I ran in to a hiccup at bedtime. It wasn’t actually the first time I’ve run into this particular hiccup, but it got me thinking.
Almost every night, I read to my son. It’s great, for all the usual reasons. He gets to discover characters and worlds I loved as a kid, or we discover wonderful new ones. He hears the stories that helped teach me things about bravery, honesty, loyalty, determination, or silliness. We’ve heard from some titans of children’s literature: Roald Dahl is wonderful to read out loud. C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles are better than I remember them: the moral choices children make in his stories are valuable discussion starters for father-son talks about responsibility, consequences, kindness, and listening to your conscience.
But then… at bedtime… there are passages like this.
Cover art from the version I read as a kid.
Turbans and scimitars. Source
From The Horse and His Boy:
"This boy is manifestly no son of yours, for your cheek is as dark as mine but the boy is fair and white like the accursed but beautiful barbarians who inhabit the remote North [meaning Narnia].” (Chapter 1) C. S. Lewis. The Horse and his Boy (Kindle Locations 79-80). HarperCollins. HOLD ON! So... C.S. Lewis believes dark people are ugly? Am I reading this right?
"The next thing was that these men were not the fair-haired men of Narnia: they were dark, bearded men from Calormen, that great and cruel country that lies beyond Archenland across the desert to the south." C. S. Lewis. Last Battle (Kindle Locations 263-264). San Val, Incorporated.
Yes, the Calormenes, from Calormen, across the desert south of Narnia, worship the cruel god Tash (with hints of human sacrifice). They feature in The Last Battle and The Horse and His Boy and they are clearly coded as Muslims: they are dark-faced, wear turbans, and wield scimitars. They are also described as cruel and exploitative. Oh... and some Dwarves mock them by calling them "Darkie.” And in case you thought you could omit a few details and remove the racial coding... they're drawn on the cover of the version I read as a kid. No getting around it.
The Silver Chair's treatment of the character Jill Pole in particular falls into many old tropes about what girls are and aren't, can and can't do.
Roald Dahl, whom we’d been reading before reading Narnia, had this buried in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator:
'It is very difficult to phone people in China, Mr President,' said the Postmaster General. 'The country's so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number.' (Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (Kindle Locations 302-303).
When they do call someone in China... their names are Chu-On-Dat and How-Yu-Bin, and they address the president as Mr. Plesident. Yeah. Roald Dahl went there. Just skip Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, folks. As sequel letdowns go, it gives Jaws: The Revenge and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a run for their money.
Soundtrack: hit play and start reading.
Tom Waits: "Pony"
Tom Waits sings about home like a man who's been lost a long time.
"I lived on nothin' but dreams and train smoke
Somehow my watch and chain
Got lost...
I hope my Pony, I hope my pony knows the way back home"
-Tom Waits 'Pony'
"I remember that time you told me, you said, 'love is touching souls'
Surely you touched mine,
'Cause part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time"
-Joni Mitchell, 'A Case of You'
I mentioned earlier that at 8:15 (or so) every Friday morning, I'm on TBS radio (101.3), yamming about the topics that have been catching blog column-space, and commenter love (where applicable). This week, as Christmas approaches, maybe it's appropriate to talk about home: December's the month I always feel the most homesick, the month I hanker hard for the foods and friends I left behind me in Canada, and the last Christmas I had in Canada was the hardest, but most intimate and intense Christmas my family experienced, or likely ever will: the first one after Mom had received a terminal prognosis for her stomach cancer.
This week, Chris in South Korea had a guest post from "Gone Seoul Searching" about reverse culture shock, and Bathhouse Ballads talked about why he dreads going back to his home in England. Gone Seoul Searching writes about missing trips to Daiso and kimbap, and the accidental "got back from Korea" blunders, where you refill your friend's drink with two hands, or bow when you meet someone, ultimately seeking out Koreatown: "anything Korean felt like home to me in a strange world that was not my own." Gone Seoul Searching clearly still has one foot in Korea, planning to return perhaps, and reaching out to her former students through facebook and email. Meanwhile, Bathhouse Ballads talks about the comfort and ease of living in Korea, and does not look forward to going to a country where restaurants and taxis are way more expensive, and the streets simply feel less safe: "Going back to the UK is a massive step down in terms of lifestyle, cultural opportunities and quality of life and even the massive hike in terms of pay can’t compensate for living in an expensive, insular little enclave surrounded by a cultural wilderness," he writes.
I have experienced this myself, most powerfully when I spent seven months in Canada taking care of my sick mom: I craved the jimjilbang (I have no idea what it says about me that I missed opportunities for public nudity so poignantly), and spicy food - I once went to a Thai restaurant and ordered the spiciest thing on the menu, just to remember. My heart still races to remember that meal. When I first got back, or when I vacation in Canada, I find myself being far too chatty with waiters and store clerks, because they can speak English! or being sullen and non-communicative, as is my habit here, so I don't have to tax the clerks' English ability, or their ability to understand poorly-pronounced Korean (and my ability to form it). My hand reaches for the not-present kimchi dish several times a meal, and when I am out socially, I fall into the habit of starting every third sentence with "You know, in Korea..." as my own, world-traveller version of "This one time... at band camp..."
The smell of world travel doesn't leave me, or other people. I can spot, in some odd way, people who have lived outside their home cultures, and those who haven't. This is also true of the Koreans I meet: the ones who have lived abroad speak (and I don't mean pronunciation) and think differently, for the most part, than the Korean Koreans I meet. They bring back interests and knowledge that simply don't arrive in Korea through the usual channels - their favorite western artists are Fleet Foxes and Frightened Rabbit, rather than Abba and Beyonce.
And maybe not everybody who goes overseas experiences this personal shift: maybe there are people who manage to live here (or elsewhere), tottering, without ever planting a foot here, by hunkering in expat enclaves, avoiding the activities and foods and places that would make Korea a part of them. Perhaps that is possible. I've met a few who tried, but I'm not sure how it turned out for them, because I didn't seek out their company, once I saw that they'd hit the reject button, and were utterly uninterested in hearing about my attempts to engage with the culture and people here. I don't know how I'd relate to such people anymore, even if I once could, or wanted to.
And this is what it is like to live with one foot in two different cultures. Does it make me better, smarter, and wiser? Not than other people (how could I compare?) but perhaps than myself when I was the product of only one culture, and lacked the self-awareness to spot what of my beliefs were the prejudices of my upbringing, and what were actually my earned and owned self. Travel is certainly not the only way to identify those distinctions, though I might have trouble understanding the journey of someone who had done it through some other route.
On the other hand, the sacrifice I must make is that I never quite belong anywhere, except perhaps with others who have feet planted in more than one place: other long-term expats, whose roots stretch entirely across oceans. Koreans all ask me about Canada, though it's been nine years since I lived there, and I can't relate to a lot of the things my Canadian friends want to tell me about anymore, unless I ask them for tiresome explanations, and I can't explain things without that same long-winded background.
This is why I say that you can never go home: part stays behind, and part hankers for pieces of that other place. You have reference points that you didn't have before, and will always have them.
So, readers, in Korea or Canada or elsewhere, where have you lived, and what footprints have those places left on you? What did you miss of the place you went to, once you came back home, and is it possible to come home again?
