A thought from Ralph Peters

We may be impressed that terrorists ad criminals manage to use out technologies against us, but it is a parasitic use, imitative, not creative. A cell phone held to the ear does not mean a modern mind is at work on the other side of the eardrum.

from Peters' 2002 book Beyond Terror, page 13

Newest American trend to hit Korea: calling dudes gay

This blows my mind. Effeminate Korean singer Brian from duo Fly to the Sky

goes on Gag Concert, only to be ragged on by has-been singer Lee Sang-won

for being gay. My translations are based on this article from Sports Chosun.

Lee: Where did all the talk of you cross-dressing and dating [Fly to the
Sky bandmate Eru] come from?
Brian: It's a misunderstanding due to the fact that we're so close. And sometimes I go to hang out at Eru's house and
sleep over.
Lee: [Older entertainer] Tae Jin-a always says you're so pretty . . .
Brian: Of course. I think of myself as his son.
Lee: Do you think of yourself as his son or daughter-in-law?

Lee then ordered Brian to do push-ups to prove his manhood.



Now what I want to know is where Lee Sang-won got this homophobic gay-bashing attitude from. It's one of America's most unsavory distinguishing characteristics and I've long cited its absence from Korea as a definite point in its favor (Not that it means Korea's any more enlightened about homosexuality than the U.S.)

I suspect that the audience watching Gag Concert that night was very perplexed by the attack. I mean, Korea is the land of the pink shirt, and whether or not Korean men are more in touch with their feminine side because they don't believe in the existence of Korean homosexuals, it remains true that Korean men can act in a manner that would get them brutally teased in the U.S. without fear of recrimination.

I don't know whether Lee Sang-won learned to be made insecure by other men during years of has-been exile in America or what, but I sincerely hope that his nasty sniping doesn't rub off on any impressionable Korean kids.

For those of you who know Maple Story . . .

. . . as a game for Korean elementary school kids, check out this commercial

It's a slightly less small world

I'm on vacation in Florida right now, and on line for the It's A Small World ride at the Magic Kingdom I realized that there was an extremely high chance that either a) there are no Koreans on the ride or b) there were some Korean dolls awkwardly shoehorned into the ride.

Upon entering the Asia room, I was prepared to have my first guess confirmed as I saw a stylized Chinese backdrop with a stylized Japanese backdrop right next to it. I know the picture below is dark, but Japan is on the left, China on the right, and the only thing between the two is the yellow bridge.

Continuing on, I instead saw that my second guess was in fact correct. The two Korean dolls in the place were placed far off from anything identifiably Korean on their own little stage.
Now take a close look at the Chinese guy from the upper left hand corner of the above photo. He's very abstract and very typical of the Small World ride.
Now have a gander at the two Korean dolls, dressed in their intricately detailed hanbok.
They stick out like a sore thumb. These hanbok look like they're straight out of Dongdaemun Market. My wife says she saw two other Korean kids flying a kite, but I can't confirm that.
The last room the ride goes through has representatives of all the countries passed through wearing white and blue, angelic versions of their native garb. There there are no Korean dolls, although there are four Chinese dolls spinning plates and plenty of Japanese dolls too.
I suppose that, to make up for their sleight against Korea, Disney has included a sign in Korean among it's farewells (again, sorry so dark).
A little closer now.

r look at the Chinese doll

A perfect chance to practice spotting logical fallacies

Thanks, Alex Lee, for your incredible logically fallacious article in the Korea Times!

My problem is with willfully ignorant people who embrace myths like "color-blind love transcends racial inequalities" and "all Asian men are sexist while white men are not." Of course, any couple can "fall in love." It's naive, however, to ignore the reality of white privilege.

False dichotomy. One can believe in love conquering all without ignoring white privilege.

I'm well aware that my attractiveness to native Korean women over native Korean men has a lot to do with my privilege as an American gyopo man. But this advantage doesn't exist outside of Asia like it does for white men. That's the difference. "Sorry, I don't date Asian guys because they're too sexist or nerdy" is a refrain I've heard a lot from Asian American girls.

