Random Musing # 3

So this hasn't got much to do with what's wrong with politics or kids these days, but It's been something I've been rolling around in my head ever since I took an eco-trek, or whatever the hell you call it, in Laos. Everytime I've tried to put it into words I get about two sentences in before someone jumps in with "you racist DOUCHE!" and reminds me that I'm white, male, and thus lacking the part of the brain that perceives racism. Writing it down seems like a much better way of getting the every facet of the idea out there before the reflexive white guilt of my listener kicks in and ends the conversation. Or I'll just dig myself in way deeper, and prove the suspicions everyone's entertained for a long time.

Here goes: I took a hike up into the hills of Laos to visit a tribe of what I believe were Hmong, but I very well could be wrong about that. It was impressive; the poverty was striking, and the hard work that went into day to day life of those people made me appreciate what I had much more. What troubled me is that these people are in effect denied what I take for granted, and that I and people like myself are the ones responsible. That is, these people, understandably, are proud of and see no need to change their culture, which makes them a curiosity in an increasingly homogenized world. In order to preserve the integrity of their culture and way of life, tourists pay companies to take them on a "footprints and photographs" tour of their village, with the price of admission subsidising the village. However, this makes them dependent on the very primitive-ness of their existence. To better their situation would actually make things significantly worse for them.

The travelers who go to these villages see children running barefoot amongst animal feces, women pounding rice manually, farmers going about their business without the help of machines and in some cases animals. Were that same farmer to haul his harvest in with a tractor, or the children to wear shoes, or the women to use more sophisticated machines or buy preprocessed rice from the more assimilated tribesmen in the lowlands, the tourists would complain that it isn't "authentic" and demand their money back.

Now, my essential view of the meaning of life, and this is obviously influenced by my talents, upbringing, culture, and career, is to make use of that which makes us unique as a species, namely our intelligence. We should be constantly thinking, inventing, creating. Getting born, eating, shitting, fucking, giving birth and then dying don't cut it. We've got one up on every other organism on this planet and we should damn well act like it. What makes the whole experience repugnant to my sensibilities is that we are refusing to allow the inhabitants of these villages to do that. They must remain as they are in a stone-age existence if any aspect of their culture is to survive.

But these aren't primitive "ooga-booga" cavemen. They're well aware of the outside world. It pays them handsomely to come and gawp at them, and they interact with the peripheries of the more westernized people to trade their agricultural products for the machetes I imagine they don't smelt themselves. Like the Amish they're acquainted with what's out there, they've just decided they don't want it.

Which is fine, but what makes the Amish Amish is their conscious rejection of modern technology. Their stasis is a defining characteristic that they've chosen for themselves. The stasis of the Hmong, and others such as our Native Americans, is imposed on them from outside. Before the modern era, if a Hmong were shown an improved technology or procedure he or she would probably adopt it without a second thought. Now any growth of Hmong culture would be seen not as an advance, but as an abandonment of that culture.

This is usually the point at which I'm denounced as ethnocentric, or whatever. How vain of me to assume everyone yearns to be just like us to suggest that these people might be happier with a more "advanced" lifestyle, a more "modern" lifestyle, more like mine of course. How dare I let my unquestioned assumptions about the life of these noble savages blind me to their wonderful communion with nature and - BULLSHIT.

I'm consistently annoyed by the liberal idea that primitive societies are somehow more enlightened, and that by advancing scientifically we of necessity lose some vital part of our spiriuality. We used to have a society just like that, where everyone lived off the land in extended families with oral traditions and blah blah blah. It was called the Middle ages, and it was probably the worst period of recorded world history. If the roles were reversed, and your options were assimilating into a Hmong version of modern society, or burning cats at the stake for hexing your fields and trying to leech the plague out of your system, I can't imagine a single one of my hippie friends who'd opt for the latter.

Cultures evolve, same as everything else, and to choose any cross-section in time as the archetype and only "authentic" version of that culture is, to me, honestly a little racist. The impression I get is that "We're the ones with the cars and internet, and you're the ones who sit in the dirt and have intestinal parasites. For you to try to be anything different would mean you're trying to be us, and by extension betraying your people." The basic tenets of Western thought are based off of the Greeks. Do we non-Greeks decry our ancestors for selling out our Roman, Pictish, Teutonic, etc. heritage, and regard our present culture as somehow bastardized?