Hey readers. I want to write about something on my blog, but in order to be fair, I need to get a point of view from a few readers. Specifically, to balance out the point of view of an ethnic non-Korean living in Korea, I need to talk with some ethnic Koreans who have grown up in Korea, and who hang out with foreigners from time to time. If that's you, please write me an e-mail at roboseyo at gmail dot com. Please don't be shy... especially, don't be shy if you worry about your English ability when you talk with foreigners... if that's you, you're exactly the person I want to talk to.
If you're really close friends, or maybe married to a born-and-raised, Korea Korean (as much as I love my Kyopo readers, I'm looking for a different perspective this time), and you'd like to help me out with accessing a wider variety of views from that group, please send me a note as well.
A blogger whose blog I follow recently celebrated her 38th birthday (congrats), and dropped this hilarious line:
And if one more 23-year-old told me “age is just a number,” he was going to get kicked in the nads. And then he was going to get told: “pain is only in your head!” Of course age doesn’t matter when you’re 23, schmuck!
Congrats on your birthday, and woe to the next 23-year-old who rubs it in.
I found this on Foreign/er, a random find from the Korean blog list, and found it very interesting to watch.
them cultural lines just keep blurring everywhere.
I really liked the part where, even though you can still hear the hurt in her voice when she talks about the discrimination she experienced when she came to America, she still explains how she doesn't see a racist in the old man shouting at immigrants in his neighbourhood; she sees a man having an identity crisis as the America he knew for sixty years suddenly changes completely. What an amazingly compassionate way to think of these people, kicking powerlessly against a changing world that just won't stop rolling, no matter what they do, and all that remains for them is to slowly watch themselves become irrelevant in the new society that sprouts up around them.
[LETTERS to the editor]Wrong example May 12, 2008 Ser Myo-ja's May 9 front page article, "American pedophiles banned by authorities," should raise concerns among Americans, fact-checkers, and anyone else at all concerned with the truth. Ser Myo-ja reports on the Ministry of Justice's ban on convicted American pedophiles from entering Korea. Ser Myo-ja goes on to mention Christopher Paul Neil [who was arrested in Thailand as a suspected pedophile who preyed on young Asian victims] as if he were American. He's not. He's Canadian. Why wouldn't the article mention that? The Ministry's ban doesn't affect Canadians. You should get your facts straight lest you add to the miseducation of Korean citizens, poisoning the minds of a society already tainted by isolationist ignorance and prejudgment. Your misleading article poorly informs Koreans.
Nathan Van, Seoul
Once again, I raise my glass to Nathan Van from Seoul.
We'll see if my letter to the Korea Herald gets printed. . . it was a little longer than his, and used words like "shame" "racist" "irresponsible" and "duty to the truth". . . even if it doesn't get in the paper, they read it, and it'll go up on this blog, regardless.
OK now. For your soundtrack needs, hit play on the clip below, and start reading.
Mahna Mahna, by The Muppets (1976 version)
I'm heading into dangerous, controversial waters here. . .
There is a cultural phenomenon here in South Korea that partly comes from being sandwiched between China and Japan, two countries which have given Korea a great deal of historical grief. It just plain rankles here, that China and Japan continue to have more influence than Korea in geopolitics -- more people, more money, etc.. Due to this, Korea has the national equivalent of "Short Man Syndrome."
This phenomenon is not unique to Korea, of course: walk up to any Canadian and say, "But honestly, Canada's basically the 51st state, right?" and you might get a response something like this:
Try telling an All-Black rugby-player from New Zealand you like his Aussie accent, or mutter "Ireland is part of the UK, right?" to a leprechaun, and you'll be farting four-leaf clovers for a month, either way. Ask anybody whose teacher once said to them, "You know your older brother always handed in his homework on time..." people like to be known for who they are, and not just for who's nearby.
Add on top of this inferiority complex, a deep, intense (and, yeah, rightful) pride in Korea's current situation, having clawed out of abject post-Korean-War poverty, and developed into one of the richest nations in the world. Then, raise that to the power by which nationalism was programmed into school-aged Koreans during Korea's industrial revolution in the '60s '70s and '80s (as a way of unifying the people, suppressing dissent, and getting everyone to buck up and build infrastructure and industry without complaining, the way they needed to do, to [html nerd joke] [cliche] rise from the ashes of the Korean War [/cliche] [/html nerd joke]), and you have a fierce national pride that likes to show itself around.
You can see this here in Korea, in the large number of what The Joshing Gnome calls "Kimchi Boosters"; I'm debating whether to use that phrase, or coin my own: "Kimcheerleaders". These are the folks who will tell you that Kimchi cures SARS, that the Japanese language came from Korea (possibly, partially true), that Korea invented the printing press (partially true, though its effect was not as revolutionary here as Gutenberg's movable type printing press in Europe), that Korean is the most scientific language in the world (their lettering system is; the language itself is as messy and goofy as any living language composed of more than 1's and 0's).
This can be exploited: my strategy for getting a new class of students to like me goes as follows:
1. Explain I've lived here a long time. 2. Show enough knowledge of Korea's culture and history to prove my interest in them. 3. Compliment Korean food, hospitality, culture, language, etc., until everybody's smiling. It's really just that easy, as long as you play by the rules.
Now I have nothing against a healthy degree of national pride, and sometimes, the warm, deep pride some Koreans have in their country, the affection and ownership people feel for their culture and compatriots can be touching. At other times, it comes across as a bit needy -- you know the girl who walks around asking people, "Do you think I'm pretty?"
(bad language alert: Eliza Skinner as Amy, the platonic ideal of the needy girl)
But you know, every country is guilty of varying degrees of boosterism. In this post about sexy music videos starring underage girls, among many other things, esteemed K-blogger Gord Sellar mentions a "standard, near-universal conviction among Koreans that a positive image of Korea must be presented to the world" that makes a serious discussion about any Korean social issue nearly impossible, "as soon as it involves even one Westerner."
Now I don't mind being positive, but I refuse to be a sycophant just to get what I want (other than in the classroom), and so, when it goes too far, it is time for a reckoning. And Korea Herald, it is time you got yours.
There's something called "Hallyu" (what? Haven't you heard of it?) that is a source of oodles of national pride these days in the Republic of Korea. Basically, Korean pop music, TV Soap Operas, and some movies, have become quite popular in much of Asia and a handful of other places, because of high production values, more conservative/less racy content than what you'd find on American soap operas (love triangles, rather than wanton infidelity; life-threatening diseases, rather than gay romances; domineering mothers-in-law, rather than date-rape), and a closer similarity between Korean cultural values and other Asian cultural values, that makes it easier for other Asians to relate to Korean soaps than to American ones.
Awesome, right? It's great! Well, heck, yeah! But here's the thing. Because of that inferiority complex, the moment the Hallyu starts gaining recognition, that aforementioned tendency to be loud and proud kicks in.
Why am I writing about this? Any non-Canuck who's spent time around a Canuck has heard their Canadian friend drop a "He/She's Canadian, eh?" into a conversation about the likes of Feist, Jim Carrey, Neil Young, Michael J. Fox, or Steve Nash -- but here's the difference. [Most] Canadians don't twist a conversation around to the topic of basketball, just to bring up the fact Steve Nash is Canadian; we don't say things like "Godfather II, eh? Speaking of sequels, have you seen the Back To The Future trilogy?" just in order to squeeze in an exultant, "Michael J. Fox is Canadian! HAH!"
Some Koreans do. Not all -- many, maybe even most Koreans are rational about their nationalism, but the ones who aren't. . . well, clear the room, bud!