Appeal to pity

Hollywood has been selling the same stereotype of Asian men forever. For every Pitt, Clooney, and Damon the world sees in Oceans 11, 12, and 13, Asian men get the same mute Chinese acrobat who fits into boxes. Globally, Western white men are allowed to be everything Asian men are not, sexy and nonsexist. They even speak.

Confusing causation with correlation. Who's to say whether Hollywood caused perceptions or reflects them. Also, that Chinese acrobat wasn't sexist.

In the U.S., Asian American women married white spouses at nearly twice the rate as Asian American men, according to the 2000 Census. Korean American women had the second highest outmarriage (marriage to whites) rate of all Asian American women at 24.3 percent of all marriages compared to Korean American men at only 3.9 percent. In Korea, Korean women surveyed by Bien-Aller, a Seoul-based matchmaking company, preferred white spouses over other races at 32.9 percent compared to Korean men at only 14.4 percent. Numerous studies contend this discrepancy is unique to Asian Americans since in other racial groups men outmarry more than women. (Outmarriage statistics for black women with white men, interestingly, were nearly the same statistical inverse of the Asian female situation. Coincidence? Last time I checked, black women were dissed by the global media almost as much as Asian men--save Beyonce).

Confusing correlation with causation and straw man. Who knows if outmarriage rates among black women is related to 'dissing by the global media'?

So, why the gender gap? A popular explanation is the overt patriarchy in Asian culture, like the sexist preference of sons over daughters to preserve the family name. But equally important is the West's wartime legacy in Asia, like U.S. servicemen, camptown-centered brothels and Asian war brides.

Total lack of evidence. How do we know if it's 'equally important' or if there's any impact at all without evidence? Also somewhat of a non-sequitur, I mean, why would the existence of brothels in the past make women want to marry foreigners?

Sorry, but a white man's earnest claim that he is "nice" and not like other perverted white guys addicted to Asian porn isn't enough to erase history. The West is smug in thinking it’s so liberal.

Ad hominem attacks. the West is 'smug'. A white guy naively thinks he's 'nice' when he himself doesn't know what's in his own nature.

Most interracial couples speak the man’s native language, English.

Non-sequitur

Many "liberal” white men don’t seek equally "liberal” Western white woman.

Non-sequitur

And white "feminists” leave the home but hire non-white women to replace them.

Non-Sequitur

Furthermore, feminist history in Asia is, in fact, strong. In Korea, women were largely in control of their own lives during the Koryo period before Confucianism was introduced. Patrilineage was uncommon, inheritance was equally divided among sons and daughters, and widows were known to remarry. A long time
ago, yes. But sexism is clearly not "inherent" to Asian culture despite
the hype.

Straw man. Nobody thinks that the 'inherentness' of Asian sexism matters, only its existence. Would proving that Korean anti-black racism was not inherent to Korean culture make it a non-issue?

Introducing these points usually mean being personally attacked on my masculinity and sense of self-worth, a classic example of how the culture of power places the burden of proof on those with less power. Meanwhile, those with more power have the luxury to brand my arguments as mere "complaints." This is known as hypocrisy, folks.
A parallel example would be me blaming Asian women for being vain and appearance-obsessed without questioning my own complicity in sexism. I can act calm and collected because my self-worth isn't reduced to my waistline.

Non-sequitur false analogy combo.

Ask a white man to switch places with an Asian man and he'll feel the difference in power quick.

I think this is special pleading. You can't feel this very real thing, but if you were to become Asian you would be able to.

Not to mention, they'd probably do more than just complain, like legally ban Asians from entering their country for decades, create "anti-miscegenation" laws that would prohibit interracial marriage, encourage state-wide sterilization programs for non-white women, and kill non-white men for just looking at white women _ all in the name of "science" and "pure" white nationhood. Oh wait, they already did.