Cross-cultural pollination is an important force and a major driver in the advancement of society. If we'd all tried to go it alone we'd still be banging rocks together and running from lions/tigers/bears/dingoes. The Greeks started scientific inquiry, which influenced the Romans, which influenced the Arabs who influenced in turn influenced Spain and Italy who gave us the Renaissance, and here we are today. And I'm fine with it. I don't shave the front of my scalp, paint my face blue or speak gaelic, but I get to live to be eighty, die with all my teeth, grow six feet tall, travel the world and work on invesitgating the fundamentals of the Universe. If I have kids they'll probably all outlive me. Pretty sweet fucking deal, one -maybe- a half billion people in human history have ever gotten.

I think the problem has become that our culture has taken such a commanding lead in these types of fields. Medieval society wasn't that far removed from the Greeks at the time. Their ideas were viewed as just that, ideas, and good ones, and so we adopted them and modified, improved and repurposed them. The Hmong and others like them would now have to pile on so many layers of technology, sociology, philosophy, etc. to catch up that they would essentially be working with a western society when they were done. A western society that they would be free to change and make their own, but their original would be obliterated.

I don't have any answers. It may be that there aren't any. That things have progressed to the point where the options for the Hmong and others are join up with "white" society and become one of us, work on your culture on your own terms until you've done in isolation what took the combined efforts of the whole world 2,000 years to do, or keep living out a fakey phoney Colonial Williamsburg existence as the only way to connect with your culture. But the only side of the issue I've seen firsthand was that last one, and it made me feel filthy.

Liberals are so Mung

I've been trying to write about this for a while, with a few false starts. I generally get caught up trying to run down every tangent that comes to mind and end up with a complete mess. I figure I'll try to keep it to the facts and see if I can at least get the bare bones out there.

The thing I've noticed since grade school, back in the days of Gingrich, was the way the Republicans got away with repurposing words to their advantage. "Liberal" became a slur, "Socialism" became an argument in and of itself (last paragraph of the article), and recently "Nancy Pelosi" has become an... ideology? I'm not sure what to make of that last one and I doubt most Republicans could help me out; it's generally attached as an adjective to some piece of legislation without explication or comment. Democrats do not attempt to counter this, either by fighting fire with fire - associating Republican words with negative connotations - or just tagging Liberal words with positive ones.

In this way, the words that we use to define ourselves on the left take on meanings that were not originally contained in the words themselves, and it becomes impossible to have a balanced debate in which competing viewpoints are held up as equally worthy. It is as though the word "harass," "terrorize" or "molest" was the only word used to describe the intended effect of a Democratic ad on a Republican incumbent's poll numbers by the media. There will be no way to discuss the ad or it's effects without casting an aspersion, however slight on the Democrat. I'd draw a parallel to 1984, but I imagine we're all intelligent enough to make this leap on our own.

By claiming "our" words, and choosing a new meaning for them, they leave us effectively mute, or at least in the position of a puppet, the content of our message decided by the people most interested in blocking them. They no longer need to defeat us in the open market of ideas, because we now have nothing to offer. Instead we have Mondale riding a tank, Al Gore desperately agreeing with Bush, or John Kerry blasting away at ducks, all in an attempt to not appear, "liberal". A word that used to mean free, open, progressive now stands for decadent, effete, godless. You can kid yourself that only Republicans buy this malarkey, but when was the last time you heard the "L" word out of a politician on the left. More importantly, when s/he said it was it used casually to complete a sentence, or make a defiant "hell yes I'm a liberal, so what?" statement in and of itself? Perhaps I'm insane and seeing danger where none exists, but this frankly terrifies me.

Obviously it is not just that one word, but I can't go example by example without repeating myself, since it's just the same damn thing over and over. Nancy Pelosi is vilified, giving Republicans an excuse not to explain why they oppose some popular and crucial piece of legislation. Universal health care is called socialism, and thus the argument is over. Socialism is not refuted, or even addressed, and listeners are quite pointedly expected to know why health care is socialism, and why socialism is bad, and if they don't that it's so self-evident they should not question it for fear of looking stupid.