Stephen Colbert encountered the Kimcheerleaders: Time Magazine runs an annual online poll for "Who is the most influential person of the year?" You may have heard of Stephen Colbert. Having heard of someone would probably be an important requirement for being the most influential person in the world, yah? Well, turns out, a few Korean netizens heard about this Time online poll, and decided that Korean Hallyu popstar Rain should top the list, and started a ballot-box stuffing campaign that led to this exchange:
(which stirred up outrage among those same Korean netizens. . . what did you expect, goofballs?)
(Rain [or 비 - Bi, the Korean word for rain] himself: handsome, isn't he? Sure he is, but all my readers back in Canada and USA who don't have Korean roots or friends read Stephen Colbert's name and went "Oh, him," and then read the phrase "Hallyu popstar Rain" above and went, "Who?")
(update: call me a hater if you want, and nothing against Korea, but THIS does not happen to the world's most influential person.)
(soundtrack time: Feist. She's Canadian, eh?)
Mushaboom
Korea's pleased with itself about Hallyu, as it well should be, I suppose. Hallyulluyah! But this self-congratulation sometimes goes too far.
The Korea Herald, which fancies itself a legitimate news source, has been publishing a running series about the Korean Wave as it appears in various countries around the world. Here is their article about Spain, and it deserves, quite frankly, to be mocked. I don't hate Korea, I don't hate Hallyu, and I don't even have a problem with a series of full-page articles about Hallyu in a major English language newspaper (Korea Herald calls itself "The Nation's #1 English Newspaper").
But here's the thing: there is no hallyu in Spain! The first ten or so installments in the series covered countries where the Korean Wave was a true cultural phenomenon: in Japan, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc., the Korean Wave merited full write-ups.
Now, we're on installment #32: Spain. I'm gonna write that number out for emphasis: THIRTY TWO.
The headline shows almost everything you really need to know about both the Korea Herald, AND the Korean Wave in Spain: Spain discovers Korea and crys out for more [sic]
Some choice snippets from the article:
. . .the majority of Spaniards may still have difficulty finding Korea on the world map. High-level visits from the King of Spain, politicians and members of parliament to Korea usually get little attention in the national media.
Meanwhile, Korean companies chose not to label their products as "Made in Korea," instead veiling them among well-known Japanese products in Spain.
Weak sauce, boys. Weak sauce.
In 2000, President Kim Dae-joong visited North Korea for the first time since the separation of the two Koreas. This historic news appeared in Spanish newspapers, which helped make Korea more familiar to Spain.
This is the best you can do? Why is this series still going? Keep grasping at straws. . .
The year 1999 was the year of letting go of Korea's inefficient traditions and actively seeking ways forward. However, there were negative consequences such as higher suicide and divorce rates, which nobody could ever thought of in a traditional, Confucius society [sic]. Women became more independent in all aspects, and new ways to choose partners for marriage were put in place following the changes in the familial values.
And this has to do with the Korean wave in Spain how?
Between 2004 and 2007, more than 13 Korean movies arrived in Spain, including "Memories of Murder," "Run Dim," "Two Sisters," "Samaritan Girl," and "The Host." During these four years, the percentage of Korean movies shown in theaters went up by 400 percent.
From 3 to 13. Wow, let me sit down before I get washed away. (sarcasm over) How did they do? Were they all unqualified smash hits, because if they weren't, why are you doing write-ups about the Korean wave in countries where there is none?
[Both Korean and Spanish movies] often tell love stories accompanied by violence and sorrow, but always end happily and humorously. Also, [Korean movies] indirectly show Korean culinary habits that are quite different from that of Spain. Besides the different food, what is more interesting to the Spaniards is how the food is displayed in a table based on a combination of colors, size and portion. There is no single way to eat Korean food. People can enjoy the liberty of choosing what they want to eat and how much they want to eat.
I know I only watch foreign movies to learn how other cultures eat. Don't you? Wait! Wait! There's a straw over there! Get it! Quick!
What can be done to insure the success of the Korean Wave in the future?. . . Given the fact that Korea is so little known in Spain, it may be more effective to target more traditional, historical Korean values and images than to make it modern, since this tends to fail to impress upon the viewers with a particular, rememberable [sic] image.
It is necessary to come up with a delicate marketing strategy to reach out to a larger population in the long term. Korean people are known to be peace-loving, integrationists and nationalists. They deserve to be proud of their own country and of escaping from the extreme poverty in the 50s and 60s with hard work and individual motivation. Spain finds all of these factors interesting, once they are exposed to them.
As I said before, from a newspaper that wants to be taken seriously, this is laughable, friends. Sorry. I don't mind national pride, I don't even mind a little boosterism for fun, but this Hallyu series has gone on too far, like this clip:
Yesterday they had the next installment, number 33, a summary of which might read, "a series of if/then speculations on how the Hallyu could gain a U.S. audience among non-Asian-immigrant Americans, and why Americans would like Korean wave TV soap operas if they watched them."
Hallyu-wood is an amusement park about the Korean wave. Its site is a jewel of unintentional comedy and overblown rhetoric. (HT to Brian for this link and the clip below. . .)
I just wonder if the Herald's editors realize that these full-page write-ups of made-up speculation and KimCheerleading narcissism have the exact opposite of their intended effect: rather than making me think "Hey! Korean culture is awesome and it's spreading around the world!" writing like this, grasping for international validation where there is nothing but ignorance, instead shines a glaring spotlight on the aforementioned inferiority complex, and ends up portraying Korean culture as a little delusional, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing, and self-important (as well as making the Herald look like nothing better than a propaganda-rag or a tourist brochure, rather than any kind of respectable news-source). Is it really THAT important for outsiders to think you're cool? Will you really not be satisfied until we give you what you want and write in reams of letters to the editor saying, "I never realized Korea was so great until I started reading the Herald!", like the self-esteem case moping around the party saying, "Do you think I'm pretty? God, I'm so fat!" and waiting for someone to say, "No, that's not true. You're beautiful"? Why does it matter so much that outsiders from every country approve of the Korean wave, that a major English newspaper will write a half-year-long series of self-congratulatory pieces that have devolved into near-fictions, speculations, and self-parodies? Will it not stop until there's been a full-page article on all 195 countries in the world? (Week 184: Vatican City: The Pope likes Lee Young-ae!)
Hallyuwood.
is an amusement part dedicated to Hallyu. As any regular reader of this blog knows, I love Korea, and Korean culture -- if you don't believe me, take a look around. But if your friend has a bit of food stuck in his teeth, making him look silly, you'd tell him, "Hey, bud! There's something in your teeth," right? This kind of rabid boosterism makes Korea look foolish to any outside observer -- such a voracious craving for validation is a sign of insecurity, and friends, Korea IS a major player. . . if it'd only realize it is and start acting like one!
soundtrack: hit play and start reading. Scroll down. Please. Seriously -- the images with the song are . . . not related. But "Send Me On My Way" by Rusted Root is one of the best road songs I know, and more appropriate to the tone of the passage I'm posting than another sad song.
Bill (or Will) Kapoun was the English teacher in Seoul who was hospitalized after an apartment fire and later died from his injuries. These words are from the Save Bill Kapoun Facebook group: Bill's sister, Laura posted some of Bill's writings on the site, as a kind of tribute and thank you to those who have (and still are) helping Bill's family. I, and a lot of the other expats in Korea, have gotten kind of involved in this guy's story; he's been on my mind all week.