Ad hominem attack and argument from prior error.

Meanwhile, tales about marriage between an indigenous woman of color and white men _ think Pocahontas _ have long been staples of European-American culture, says George Lipsitz. The native woman's love for the white man serves to establish the moral superiority of the conqueror's culture. These stories turn the brutality and sadism of conquest into a voluntary romance. That's why people who argue Asian women are resisting Asian sexism by marrying white men
are mistaken.

False dichotomy. Why can't there be both 'push' and 'pull' factors?

If white feminists didn't marry Asian men to combat Western sexism, why would the opposite be true?

I struggled with this one before realizing it's a false continuum. Asian women who marry Western men and move to the West in order to escape sexism in their own societies will become subject to Western sexism. This argument simply denies the possibility that one variety of sexism may be more or less desirable than the other.

It's easy to criticize someone like me as defending native Asian men because I'm Asian. But I'm also American, an irony lost on most white Western men who brand me as some sort of Korean nationalist.

All fallacy-noticing aside, I recognize the writer of this piece as one of the most American people around. Only an American could string together this much Anthro 101 this angrily. Also, there's no irony to be lost, dingus, you're criticizing white Westerners, not Americans.

I have no problem criticizing Asia, like how East Asian men exploit South East Asian women but still use marriages between the two as proof of how "cultural understanding" they are. Here, the power dynamics are clear. So, what makes white men with Asian women that different?

False analogy (except in the case of mail-order brides)

Ultimately, it's not about arguing who's "worse" or shallowly emphasizing that we're all sexist and racist. It's about taking the issue less personally, enough to see that there are larger forces at play. I love my parents but still find it important to criticize the ridiculously classist system they came from.

Appeal to sincerity

Consequently, the current state of interracial relationships doesn't equal "racial harmony" as much as some people would like to believe. After all, it's called "color-blind love" for a reason. It blinds you to the truth.

The 'shitty writing' fallacy.