I'm not saying that Democrats should fight fire with fire. It's not about scoring points, or picking up seats in the house. It's about shepherding our country into the future in the most intelligent way possible. The only way that can be done is to call attention to the fact that the right's message is all surface, and no substance. There's no way to argue with what's said between the lines, or refute a tone of voice. The only way to keep them from getting away with this is for Democrats, or the moderators of the talk shows where these kind of things get said, to call out exactly what's happening. Stop the debate cold and demand explanations of what is said when a Republican drops a glib, contentless retort. This changes the topic of the discussion to the discussion itself, but it needs to happen and it needs to happen every time it occurs until this stops. The right hasn't got a message, and they need to be exposed as such. Instead the Democrats spend all their time shadowboxing an empty message made up of insinuations and getting nowhere, or worse, giving in and trying to fit their message around what words are left them. Just by making anyone on the left refer to themselves as a "Moderate" or "Centrist" rather than "Liberal" to be taken seriously, Republicans reel in half the rope in the tug of war of politics.

And yes, I'm quoting South Park in my "serious, heavy handed" blog. Go eat a dick.

I'd lead the revolution, but I just got this hammock...

I'm going to alienate a lot of people right from the get-go with this one.

I am an intelligent person. Perhaps I have a one dimensional personality, but everyone I ever knew in school knows, or at least makes a big deal of introducing me, as a "genius." I'm good at math, science and am at least above averagely well-read. Being that being "the smart guy" has defined or at least colored me to most of the people I've ever known I've put some thought into intelligence in general over the years. Some disturbing developments I've noticed in the area are as follows.

Larry the Cable Guy.
There's nothing wrong with dumb culture. People have always made stupid lowbrow garbage. The difference was that it used to be dumb people enjoyed dumb shit because they were too dumb to discriminate. More and more recently it seems that ignorance, if not outright stupidity, has become not only acceptable, but preferable to the alternatives. People now more than ever seem to celebrate idiocy, seek it out and emulate it as often as possible.
In one sense its understandable. The people I find most enamored of this are what used to be called "lower class" before making someone sad became the worst thing you could do. Everyone's always assumed they're dumb hicks anyway, so laughing at Jeff Foxworthy may just be their reclaimed "nigger." And since the Republican party's spent the last thirty years describing them as the "Real Americans" some of the less self aware middle class self servingly identify with them as well.
The problem is that while the meaning of a word can change depending on its use, stupid is always stupid. And stupid is as stupid does. Most people aren't as stupid as Larry pretends to be, it's only done to be funny, and we're all in on the joke, but doing anything enough makes it a habit. Once stupidity becomes the default, it doesn't matter if its done ironically or not. It doesn't matter what you think, or what you'd like to be, it's what you do that determines what you are. A coward who's forced into doing something heroic is still a hero, and a genius who acts like a mouth breather is just taking up space. Larry the Cable Guy, and others like Limbaugh and Hannity, who espouse an unthinking simplistic model of life are in a very real way making people into morons. These people are the equivalent of lead poisoning.

Epic Movie
Of course, not all people want to present a front of this sort to the world, and do attempt to better themselves. The problem, as I've profanely and digressively touched on, is that one trap to fall into is to keep learning the same thing over and over.
People like to feel like smart, and nothing makes you feel more like a know it all than to listen to someone explain something you already know. Thus we get travel shows that talk only about the most stereotypical, widely known facts of the country, authors like Dan Brown who take semi-obscure bits of theology, make horrible fiction and somehow imbue them for the credulous with an air of "scholarship," or a media echo chamber that endlessly repeats the latest easily digested soundbite or scandal while tons of real, extremely unimportant but boring news goes by unnoticed and undiscussed. It's a horrible rut to get into but a very easy one, as you're never caught out in cocktail party conversation, as everyone knows the same eight facts about any concievable subject. You're always ready with a "You know I heard that, and did you also know..."
I recognize that everyone must learn basic facts at least one time in their lives, and that I'm getting dangerously close to the doucheyness of declaring this or that type of entertainment "for idiots." It does however genuinely seem to me that people are made uncomfortable by venturing a sincere, original, honest opinion that has not previously been vetted by one of the only two legitimate ideologies in the country. Remember the next deep thought that comes into your head, be it about love, human relationships, art, politics, anything, and voice it to anyone you know, in any setting you deem most appropriate. How close of a friend would you have to go to to not get a tired marijuana joke as a response?