While the inciting event is a terrible tragedy, it's kind of beautiful to see such an outpouring of concern for a fellow human, and it's really restored my faith in the expat community in Korea, which can sometimes come across as a bunch of privileged (predominantly) whiteys pointing condescending fingers at the flaws in Korea's culture as a way of dealing with culture-shock (all the while getting paid handsomely by the same ones whom we judge and criticize) and then sometimestaking aim ateach other instead, for variety. I'm guilty of it too.
Anyway, seeing this kind of communication reminds me why we're overseas to begin with, and it's a refreshing look at that so, so human search for meaning:
"...The semester before I went to Ireland I had been living the life of a typical frat guy in a typical American college and was dealing with my first serious break-up. Going to Europe was nothing like what I had expected. I thought I was going to be partying and meeting girls all the time. I thought I would be taking the life I had been leading in America to a new level. Instead I started a completely different life. I met almost no girls during those five months, I had almost no friends and I had almost no fun. At the end of that time I started reflecting on my entire life, on my past and on my future and I realized that there were many parts of it that were not at all how I had planned or how I wanted them to be. I saw large chunks of my earthly days completely wasted, unappreciated and unused and it sickened me. I started writing about it. My writing was then immature as was my outlook on my life. I do not claim maturity or ability in either life or writing now, but I see myself going in the right direction in both attempts. When I first started travelling I spent a few days walking around capital cities with a stupid look on my face and a guide book in my hands. Today I spent my morning digging for clams in a mud bank on the Algarvan coast of southern Portugal before spending my morning trying to sell tickets to go dolphin sightseeing. Afterwards I went on a hike to collect almonds, oranges and sage to cook the mussels I collected off the shore (mussels are much easier to find than clams), which I cooked on a hotplate in my rented room which overlooks the bay of a small fishing town. So I have come a long way, as a writer, as a traveler and as a person. Or at least I hope. . . .
"That was life, when I wrote that. I was really living. Despair is life, pain is life. . . . Happiness is life, laughter is life, there are so many kinds of life, but I, like so many of us, did hardly any living, instead I spent most of my time looking forward, always anticipating, one day, yeah, one day, if I just keep waiting, planning, one day, I'll be happy, I'll be living.
". . . In retrospect, we remember, we give credence to our waiting, proof that living life is possible, but if we are truthful to ourselves, we remember, most of those past days were either days we had wished had gone sooner at the time, or were just the beginning of the list of days hoping.
"It wasn't until I started traveling that I realized that not only does life not have to be that way; it isn't meant to be that way. . . . The natural world we spent most of existence alongside, already physically distant becomes emotionally even further when we don't celebrate and enjoy it. . . .I have become a better person by seeing the world; there is much more that I hope to see and experience, but above all, I hope that by sharing my experiences, others will feel compelled to push themselves; and be reborn into a world without limits, where everything is possible and the pursuit of the new and beautiful takes the place of security and seclusion.
"On its most superficial level traveling allows us to see and discover new and beautiful things, on a slightly deeper level it allows us to know more about our neighbors in the rest of the world, which is one of the things America needs the most right now, but at its deepest level the greatest gift of traveling is the personal journey that allows us to see our own likes and dislikes, passions and perversions, history and future, under a completely different light. Only then can we be truly satisfied for; truly, many will shed a tear when we pass from this world, but besides our nearest loved ones, our days on this earth are quickly forgotten. Few will remember us a year later. The things we do, the attainment of the goals we spend so much time striving for, all mean little beyond the here and now. That is why, when I die, all I hope people to say of me is he lived life. The good, the bad, he took it all in, and relished it. Yes, he lived life for life. Which is how we should all live our lives, never letting a precious moment slip by.
This one got the most votes so far, so I'll start here.
When I heard the news about the Sungnyemun Gate burning down in Seoul, one of the first things I did was go online, to the Korea Times website. After the article write-up, people could post comments.
Here, uncensored, is what I saw in the comments section. (warning: strong language ahead: if you don't like bad words, look to the right.)
Readers Comments (interestingly, commenters had their IP addresses listed after their usernames. . . more on that later.)
ultrakorean (80.187.98.1) 02-11-2008 07:45 Even the white american losers have been immigrants
ProudKorean (96.231.154.11) 02-11-2008 07:43 The U.S. is, like 50 times the size of SK, yet it whines about how little room is left to take anymore foreigners or immigrants in, while pressuring SK to let in more and more, including the U.S.' own unemployed or unemployable (white) losers. Go figure.
ultrakorean (80.187.98.1) 02-11-2008 07:40 the (white) foreigners should go home, fast.
ProudKorean (96.231.154.11) 02-11-2008 07:38 When (white) America lets foreigners in, it's to exploit them as cheap labor to subsidize the whites, at every level. When (white) Americans come to Korea as foreigners, it's to suck the blood of Koreans, as the great (white) masters.
ultrakorean (80.187.98.1) 02-11-2008 07:34 All of the wannabe English teachers, keep out. All of you stupid idiots, keep out. All of you Dumb fucks, morons, douchebags and faggots, keep out.
No explanation necessary, I hope.
Everybody loves the internet because everybody has a voice, right? It's, like, you know, the ultimate embodiment of freedom of speech! Anybody can throw in their two bits! We live in the information age! Proudkorean and ultrakorean above especially love it, because they can be as rude as they want, and nobody will know it was them!
Now I've been spending more time on some of the expat in Korea blogs lately, and maybe I'm wrong, but I have a feeling what I'm seeing isn't too abnormal: the amount of negativity, nastiness, pettiness, and just outright rudeness is no longer shocking, but it's really disheartening. People take cheap shots for the sheer fun of doing so, people pose as somebody they aren't, or strike the most offensive posture they can, just to have others respond to their comments (this is called trolling: the commenters above, according to later commenters on that same site, aren't even from Korea -- the IP addresses were from Europe and . . . somewhere else I can't remember. They just posted that racist garbage to bait somebody into reacting. And it worked: later that morning, they were elbow-deep in debate/flame-wars with other netizens. Most of the "debates" went something like this:
Responder: "You're overgeneralizing, and you haven't backed up your assumptions: there are no statistics that prove white English teachers in are more likely than other demographics to be pedophiles."
Ultrakorean: "Go home, you bum-loving, HIV-positive FAG!"
If throwing a wet blanket on my morning jag helps them feel alive, I hope they feel really friggin' validated. As for the people responding to such ignorance, well, you can mud-wrestle a pig, but only one of you's having fun.)
Here is the worst example I ever saw (this is not a typical comment board: this was the one that forced the guy to change his commenting policy -- but it shows how far people will rocket past any line of taste or sensitivity if others react to their poison: it's even less appropriate considering the kick-him-when-he's-down topic of his original post) and its younger brother. Read the comments if you want to lose a little faith in humanity. For the first one, run a search and find where "angrykorean" and "bigchoi" and "troop" start yapping. For the second one, Peter is about the ugliest thing I've ever seen, and probably a "sock" (an id invented by a third user, in order to start a conversation with him/herself, or manipulate a comment thread toward some end).
So basically, the way I see it, there are a few reasons the Internet will never reach its full potential for social change.