I am leaving Korea in a week

And I can honestly say that I will miss it much more than I ever missed America. Why?
I suppose the reason is that I have America inside me. If I had to I could probably make America over again, but Korea will forever be an outside influence on me, no matter how much I've internalized.
Perfect example, I just wrote 'nomatter' as a single word, apparently my subconscious brain's translation from one Korean word (아무리) to English.
There are so many things to worry about. I lost 180 pounds in Korea. Will returning to America put me back on my diet for death? Will I forget massive amounts of my hard-won Korean? Will I lose touch with the culture? Will I forget all the important lessons about people that I learned here?
And then there are the regrets. There are those who've spent their time in Korea mining its history for wisdom. There are those who've spent it having fun, blissfully unaware of the world going on around them. There are those who've spent their time in Korea viciously poking holes in the hypocrisy, the illogic, the foolishness that one finds here. I have spent my small time here trying to really understand the world as modern Koreans see it. I effectively walled myself off from the non-Korean world. In 2006 I spoke face-to-face with non-Koreans less than 10 times. The Japanese colonial period, the Yangbans and the early Christian missionaries are as far from me as they are to the average Korean man on the street, but it is a rare trend or buzzword that I have not heard about.
I believe in secular humanism, a world without a god in which people have been created in the forge of evolution for no particular purpose and culture is a mere element of our extended phenotype. To the extent that I believe the past effects the present, I don't think things systematically forgotten or dumbed down to a nub have any bearing on the present and thus I am not a huge fan of history as a window on the present. When I view the Koreans of today I see them as products of their environment, and that environment a product of history, a crucial distinction. When I came here I wanted to feel what Koreans feel and know what Koreans know, unhampered by half-baked connections to the past. Korea is often a country of pure emotion,and to approach it on any other level seemed and still seems foolish to me. To try to use facts in a way in which they are not used in Korea seems silly and almost (gulp) imperialistic. Now is a time for me to look back and think seriously about whether I have made the right decision, whether I have seen what I wanted to see and taken away what I wanted to take away.
I have managed in my time here to stretch my mind more than I ever thought possible. I have come to understand mindsets that I once ridiculed and among those I have even found those that I accept. Through it all I have not lost my own perspective, not become like putty that can take any form and has none to call its own. I have been able to call a spade a spade and to see when I was wrong.
Coming to Korea was the best thing that ever happened to me. Anyone that knew me will tell you so, and yet when I came here I had no idea that it would wind up this way. How much of this is Korea and how much of this is the natural process of an arrested adolescent becoming a man? This is impossible to answer and perhaps doesn't deserve one. Had I gone to China would I now be extolling the great reformative effect of Chinese culture on me? Impossible to say.
What I can say with some certainty is that I have learned far more in Korea than I ever set out to or even knew to set out to. I learned to suffer fools, and as much as that would enrage the high school, OK Computer-listening boy I once was, that is a valuable skill. I learned both the power of being on the outside and exempt from society's rules and the power that comes from being an insider and being bound to those rules. I learned how to function in a society I never thought I would have more than a fleeting relationship and I learned respect for people whose lives are as different from those I grew up around as possible.
So did I make the right choice? Should I have been visiting historical sites, dabbling in some University arts scene or hunting girls in Itaewon? Would I have better spent my time snowboarding, studying Joseon-period documents or lecturing every Korean that I met about what's wrong with their country? Or might I have been better off just cocooning myself off from the country altogether, meeting my foreigner friends every night of the week and otherwise behaving like a jolly colonial git?
I honestly don't know, although I have a strong suspicion that I have made the right decision. Every kind of expat in Korea that I have described is a real person and I would love to hear what they think, but with this blog's readership I don't see that happening.
Korea is a complicated place. It is so easy to peg it as any one thing that it is not, and to paint roll it with any label that you want. It's like Ireland. It's like Italy. It's like Cold War-era Germany, it's an agrarian blah blah but the people all blahed, It's the best example of American nation building, it's whatever your heart desires.
But it's not any of those things. I won't even attempt to say what it is. That's a fool's errand, and since coming to Korea one of the things I've learned is not to answer every question that's put to me.

Reification in action

I was just watching Korea's 'know-nothing celebrities try to guess whether there is legal recourse for something' show Solomon's Choice, and the situation in question was a child whose mother starts sending her to hours and hours of after-school classes, giving the child so much stress that she starts to bite her fingers until they bleed and wet her pants in class. The mother-in-law forces the status-hungry mother to take the daughter to a doctor, who diagnoses her with stress (if you know anything about Korea you knew that was coming) and (get ready) juvenile depression (소아 우울증), and the term was done in a different font and color and fairly slapped in your face as if to say "Yes, that's a thing now." And I could feel the Koreasphere whirling around me, suddenly faced with a term they hadn't known they needed but they will soon be unable imagining a world without. Stay tuned for more sightings of this little charmer.

The most American woman in the world

Living in the Land of Extremes has done a great post on this paranoid Korean adoptee, who claims that her Korean culture was "literally raped from her" and that white Americans take one look at her and expect her to yield to them when they get on and off elevators

The thing that gets me about her is that it is impossible to look at such a person as anything but an American. The quest for identity, the identification with something that she knows nothing about in opposition to the place where she comes from, which she characterizes as an uneducated family. It's textbook, but for some reason people as a species suffer from a chronic inability to look at themselves in such terms unless exceptionally trained or otherwise forced to. Looking at her is like watching a flailing mixed-up machine malfunction, except, you know, we're the same kind of machines.

Incidentally, like most Americans, she has an incredibly poorly informed concept of what international adoption is and how nations interact. For a person getting a masters and leaving America for ever to live in Korea with her people, she has an almost comically misinformed perspective on the country, seemingly derived from a single session of factoid spouting and anger venting by some angry Korean she knows. Korea is a small victim country and America raped it for its resource, adorable babies, so that Americans could selfishly make themselves feel good by raising said babies.
The fact that a person like this is getting a masters indicates to me that America has a serious glut of universities.

