach.

Leaving Southern California, north to Silicon Valley, I spent time in: San Jose; Palo Alto; the Stanford campus; Menlo Park; Redwood City. (Another post, maybe.)

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Friday early morning. I arrive at the airport from points east (Korea, by way of a long layover in Hawaii) and am soon on the bus to LA Union Station. Or am I? I am not. I got on the wrong bus. It was not labeled. It came to the place marked LA Union Station; I decide to take this new opportunity. and follow the shuttle bus where it goes. New destination: Van Nuys.

Continue reading “Post-381: Southern California observations; Anaheim, Robber’s Peak, Orange”

bookmark_borderPost-377: The 2020s as The Twenty-Twenties

Posted on by Peter

Someone (A.R.) sent me a message saying

It’s the roaring 20s again! Quick, enjoy some alcohol before the economic collapse.

I predict people are going to use “the twenty-twenties” for the decade of the 2020s, and not “the twenties” (as for “the two-thousand[-and]-twenties,” No).

“The twenty-twenties” sounds sleek, futuristic. “The twenties” is already taken. The foregoing reasons are compelling and lead me to the conclusion that “the Twenty-Twenties” is the one.

Also this. Scholars believe Jesus was born in 5 BC, in which case our year “2020” into the 2,025th year anno domini. The number sticklers would say we’re already down to a mere four years , 11 months and some days left in the true “2020s.”