1. The first one is the flipside of the democratic nature of the Internet. Anybody can weigh in now, and that's great! The problem is, there is no filter to tell me "This guy never finished high school," "This guy has a masters' degree in this exact topic," and I'm left to fend for myself. The holocaust-denying anti-semite shows up right next to the experienced diplomat on my "Gaza Strip" search results, and even if the analysis does have "John Doe, Ph.D." on the byline, I don't know if that Ph.D. is in math or sociology. Yeah, there's a ton of great stuff out there, but it's like a diamond in a vegetable garden: yeah, the diamond's in there, and there's also some other nutritious stuff, but there's also some dirt, some compost, and a fair (stinky) bit of manure, too.
It almost makes me want to go to a bookstore and buy a book or something!
2. If we go with the "most read" or "most sent" stories, we aren't too much farther ahead, because most clicks on the Internet are from people looking for diversion, not edification or education. If I want to find something credible and insightful, where's the resource that will hook me up with it. . . and who makes the decisions about what goes on their recommended reading list? These days, there are a few things like "digg" and "stumbleupon" where you can give a site thumbs-up or thumbs-down, thus recommending it to other users of the service, but because most people use the Internet for diversion, fifty-thousand netizens CAN be wrong -- I don't WANT to see Jennifer Love Hewitt's beach bikini pictures or a video of some guy getting nailed in the crotch by a water-balloon slingshot. In the end, the cost/benefit ratio for the good stuff I do find, compared to the amount of time I usually spend searching out and verifying it, is pretty poor.
3. Too many voices is the same as no voice. Multiplicity without focus becomes white noise.
4. The lowest, ugliest, nastiest commenters set the parameters for the entire discussion. Repeat: it is the stupidest and worst, not the smartest and best comment, that sets the tone for the entire comment board.
In a place like a peer-reviewed journal, because of editors and experts making informed decisions, nothing but the best stuff rises to the top. It's stimulating and challenging to read that stuff. But imagine if The New Yorker had a feedback page where they regularly printed letters saying things like "Alice Munro's short story in the last issue was GAY. GAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY!" or somesuch. It becomes difficult to carry on any kind of discourse at all, and it would damage the New Yorker's credibility to publish such tripe. Here's an irreverent but humorous look at how it would sound to have a group of Internet commenters at a board meeting (bad language warning number 2):
Now, webmasters are starting to get more vigilant, and on some sites, you can report harassing comments, as well as giving thumbs up and thumbs down for good or bad comments. Yahoo answers is one community where you'll be booted if you consistently post asinine or inappropriate comments. What else can be done to get these trolls out of my hair?
Yeah, there's that vaunted freedom of speech . . . but that's not freedom to crap on other people's attempt to have a legitimate discussion, or to simply live a normal life. Freedom of speech, famously, does not protect me when I falsely shout, "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. Some people hide behind anonymity to act out their worst impulses. Here in Korea, you MUST enter your ID Number (like your social insurance number) to become a member of most online communities. This happened after a pop star actually committed suicide in part due to vicious online criticism of her career and character. She's not the only one.
Yeah, the hackers won't like it, and will find ways to get around it, I suppose, but I don't mind Korea's policy of attaching your user id to your actual ID number (at least on comment boards, to begin, and maybe also on user-created-content sites, and as long as it's kept private, with clear, well-defined laws about when that information can and can't be released) -- if it's being used to make sure you're not harassing people online, or posting hate, I don't mind that. I mean, it makes things more problematic if I go online to vent my passive-aggressive hate for the world, or if I'm planning to cheat on my wife or buy illicit substances or materials. . . but why SHOULDN'T people have to answer for what they say? I mean, you're still free to have whatever opinion you want, and to express it, but you might have to answer for it, is all.
Other options: I've heard (though I can't find it on the site map) that if someone's just looking for a flame war (flame is the name for those kinds of poisonous, negative comments), there's a comment board on Dave's ESL Cafe intended solely for those trolls, so they can bother no one but each other -- a kind of rock under which they can crawl and meet more of their own. I kind of like this idea- if you get enough thumbs downs, you get sent to the corner, where you can't comment on respectable message boards until you've thought about what you've done. Even with ID attachment, I've seen an interested group hijack a message board: the Jehovah's Witnesses have been known to get on Yahoo Answers and give thumbs downs to anybody representing anything other than JW's, undermining the whole purpose of an open forum, and grinding their own axes. Other religious groups have done the same.
Anyway, the Internet is an amazing medium for communication without borders, and all kinds of social change could come out of that information flow. As an idea, it's revolutionary and amazing. . . except for the large number of jerks who populate it. It's kind of like if half the population of Sydney, Australia (one of the worlds' prettiest cities) were profligate litterers. There ARE people using the Internet to try and make the world a better place (click here. Go to this site every day. You have no reason not to.) However, until the world wide web begins being seen as an agent for social change and connection, and not as an anonymous dumping ground for my frustration at whatever grinds me down, and until there is a reliable mechanism for making sure that the best-informed, most thoughtful and enlightening additions to the information highway reach the most sets of eyes, rather than simply the ones involving nipple-slips and candid bikini shots, the Internet will not reach that potential.
Here's a site that IS trying to make the internet a better place. Self-described as "the youtube of ideas" here's a site that's trying to start discussions about important topics, getting experts to weigh in, and then allowing the average web-user to respond. Yay bigthink.com.
NOTE: I do recognize that there are times when anonymity is helpful, even necessary: countries where information is controlled need anonymous interfaces for people to get word out about what's happening, for example political blogs in China, or reports during the military crackdown in Burma/Myanmar. Even when the little guy is taking on a powerful organization, as in the group "Anonymous"'s assault on the church of Scientology (which has a history of suppressing exposure of their, um, controversial aspects, with litigation -- search "anonymous vs. scientology" on youtube to learn about an interesting Internet meme. If anonymity is being used to pass on important, or controlled information, I love it. . . but too often, it's being used as a mask behind which I can act like an asshole instead. How do we filter out important anonymity from jerk anonymity?
And there's the dilemma in its essence, I suppose. I wish there were a way that ordinary web users could marginalize the ogres, though, and help nudging that cream, so that it rises to the top.
Whoa. That's weird. After writing in my last post about why people do these kinds of destructive actions, I came into the staff room after a class and my coworker told me about the gunman in Northern Illinois.
I still hold to everything I said in my previous post, but it's sure freaky having a shooting happen the day after writing about it. Maybe I should write about stuff like my sister winning the lottery instead.
I'm reposting this clip from fight club. Just like yesterday, it's still graphically bloody, but the monologue in here (matched with the imagery, for that matter) just about perfectly describes what I imagine would have to be going through the mind of someone when they decide to actually pick up a gun and start destroying things.
"I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn't screw to save its species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers and smother all the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted to breathe smoke."
Somehow, each of these people have convinced themselves that the entire world deserves to be as unhappy as they are. Why or how they reach that state of solipsism is different for each one (and yes, I recognize that depression and mental illness can warp a person's world-view -- but they're not off the hook that easily. Each person has choices to make, too, and some chronically depressed people get help instead of torching national monuments or killing strangers), but their own agenda (sometimes spite, sometimes something more ideological) has become more important, in their minds, than any human life, any treasure, and certainly any law.
Now, I'm gonna throw some JD Salinger at you, because when I struggle with getting down, old Jerome David always picks me up. Thanks for that, Jerry!
You see, I've been struggling with/coming to grips with cynicism lately. I'm spending more time reading the newspaper and following news on English Expat in Korea -type websites, and I've been dismayed by both the cumulative drag of constantly reading about tragedies in the paper, and the amount of cynicism and negativity that sometimes gets packaged along with the news in the comment boards (and some of the writers) in the Korea Expat Blogosphere.