The Return of the California Knockout

When I was in 6th grade my class went on a one week school trip to a camp in upstate New York called Frost Valley. On the very first day, practically as soon as we got there, a couple of guys started talking about doing the California Knockout. One guy stood up against the wall and invited his friend to administer the chest compression necessary to induce said knockout. I remember at the time thinking it was one of the stupidest and clearly dangerous things I had seen my classmates do.
You can't keep a good bad idea down, though, and know the dread California Knockout has surfaced in Korea under the infinitely less interesting name "The Choking Game". Gusts of Popular feeling has a great post on the issue with pictures that look exactly as I remember. This time around, however, there seems to be a solo version played with a noose that looks like some sort of kiddie version of autoerotic asphyxiation.
Not to oversimplify things, but I believe that the cure to this kind of boredom-induced tomfoolery is probably sports. Let these kids play some sports, Korea! Something that lets them work the arms, perhaps, because soccer obviously is not doing it for them.

Your Eyelids and You

So I've got this really wacky class of kids, and they usually spend every moment in class that they possibly can screwing around. Yesterday two of the boys in the class, Nate and Richard, started showing everyone their talent for forcing a crease in their natural epicanthal folds. Here's Nate in his normal state

And here's Nate after giving himself a 'double eyelid' or ssangcouple (쌍꺼풀) as they say round these parts.

Yes, Nate is kind of cross-eyed in these pictures, because he chose to stare directly into the camera four inches in front of his face.

Here's Richard before creasing

And after

Very sultry.

The topic of double eyelid surgery or ssangcouple surgery (technically Asian blepharoplasty), as I'm going to choose to call it, is a complex one. So many of my friends here in Korea have had the surgery both before and after I've met them. The results vary from attractive and natural to jarring and artificial. The motives usually involve making the eye look bigger and more attractive, although some claim that they've been ordered to do so by their doctors for various reasons. Korea's president Roh Mu-hyun had the surgery last year, but I highly doubt he did it for aesthetic reasons. The word on the street is that heavy epicanthal folds get heavier as life goes on, and eventually they can weigh heavily on the eyelashes, which I guess is what happened to Roh. Here he is before and after
Limpid pools.

Here is a somewhat more typical before and after pair from an actual advertisement for a hospital that performs this procedure
To get an idea of how big a deal all this ssangcouple stuff is, check out all the people who posted pictures of themselves and their ssangcouples. Truly staggering, the number of people crowing about their new ssangcouples, their babies' ssangcouples, and anything that even looks remotely double-lidded.

According to the website of Dr. Frank Meronk, a plastic surgeon specializing in Asian patients based in Santa Barbara

Irrespective of ethnicity, an upper eyelid is typically considered more attractive by most people if it lacks excessive skin and fat, possesses a reasonably defined crease (which makes the eye appear bigger--a universal signal of youth and attention), and displays at least some platform of exposed skin between the crease and the eyelashes (which, in ladies, allows for a more effective application of makeup).

Furthermore

[M]ost experienced eyelid surgeons agree that the qualities noted here are generally appreciated across many diverse cultures and not solely a matter of Western bias.

This website is truly fascinating and has a lot to teach us about the procedure, but be warned that it does contain graphic images. I just accidentally exposed a bunch of little kids to an interior view of uneven fat deposits in a Vietnamese lady's eyelid, which is a sight none of us is likely to forget soon.

I don't know what you think about this procedure and I frankly don't know which side of the issue I am on, but I do know that ssangcouples make it possible for Richard to do his signature "haughty seductive CEO" face.

I'm screwed

Today, at my school, 5:00, Elementary C Class, students' age: ten and eleven.