A Beautiful Mind
To be honest, the facet our culture's approach to intelligence that most disturbs me is not the chucklehead watching the Man Show and reading Maxim because that's what he thinks guys are supposed to do. Nor is it the blanding out of the middle class, which I suspect is just part of human nature. It's the way people, even - especially - other intelligent people look on IQ intellectualism, even learning, with a kind of holy terror. There's something intrinsically special about someone who is smarter than you, that neither you, nor any normal mortal, could ever hope to attain. Better then to stand reverently in awe a respectful distance away, carrying any utterances down the mountain for the edification of the masses.
It generally works like this, an intelligent, art-brain kind of person (I've always been bad at right/left, and I don't feel like googling it) reads some popscience book about quantum physics or string theory (It's almost always those) or conversely, a math-brain type person takes a philosophy or creative writing class and then goes on and on to their friends in the respective field how they'd never be able to get their head around that stuff.
Of course the only reason their friend got their head around it in the first place was tons of hard work, touched off by more tons of enthusiasm. As Americans that view is anathema of course, we prefer our heroes to be prodigies. Takes the onus off of us, if we were meant to be good at math wouldn't we have figured out calculus in our cribs, or if art, shouldn't we have scrawled the Last Supper on our nursery school walls? The most illustrative example I can think of is Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon plays a twenty something generalist autodidact who shits the answers to problems in fields from math, to biology, to colonial American history that have stumped professors who have made that field their life's work. Because that's what smart people are like right? They just know the answers? Regardless of the question?
It's not. No matter how intelligent someone is, all that means is that they are good at learning. We all start a blank slate, and some people are quicker at filling it in than others, but they still need to put in the work. Yes, Mozart wrote his first symphony at four, but does anyone listen to it? Someone who spends his life getting the shit beat out of him by foster parents or hanging out with a gang of clods from Southie isn't going to be able to argue precedent in his own trial. He'll probably come up with a really clever way to shank someone and get away with it when he's in prison, but that's it.
Besides the unrealism, the problem with this view is that it paints him, and intelligence, as a superhuman, and thus, unatainable. At twenty he knows more than it's likely possible to even learn in a lifetime. The equivalent would be Donnie Wahlberg walking onto the Link and pulling the goalposts up with his bare hands.
This is a horrible metaphor, but I can't think of any more fitting: The mind is a muscle. I will never be an Olympic marathoner, but there are studs I ran with in high school and college who burnt out, quit, and whom my mediocre ass would now run circles around. This means I am now a better runner than them. In the same way, IQ is is the potential to learn, just as talent is the potential for athletic greatness. What matters is how much of that potential is realized that depends on how often and consistently one works at realizing it.
Knowledge is not conferred innately by one's genes, but by study. I don't mean sitting with a book in the library study, although obviously that is one way. I mean keeping your eyes open and looking around you. Every day, you are presented with hundreds of opportunities to better yourself. Have one of those conversations I was talking about. Read a challenging book, or watch a difficult movie. If you have the option, try a few classes in the subject you kinda sorta wish you had a handle on. If you dislike your job or beak up with a girl/boyfriend, think about why, and what that says about you, and people in general. If you get lost, instead of turning around, point yourself in the general direction you want to go and find a new way there. Fuck sake, just watch the traffic lights and try to figure out the timing, save yourself a couple minutes on the commute every day.
The ranks of people descending into sub-mongoloid levels of outward intelligence wouldn't be so alarming to me if it seemed as though there was a sizeable population of people running in the opposite direction the way we chase after the opposite sex, or a career, or any of the more minor obsessions that fill everyone's lives. Math isn't hard, nor is philosophy, writing, art, or whatever type of intellectual endeavor that you "have tons of respect for" but "just don't get." You just haven't really tried. I know I haven't.

Muttering to myself through a megaphone...

So as of Korea I've definitely become radicalized politically and sociologically, I'm just not quite sure how, as smug, faux-liberal Johnny-come-latelys like Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann make me nearly as sick and angry as hateful lying cynics like Libaugh and Hannity.