It's hard to stay up to date with the news and such, without getting dragged down by bad news. Add to that the fact I firmly believe that our characters are determined by the things we choose to look at and the way we choose to look at them -- my mom used to say, "Garbage in, garbage out," and the dilemma comes into a little more focus: how do I keep a positive attitude while still being aware of what goes on in the world, and doing my part?
And then, just when I think I'm finding a balanced way to view the world, that is realistic but also positive, that is both honest and edifying, something shitty happens.
(Northern Illinois University. Condolences to all involved. Peace Be Upon You and God, or Richard Dawkins, Be With You all.) Maybe it's apples and oranges to compare a national monument's destruction with the loss of four lives, but the fact remains that both of those guys chose the best way they could think of to raise a middle finger to the entire world they knew.
In one of my favourite passages of Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield complains about graffiti in his childhood school: “That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.”
And that's just the thing about life sometimes, isn't it? All that shit we can't control, that jumps out at us from behind the door, and derails our gravy train.
And you know, in the same way it's easier to watch TV than to read a book, it's easier to get caught in the cycle of negative thought, than to claw back up into the positive stuff. In a text message, I wrote to a friend that "Hate is just a way to postpone grief" -- all that hate, and then the grief, NEEDS to be sorted out, as much for my benefit as for anyone else's, but it's easier to shift blame and resent someone than to look in the mirror, deal with how I feel, grieve, and then (eventually) grow and move on. It's easier to decide I have a right to be miserable, and from there, to decide that the entire phony world deserves to be miserable with me. That negative energy feeds itself like feedback in a microphone, and can get blown all out of proportion, and from there, all bets are off on how I might react.
It takes work to pull out of the whirlpool. But if you can. . . (back to J.D. Salinger, at last)
Holden Caulfield's teacher, Mr. Antolini informs us that, “Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as some day, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
. . . but it takes work to get into the positive cycle, the good reciprocal arrangement, instead of lapsing into the negative reciprocal arrangement, where my bad attitude makes other people miserable around me, and then I soak up that misery and radiate it back out again wherever I go.
So I'm trying not to get too down today. I'm trying to remember all the wonderful things that make my life joyful, and to focus on those things (without blinding myself to reality). Hopefully, I'll get back to the last fifteen pages of Franny and Zooey again (I'd quote it, but you really just need to read the whole book for it to make any sense anyway) "There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady" see? Pretty opaque, huh? -- if you read it, you know.
And maybe, if I stay in the positive cycle, I can even get to my favourite Salinger quote of all: "I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy." (the fat lady is Jesus, don't you know?)
Anyway, it's been a bad week. . . by my lady found me some dairy free chocolate for Valentine's Day that was really really great, and I'm reading Lord of the Rings, which is such a flippin' awesome book, and today was payday, and my best friend is back from traveling in Europe, so things aren't all bad.
Pray for those folks in Illinois, though. And read Franny and Zooey, if you don't get the "fat lady" stuff, and want to.
You can read about it at The Marmot Hole, so I won't reprint the whole thing here, but basically, they caught the guy who torched "National Treasure Number 1". His reason? He was upset because a contractor paid him a lower price than he asked when they built apartments on his land.
Even worse, last year he ALREADY tried to burn another cultural heritage site, to draw attention to his grievance. It seems he went for National Treasure Number 1 because he was further miffed about having to pay fines for trying to burn down buildings in Changgyeonggung palace.
He apologized, and made the "it could be worse" defense, saying, "I was thinking about attacking a subway station, but chose a national treasure instead," which is like a wife beater saying, "you should be thankful: I only hit you with an open hand! Vern next door uses his fist on Marcie!"
Now here's the thing.
It seems like the old forms of protest aren't enough for the crazies anymore.
I mean, back in the good old days, if you had no other options and nobody was listening to your complaints, most people simply participated in self-destructive behaviour -- get drunk, ramble onerously about "The Man" for a while, say bad things about whichever scapegoat you've chosen to bear the blame for your own disappointments, and get on with life. Maybe throw in some passive aggressive law-breaking -- "Ha! I never wear my seat belt, because, damn the man!" "I call police officers 'pig' behind their backs" "I don't declare all my extra income." "I litter. . . mwahahahahaaaa"
But in our hypersaturated information age, that stuff just isn't enough anymore. People want a stage. In feudal Japan, seppuku, or ritual suicide, was a very honourable way to add gravity to one's protest, or to avoid shame in death, in the case of being captured or defeated in battle. Nowadays, a suicide doesn't even make it into a big city's newspaper pages, unless it's a particularly heartbreaking case, and probably one that also happens to fit the political agenda of the right (or wrong) political commentator/journalist/moralist/loudmouth.
So what do the crazies do? The ones that want a stage? I mean, to regain a few moments of power, in the face of all the powerlessness, what do the disenfranchised have to do these days, for someone to validate their complaint, to vent their rage and impotence?
(warning: this is a clip from fight club. it's kinda graphically bloody)
Destroy something beautiful.
Destroy something priceless, something precious. It's not enough anymore for me to drink myself into oblivion and drown in my self-pity. Now, I have to get revenge at the world. Columbine, Virginia Tech, WTC, burning Korea's National Treasure -- finally, they know they exist, I guess. They got their names in the newspaper.
And how many of these kinds of unnecessary, wanton tragedies could have been prevented, if people had listened to those on the margins, and how many of them were the inevitable acts of deeply disturbed minds who were completely out of touch with reality? I don't know. I don't know the role of mental disease in these cases, I don't know if each of these people could have turned a corner, if the right words, or the right kind of compassion, had come along at the right time. I don't know which of these were simply the outward expression of an intense, black hole of hate inside somebody's soul, and I certainly don't know how those deep black holes got there in the first place, and (this is the hardest part) I don't know which disenfranchised group will be the next to lash out. Nobody does -- that's the scary thing. While everybody's trying to reach out to The Muslims, there could well be an abandoned and ostracized Vietnam Vet polishing his rifle; while we're thinking of Cho Seung-hui (Virginia Tech shooter) and trying to reach out to maladjusted immigrants, some member of the uneducated, working poor, helpless to stanch the bleeding of his credit card debt on his mortgage-crippled sub-sustenance-level income, or some salaryman whose health insurance company won't give him a friggin' break, buys a cannister of gasoline and a lighter, and heads for the nearest administrative building. Who's to say?
And a lot of these things CAN'T be prevented. You'll never eradicate school bullying. Racism will continue to be felt (whether imagined or not) and victim mentalities will continue to fester, as long as there are groups of people who look different, or act different, or talk differently, from other groups. The powerful will always prey on the powerless, and the powerless will grow angry (the only prerogative left to them).
Now I'm not some kind of communist, but I do think that the measure of a society, and, I suppose, of our entire race in the end, is not the level of opulence the rich enjoy, but the degree to which our most powerless are respected as humans (all these bartletts regulars seem to concur). Dostoevsky's (possibly apocryphal) quote states that "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
Who knows. Maybe the revolution is coming. Maybe things will mostly stay the way they are, and maybe there are some people who will never be satisfied, who will always find excuses to feed their anger, instead of trying to live beyond it. Maybe such people will always want to take something with them when they go, and for all they care, having their name and face in the newspaper for a day, having everybody know exactly WHY they in particular are angry, is more important than any other person's life or treasure.