Me: OK everybody, take out your notebooks, time for a test!
Judy: How do you say "Gongbu anhetta" in English?
Me: "I didn't study."
Freddy: How do you say "Mang hetta" in English?
Me: "I'm screwed."
Freddy: I'm screwed!
(long pause)
Judy: Me too I'm screwed.
Nate: I'm screwed too.
Richard: We're screwed.
Kristen: Everybody screwed.
Freddy: Mr. Mondello today's test and everybody screwed!
Me: No, "I'm in trouble" is better.
Nate: We're screwed.

They retain so little of what I say, and yet any little slip-up and they never forget.

Lee "Na"-young, stop "misappropriating" our "air"-quotes " "

There's a commercial on Korean TV for the Blooming apartment brand featuring Lee Na-young.

She knows your secret.

In the commercial she is sitting at a table and a waiter brings her a covered platter. He lifts the lid off to reveal "the apartment she ordered". She looks down and says:

(Gasps) "Two" bedrooms, one closet!
(침실 "두개", 옷장 하나.)

So she gives air quotes on the word 'two' and then puts up one finger on the word 'one'. What does she think air quotes mean? Are we meant to understand that air quotes mean 'two'?
I suspect that this is a desperate attempt to give meaning to Chandler from Friends' frequent use of the rhetorical device.

Down a rabbit hole...

So I'm thinking I'd start my new blog translating a Korean comic book, get some good study done and improve my Korean, cherry-pick some choice inaccuracies and mine them for laughs. I wish it were that simple. It turns out an entire chapter of this book is essentially a reiteration of the classic anti-Semitic story about the wicked Jews controlling every bad thing that ever happened through finance and then essentially getting caught up in their own game by the holocaust. Now the blog is on hold (while the translation project goes on) while I explore my rights, so I don't get sued when I make this horrendous historical distortion public. I'm right to worry. Korea has a long history of the old 'Lock up Al Capone on tax evasion charges' technique, and I certainly don't seen to be sued for copyright infringement or anything like that.
But it's coming. It makes me sick when I think of all the innocent kids whose parents buy these books because they think they're educational, and they end up reading things like this (direct quote from the book):

We Koreans, who are hard-working and diligent and are sad to come in second, can amass great victories in America with our competitive spirit. But in the end each and every time we hit a barrier, and that barrier is the Jews. We Koreans, who don't know how to lose to any other race, can never surpass the wall of Jews in American society. This is not only true of Koreans: Every other race and ethnicity has this in common.

My New Project

I've begun an ambitious new project. I have taken it upon myself to read the popular (in Korea) educational comic book series Monnara Iunnara (Far Country, Neighbor Country), starting with the volume dealing with the American people, and blog about it, sharing the most interesting, accurate, inaccurate, biased and dead-on parts with you. I am keeping an open mind, neither expecting it to be too biased and ridiculous nor too accurate. The illustrations are lively and funny, and the book seems to deal with America's somewhat bumpy history in a well-intentioned manner, but I'll have to read to know for sure. You can check out the new blog here.

Egg Everything Bagels and the Grand Prix Pizza

When I was a kid my parents used to get a dozen bagels and everyone except me used to go straight for the egg everything bagels, but something about them turned me off. I finally realized why I hated egg everything bagels while reading this post on the Boonville Blog. The egg everything bagel is a failure of the bagel imagination. Eating egg everything is saying that the sheer number of different things stuck onto the bagel is more important than the taste or quality of any individual ingredient. The egg everything is the bagel for the truly tasteless. It's the bagel that whatever the closest bagel shop is to that window where they film The Today Show is probably serves to the tourists from Jewless states when they wander in looking for mayonnaise sandwiches. The concept of just sticking everything in the bagel shop thoughtlessly onto one bagel really speaks to the failure that some people have to appreciate the delicate balance of flavors that one finds in an onion bagel or a raisin bagel.
It reminds me of the first time I ever made kimchi chigae (or kimchi stew, pronounced chee-gay). Typically consisting of kimchi, water, pork of canned tuna, a pinch of beef bullion, and some sliced onions, my first kimchi chigae also included dumplings, carrots, tomatoes, a fried egg, ramen noodles and oregano. It was declared by my Korean friends to be unworthy of the name kimchi chigae. Of course now having developed my palate a bit, I can understand why my lame attempt at fusion was derided by all. I was unable to appreciate the simplicity of the soup in it's original form. The same was true of seolleongtang (pronounced as if you're seeing off a Chinese friend, "So long, Tong"), which looks like milky water and is made by boiling cow bones for days and days and putting a few scraps of beef and diced leeks in it before serving. Until I developed a taste for it, it tasted like steam and hot water with left-over pot roast floating in it. Now that I get it, I'm big into it.

