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.