If that's true, there's nothing we can do to stop those kinds of crazies from continuing to appear out of nowhere, and making the world suck for a day, or a week, or a two-term presidency and maybe more (thanks, for that, Osama. You dick.) For my part, I just hope I can treat the people I encounter as humans, and as worthy of dignity, so that even if I can't stop the helpless/angry/crazies, I'll know I'm not helping to make more of them.
Rilke again, 'cause dammit, he deserves to be read twice. (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
"How we squander our hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end. Though they are really our winter-enduring foliage. . . place and settlement, foundation and soil and home" (still elegy number 10)
Another pitfall:
I am surprised and amazed at how impatient people who grieve can be, for their own wholeness (myself included). I am dismayed, but not quite as surprised, at how impatient OTHER people can be with mourners, dispensing Bible verses like medical prescriptions and declaring the issue done with. "Why are you still sad? I told you to give your grief to God a month ago!"
When Bruce Lee injured his back in 1970, he spent six months in bed, reading, because if he took a short-cut or rushed his recovery process, he would have put a ceiling on his own post-recovery ability, or worse, re-injured himself. The human body needs recovery time for injuries. That's just how it works. (Bonus points: I just compared myself to Bruce Lee! I kick ass!) Seriously, though, why do I think my heart would work any other way than the rest of me? The only part of me that can change quickly is my mind, and even then, the mind often has to wait for the heart to catch up -- that's why it was so hard to break up with exgirlfriendoseyo, even when I could see that we had no future.
I finally realized it's OK to say "actually, my life is pretty shitty right now," instead of "God is teaching me patience", when my friend wrote "I think God honours honesty more than anything else we try to give him" in an e-mail. I'll buy that. Isn't that what the entire book of Job is about: finding an honest answer instead of a quick answer? Also: thanks for that, Mel.
I believe an honest doubt honours God more than a blind faith, and waiting for real meaning is more beautiful, and more consecrated, than skipping to a rote, ready-made meaning, even if the quick answer comes in the form of a bible verse. I think an afternoon volunteering at an orphanage or a soup kitchen honours God more than either of those. (And helping others can do wonders for one's own hurt.)
During the dark, disappointed, meaningless parts, I found comfort remembering that during the wait for a messiah, God made Israel the nation it needed to be, not through a series of growing successes, but through a string of spectacular failures. (Don't believe me? Go read Numbers, Judges, and Chronicles.) Ditto for Saint Peter. The word Israel does not mean "He Who Has All His Shit Together" or "He Who's Squared Things Up With God". Israel means, "He Who WRESTLES with God," and what a wonderful name for a chosen people!
So after all that grief, after avoiding those false trails, where am I now? What meaning HAVE I found? Well, my ideas about God are very different than they used to be, and I think that's a good thing. There's a lot more honesty in the mix now, and a lot more knowledge of my weaknesses.
I no longer think of faith as a helicopter, lowering a ladder from the sky, to rescue me from my griefs -- I think now that faith is more like a walking companion, someone with well-worn shoes and holes in the knees, who doesn't always know the way, and certainly doesn't have all the answers, but who'll point out a root across the path, or pick me up after I trip on it, who makes interesting observations about the trail, who'd have my back in a pinch, and who's always good company. No, he doesn't make the path shorter, but at least he makes the time pass faster, and maybe from time to time, he just happens to have an umbrella when I really need one, or a pocketknife, or a joke that helps me laugh through a windstorm. In my diary, four months before my mom died, I wrote "I want a faith like a steel cable: tough, flexible, and useful." Maybe I'm closer to that now than I was before, but I'm not out of the woods yet.
I'm beginning to think it's OK not to be out of the woods, maybe that's not a statement of despair, but a statement of hope, hope that there's still more to be learned, if I keep myself open to learning. Maybe admitting "I'm not out of the woods yet" authentically IS the best thing I can come away with, and maybe The Lesson I've Learned is that life doesn't fit in boxes, nor needs to: Things I've Figured Out quickly become Prejudices, if I decide I don't have to keep thinking about them. Maybe some honest stumbling about in the woods IS an act of worship, and by being OK with that, or even celebrating that, it might even become a celebration of the fact we need nevercease our search for meaning, that every part of our life can continue being deepened and enriched, long after we stop feeling sad.
"Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight, let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels. Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful, or a broken string. . . . How dear you will be to me then, you nights of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you."
(Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, Tenth Elegy, Opening)
Without advent, Christmas arrives through the side door, and startles me while I'm brushing my teeth for bed. With advent, it enters with fanfare, as the culmination and final satisfaction of a month-long buildup. Opening presents is the fun of Christmas, but lighting candles and reading Isaiah, looking forward to something just beyond my fingertips, is the feeling of Christmas.
Waiting is the most underrated, quickly-forgotten experience-enhancer: nothing improves a food's taste more than hunger, yet nobody thinks fondly back on hovering by the oven door, sniffing for the smell of roast turkey: caroling, presents, stuffing and snowball fights monopolize our nostalgia. Advent, though, is soaked in waiting, it drips with anticipation.
So many of us live our lives between our reach and our grasp, waiting for. . . something, and the thing between my reach and my grasp for the last two years was another very human thing: meaning.
Meaning is the rope that lashes us to the pier. It's the string wound out, that will lead me back out of the maze after battling the minotaur. "Man's Search For Meaning," (highly recommended) by Victor Frankl (a concentration camp survivor), says that meaning has the power to make any ordeal bearable, as long as we can firmly believe that our trial brings us closer to a greater goal.
Losing meaning is a scary thing - people lash out and lose rationality when their lives' meaning is merely DISPARAGED (when somebody says, "You should quit your job and raise kids" or "Just a house-mom? I thought you'd amount to more than that" hackles rise, fast. As for religious debate -- well, nobody ever strapped a bomb on his body to prove "Pet Sounds" is better than "Sergeant Pepper"). To actually lose meaning is downright terrifying -- how do you measure anything when you don't trust your own reference points anymore? Friedrich Nietzsche described it this way:
"We have left the land and have embarked! We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean. . . but. . . you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. . . and there is no longer any 'land'!"
In the space of six months from late 2005 to early 2006, I lost my mother, the woman I'd intended to marry, and several other things that were crucial to the person I believed myself to be. When my mom died of stomach cancer at age 53, I was at her deathbed. Being right there to hear her stop breathing was like being at ground zero of a meaning-grenade blast. Later, breaking up with the girl I loved was another such blast. By April 2006, every mooring was loose - I had the rope in my hand, but the other end wasn't tied anywhere! I was like a cat in zero gravity.
(hee hee hee)
The layers of meaning that had kept me warm were torn off like shrapnel shredding a winter coat, and nobody can survive winter, naked in the snow. But, I also didn't want to drape myself about with the nearest rags, overestimate my preparedness, head into the storm, and freeze anyway.
When it comes to searching for meaning, "Any port in a storm," is not enough, and I didn't want to short-circuit my own search for meaning. The German poet Rilke (one of my best friends), says, in his tenth Duino Elegy,
"How we squander our hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end. Though they are really our winter-enduring foliage. . . place and settlement, foundation and soil and home"
Sure, things were going badly, but I didn't want to squander my hours of pain, to short-cut through them and thus waste them, if I could instead come through them richer, deep green with tough foliage, rooted with place, foundation and home.