So thinking about the egg everything bagel brings to mind the latest innovation in the koreanization of the pizza. Mr. Pizza (slogan: "Only for woman") has recently introduced the Grand Prix pizza, which I valiantly ate with my wife last weekend. One half of the pizza has boiled skin-on potato slices, sour cream, bacon, nacho chips, and something I couldn't quite put my finger on. The other half of the pizza had green peppers, olives, shrimp, ham, Domino's style sausage chunks, corn niblets and other assorted things. The crust is a sweet pastry somehow grafted around the rest of the pizza. The whole pizza comes with hot sauce, parmesan cheese powder, garlic diping sauce and a little tub of blueberry jelly for use with the crusts. Miyoung and I found that we couldn't even consider eating the crusts at the same sitting as the rest of the pizza, and let them sit a few hours before tackling them separately. The experience was similar to eating a crustless pizza befouled with cake and later eating sweet crullers with bits of sausage and black olives stuck to them. The whole experience brought to mind the question "Who would possibly prefer this inelegant, complicated eating experience to the pure pleasure of a New York pizza with a single topping, let's say, mushroom?" The only plausible answer, it would seem to me, is people who don't have the developed sense necessary to appreciate the details of a nice, simple mushroom pizza.


I'm sure that things like avocado roll and
volcano roll disgusted the Japanese the first time they saw them. "Dear gods, look how these barbarians have perverted our beautiful traditional food!" is, I'm sure, a close approximation of what they thought or said. In the end, I suppose this kind of culture perverting is the inevitable outcome of spotty cross-cultural transmission. Is there a single counter-example, in which something was imported from abroad and developed into a deeper, more exacting incarnation?

Disappointed Ancestors

I just saw the first episode of the third season of Battlestar Galactica and it got me thinking about the way the world changes. The series starts with an apocalyptic attack by the Cylons (robots created by humans) that cuts the human race down to 50,000 people on the run in a ragtag fleet of spaceships. The second season opened up the world of the Cylons a little bit to show them to be an idealistic young race that destroyed the humans on orders from their god (they're both monotheistic and very evangelical) and have had a change of heart and now want to bring the light of god to the human race, which is polytheistic and extremely close to the godless urban/coastal America that I grew up in. Anyway, the humans camped out on a planet, built a little squatter's camp, and one year later were found and occupied by the Cylons.
So as the third season begins, the Cylons are obviously the in over their heads optimistic Americans and the downtrodden, now extremely radicalized humans are any number of peoples not American. Thus, a setup for brilliant drama, in which you have an American (and I presume international) audience rooting for an insurgent group built on the ruins of a dismantled military who use killings, bombs, and similar terror to convince the Cylons to leave them alone in their wretched new city and stop helping them into the future.
So, that got me thinking about all the historical figures who would look at the country of which they are either a hero or a founding father and shake their heads in shame. This could be for any number of reasons. Surely William Wallace would consider his own life to have been a failure, in that Scotland is now completely subsumed into the United Kingdom. The rugged individualists who built our big-ass country would no doubt cringe if taken to a strip mall (that goes for every country that's had a sweet Amerrrican fairy dust kiss). Certainly the people who wrote the constitution had another thing in mind when they made up all that stuff about "rights". The mighty Samurai of Japan would no doubt be disgusted at the leveling of Japanese culture, as would the Yangban of Korea.
The case of the Yangban is a particularly sad one, in my opinion. The Yangbans, literally "the two halves", were the noblemen of Korea, so named because they were lined up on the two sides of the King's court. They were typically Asian nobles, in that they praised refinement and learning as paramount. Unfortunately, refinement and culture have not survived into the modern world, and in fact, are probably antithetical to Democracy. If the history of Korea were a Rodney Dangerfield movie, then the snobs would have been essentially obliterated by the Japanese occupation and, when that period ended, the entire country essentially left to the slobs. This is shocking to me because I am American and we never really had much more than aristocratic aspirants, but I'm sure those in European countries with formerly rich high culture would report a similar phenomenon. The really sad thing is that the Yangban are remembered in Korean popular culture as a bunch of snobby assholes. For example, the Yangban disdained physical movement and exercise, preferring quiet contemplation. One common claim is that the Yangban were such uppity pricks that they wouldn't even run if their house was on fire.
Every time I hear this story I'm reminded of the book 1984, in which the capitalists are recalled as an extinct creature who lived off the sweat of others and always wore ridiculous top hats. That's the paintroller version of capitalism in a socialist dystopian future.