Since Forty Minutes isn't really the forum for anything sincere or thoughtful, a general problem I see with the country which I'm going to address at some point as well, I figured I'd reactivate this website. Since perhaps 10 people even know about this site, and the last time any of them checked it was maybe April, I'll get a chance to put some stuff up and make sure none of it is too embarrassingly simpleminded once I put in on paper, as it were, before anyone else sees it.

Some things I've been thinking about, and will address later:

1. The fractiousness and self importance of liberals vs. the unity and goal orientation of the Republicans.

2. The elevation of ignorance, if not outright stupidity, to a virtue amongst the lower class, and everyone else's idolization of intelligence into the realm of magic.

3. The acceptance on the left of the fact that real tangible change is an impossibility, and that reality is here for our entertainment. i.e. Kucinich jokes, Kerry v. Dean, Nader "stealing" an election.

http://fortyminutesofhell.blogspot.com/

That is all

Yea, Floorbears.

So a while back I talked about how awesome it was to go to places in the off season in Korea, because everyone in the country with the means and free time packs whatever is "the" place this season, and then completely abandon it as suddenly as they arrived. Now I know how awesome it isn't to go to places during the high season.

I casually mentioned to a teacher that I ran to the top of the town's "mountain"... More of a hill, even going as far as calling it a "himllountain" is generous. Anyway, he took it as a sign that I was an avid mountaineer, and invited me out to NaeJang-san. This being the season that all the leaves were changing, it was something that was not to be missed, according to him.

Now I'm from the Pennsylvania Poconos, and have lived every fall of my life in PA one place or another. I'm intimately familiar with the lifecycle of deciduous trees, and the annoying bullshit phenomenon of "leafwatching" that people from crowded places - i.e.New Yorkers and Jersians - get up to this time of year. So I really have no excuse to complain, as a split second of thinking about what going to a national park in a country with a population which boasts a density roughly 15 times that of the U.S., and a flock-like collectivist mentality too boot would entail.

Mr. Sim met me at 5:30. In the Godfucking morning. Of a Saturday. I figured it was to get an early start on the day, so that we could both be in our respective homes, chillaxin, watching Korean's duke it out one of the two Starcraft channels on TV by 12, 1 at the latest. Turns out it was because every morning's fog is completely opaque before the sun comes up. So after driving for two and a half hours at 40km/hr we finally arrive, to a line that was literally miles long. Mr. Sim explained to me that the mountain was so beautiful this time of year that it attracted upwards of 60,000 people every day. I could have mentioned that the point of getting out in nature is not to be standing ass-high in Koreans, but I was busy dozing and drooling all over myself.

Eventually we get out of the car, and began the hike. Beautiful mountain, great views, had a blast, camera died after two pictures. Oh well. Walked all over the place, but as a reasonably in shape 20 something dragging two 40 year olds behind me, I had a lot of time to check out the mountainside. Or what I could see of it under the carpet of leafers. Problem with 60000 people hiking one trail is that 30,000 of them are coming the other way, and when you're on a mountainside with about 3 feet of walking space between the sheer rockwall and the 20 foot drop off, the Pushy Old Korean Broad barging her way past can sort of grate.

Can't complain, got a few nice pictures, my favorite of which is included. Gotta love the terror on the Alpen Bear's face, and the fact that baby bear is gonna get squooshed no matter what. Little morbid, but you damn sure look up when you're near those signs.

Goddamn Blog Fuck!

This blog thing is hard... reciting the alphabet backwards while being whipped in the eye with a nickel in a nylon stocking hard. If it weren't for you people whining all the time, I'd have probably taken this whole thing down. Here's why no stories. The school put blogger on their net nanny so I can only access the PG-13 parts of the web at an internet cafe after work - too busy doing anyhting else, on Friday night - never again, or on Saturday or Sunday - too hungover. Eventually But here it is. Another post. That is all

P.S. Eventually I'll get around to posting more regularly, and here's what you're in for:

Angry, dishonest men selling fruit

Justifiably pushy old broads

Unjustifiably opulent apartments for Army guys

Mountainous clusterfucks

Korean Hallmark Holidays

Prepubescent Boy Drag Show School Festival Time!

By the way, I'm unwilling to look, but I bet there's at least one porno website out there that's all about backwards singing while being beat about the face with spare change in a sock. Probably has some pretentious name too, like Sock Play or something.