See, sometimes it seems like the world takes a perverse pleasure in poking our softest spots (it actually doesn't: sometimes life sucks, but it's nothing personal. Just trust me on this one). Faced with disillusionments that are sometimes sudden and forceful, like a nuclear bomb, and other times slow and soul-sapping, like a trench war, short cuts are easier than gritting teeth and gutting through life's challenges. Bad ports are rife in the storm, and inviting.
To boot. . .
I used to say things like, "God is teaching me patience." There's nothing wrong with saying that, and sometimes there's deep truth there. Sometimes, though, skipping to the lesson one wants to learn from a situation is a way of hijacking any true learning that might have happened.
Consider this analogy: in university, I studied literature, and discovered that there's a huge difference between reading The Great Gatsby for its colour imagery, and actually reading the Great Gatsby, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it. Sure, if colour imagery (or Freudian symbolism, or power and gender relations: pick your essay topic from those listed on the handout) is what I'm looking for, I'll find it -- but if that's all I'm looking for, a lot of other things might pass me by.
I didn't want to be like Prince Humperdink (skip to 1:58 in the clip if you can), bellowing "Skip to the end!" instead of bearing through the full marriage ritual.
So, instead of "squandering my hours of pain", instead of just saying, "Skip to the end. . . say Man and Wife!" I wanted to dig in deep, and commit to every step of the journey through the dark valley -- because you never know which patch of mud in that valley has diamonds in it, especially if you're only scanning the tree-branches for silver apples, or thinking about the beef stew at the hostel on the other side.
Another shoddy port for the storm:
One Sunday, I heard a pastor tell a story about his brother-in-law being senselessly murdered in a parking lot by street thugs. The shock-power of the story silenced everyone, and the pastor intoned, "That story just proves that life is war. . . spiritual war," the theme of his sermon.
If that really was all he learned from his brother's death, what a narrow, embittering grief he must have had! And if it wasn't, I thought with outrage, how dare he exploit his brother-in-law's murder, using it as a prop for his own message, to shock people into listening! I wondered how many other themes he'd tacked onto that tragedy, and whether he realized his lurid tactics left such a sour taste.
It is wrong, and it trivializes a tragedy, to put a false meaning in, where one is waiting for a true meaning. The pastor who blamed the 9/11 attacks on the US Government's tolerance of gays ought to be. . .what's the religious leader's equivalent of disbarred? Publicly and loudly reproached, at least. Ditto for the pastors who blame the Colombine shootings on politicians' taking prayer out of school (did any of you get that e-mail forward, too?).
There are some situations in life where, when faced with such difficult realities, the only appropriate response is deep, sad, and searching silence. No parent who has lost a child deserves to have her child's death used as a political platform, and it dishonours my mother's death, and cheapens the entire rest of my journey, if I twist that tragedy to reinforce my own prejudices. I'd rather wait for something true. The meaning will come, but meaning can be like a shy cat: sometimes we have to stop yapping, clicking and beckoning, before it'll approach.
When people get their news from the internet, with its 24 hour coverage, things get silly, with journalists clamouring for column inches on the relevant topics.
My favourite example of this phenomenon is the meta-column. This actually makes me think back to my University days, and the idea of primary and secondary texts.
Here's how the ladder goes:
Top: Primary texts, like "Hamlet" by William Shakespeare.
Secondary texts, like "A Structural Analysis of the Dialogues Between Hamlet and Ophelia" by Dr. Hoight D. Toity
Tertiary texts, like "A Critique of Dr. H.D. Toity's Structural Analysis of the Dialogues Between Hamlet and Ophelia" by Dr. Ivy ReTower
and possibly, if the controversy gets heated enough:
a Quaternary text, like "The Flawed Reasoning in Drs. H.D. Toity and Ivy ReTower's Analyses of Dialogues Between Hamlet and Ophelia: A New Perspective" by Dr. P. Arasite. (aka: I couldn't think of an original article, but I need to publish to stay on the tenure track)
And so it goes. I don't know if you ever reach bottom in this kind of self-reflexive cannibalism.
The crazy thing is, these days, the same self-reflexive feeding is happening in the news. I like to call this meta-news. Meta-news is news that comments on news -- rather than discussing world events, you discuss news coverage of world events, the method, emphasis, responsibility, integrity of such.
Think about it:
Primary news: "Paris Hilton (or Michael Jackson, or Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, Tom Cruise, Mike Tyson, or whoever the latest pop-culture whipping person is) Does Something Disgusting but Not Altogether Surprising." by Associated Tabloid Press.
In a move that disappointed thousands of loyal fans, _______ committed a shocking act of ________ in a ___________ last night, in an incident that lasted __________ until ________ showed up and calmed everything down.
(Sometimes the real headline here is "Hey Everybody! Look Over Here And Get Distracted From The Mess We've Made In The Middle-East By Wasting Your Attention on Useless Crap!" by the G.W. Bush Administration and Fox News.
Hey Everybody! Look over here! She has blonde hair! Blonde hair! You like blonde hair! Your sons and cousins are dying in a needless war, and we're only just beginning -- the Iran scheme is already in the preparation stage -- but THIS GIRL IS FAMOUS, and she has a little dog with pink ears and Blonde Hair! She was in a sex video once and she has blonde hair! Look at her! She's rich and reckless with blonde hair! Grab your ankles while we stomp on your freedoms because she has BLONDE HAIR!!!!!)
The next wave:
Meta-news as analysis: "A Publicist Discusses the Implications of This Latest Non-Scandal" by Headlin G. Rabber.
It seems nobody is advising her on managing her image. She's obviously addicted to flashing cameras. If I were her publicist I'd say she. . . but doesn't her blonde hair look great!
Meta-news as commentary: "Why Are We Paying So Much Attention to Such A Waste of Copy?" by M. Oral Soapboxer
This isn't news! I can't BELIEVE so many people are reporting on this! What a society of clowns and hypocrites we are when we think THIS is important! Pay no attention to the irony in the fact I am adding to the coverage on her, by criticising it.
Look at this. Ahh, grandstanding. The sweet sweet smell of righteous outrage on national television!
Next: Meta-meta news: "Columnists Grabbing For Column Space by Claiming To Be Above It All are Phoneys!"
Don't even click on the link everybody. Don't even read the article. Let MY article be the last one you read on the topic. The only way we can make her go away is to ignore her. And read my article. And send it to your friends. Just click on the e-mail to your friends button, and the press agency sends me a thousandth of a penny. They add up. Really.
and finally, Meta-meta-meta news: Old Roboseyo
What a farce this is. I can't believe I clicked on the link, too. I can't believe I'm putting it on my blog. Yes, even adbusters etc. is part of the cycle when they criticise it.
What's to be done? Our lives are filling up with useless information. How do we get back to caring about what's important, and getting others to care, too? Seriously, all it takes for us to stop thinking about Blackwater, Guantanamo, Pakistan and Myanmar, is for Paris Hilton to climb out of a car without wearing panties. . . AGAIN? THIS, and we settle back into our duoback chairs and forget about writing letters, attending protests, and storming the lawns of our leaders to get things sorted out?
I don't even know what to say, except that when I think about it too much, I think that if there's real estate for sale on Mars, I'd think about going.
the Korean saying for being too stuck in your own perspective, your own point of view, your own comfort zone, so that you can't think outside the box, and can't think accurately anymore, is "A Frog in a Well"
So how do we get out, and get angry, and actually do something?