The last mammal

Discovery Channel did a show a few years ago called The Future is Wild, and the premise is that humans "leave" the earth, and then millions of years later some kind of probe comes to the earth and makes a nature show about all the new animals that have evolved. Anyway, besides the fact that humans "left", what got to me was the animal they called the poggle, which was, according to the show, the last mammal. The thing about the poggle that is so depressing is that the poggle, the last in a long line of mammals including majestic creatures like whales, bats and horses, is a little hamster-like creature that is raised for food by giant spiders. So that's how it ends, Discovery Channel? All those warm-blooded hijinks for that, to feed spiders in the deep future? Quite sad.

Or not. I mean, maybe mammals weren't meant to live in the warped, twisted future that the staff of futurologists and futuronomists at DC have created. Maybe 100million years in the future is better off without mammals.

Anyway, I was thinking about evolution today, in particular social evolution. The thing that spurned it all was the fact that Bill Clinton has convinced junk food companies to stop selling so much junk food in schools, and there's apparently some kind of trans-fat restriction bill on the docket somewhere. And that would be totally anti freedom of choice, right? How can it be America when you can't even choose your lunch? So that got me thinking about good old fashioned freedom. The kind of good old fashioned frrreedom where you hit the R really hard like a rreal Amerrrican. Anyway, it all started with the founding fathers, those bootlegging tax-evaders, who wanted Americans to be as free as they could possibly be, like old Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death." Right? So, given 230 years of evolution, where did that freedom wind up?
I posit that it ended up going something like this: as an American, you are exposed to every possible opportunity to fuck up your life without the government getting in your way. You are totally free to do anything that is likely to ruin your future. And even the people in a position to tell you not to, who know better, may not intervene because they're Amerrricans too. And then after the damage has been done and you know better and you see it coming for the next generation, you bite your tongue in the name of frrreedom.
When I moved to Korea I initially noticed the same thing that most foreign men do: The women are so beautiful. You hear it all the time among Americans abroad, I'm sure they say it in most any foreign country that they go to. Why? Is it because immigration to America has somehow detrimentally mutated the DNA of our nation's ancestors? Of course the answer is that such a huge proportion of our men women and children are fat that half of our beautiful women are trapped inside fat bodies. In my high school there was a girl from China who came to the U.S. not speaking a word of English and, a few years later got an astronomical SAT verbal score. What does that mean? Americans are dumb? Yes, but not because they do poorly on standardized tests. Because they don't push the importance of education in anyway near the way they do in some other cultures. So what you find in the U.S. is a nation of underachievers with lots of rich life experience. I'm serious, not being fascetious about the rich life lessons bit, it's true. The question is, is it good or bad to live way below your potential, making mistakes left and right with little guidance in order to get this life experience?