Weekend Reading
“Americans start out at a young age learning classic adages like “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” Our time-honored golden rule has worked in every situation for me - until I got to Afghanistan. In Afghanistan the rule should read, “Do unto the Afghans as the Afghans do unto each other.” We should not expect them to embrace our approach simply because we believe we are efficient problem solvers. They see our approach as hasty and arrogant. We encroached on their culture so we must adapt and learn to collaborate in a more personal way. Our cultures are disparate but we can do this. My men and I have done it.”
“I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life. Such places once abounded. Well into the twentieth century there were many cities comprising multiple communities and languages—often mutually antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow coexisting. Sarajevo was one, Alexandria another. Tangiers, Salonica, Odessa, Beirut, and Istanbul all qualified—as did smaller towns like Chernovitz and Uzhhorod. By the standards of American conformism, New York resembles aspects of these lost cosmopolitan cities: that is why I live here.”
“A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals. They’re also less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda. If secular liberals can give up some of their snootiness, and if evangelicals can retire some of their sanctimony, then we all might succeed together in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity, like illiteracy, human trafficking and maternal mortality”
“Despite the occasional principled libertarian such as Ron Paul, a Christian who equates the Federal Reserve with Satan, the marriage of religious fundamentalists and market fundamentalists is holding. Why? Because, in the favorite word of Church Lady, it is so convenient. The Christian far right hates big government, and so does the commercial right. It may be annoying to socially moderate financial elites that the religious right is so crazed on the subject of gays, guns, and God, but these views do not affect the business elite where it lives.”
Geography is just physics slowed down,
with a couple of trees stuck in it.
In Defense of “Funny” Cultures
Tim Rogers’ take on contemporary Japan over at Kotaku is a great example of how people should not write about foreign cultures: with near-total subjectivity.
The piece is a laundry list of things Rogers, having lived in Japan for several years, dislikes about the place. A sampling:
Once, shortly after getting a new job, a coworker announced he was getting up to smoke a cigarette. He asked if I wanted to join him. I said I didn’t smoke. He was surprised. “I thought you said you were in a band?” Just like that: You’re in a band. You must smoke. Well. My excuse that I was just the vocalist, so I needed to keep my throat pure. He mentioned how Kurt Cobain apparently smoked five packs a day. Well. A couple years later, another person learned I didn’t smoke, and acted surprised. “I figured you must smoke because, you know; you play video games.” That’s a real stereotype, man. It exists. In Japan, gamers are smokers. Maybe this impression is born from the fact that breathing in Japanese arcades is pretty much exactly like dunking your head in a bucket of hot water and dead cigarettes. Don’t let the hype fool you: Japanese arcades are great because, you know, video games, though man, there is a hell of a lot of smoking going on in those places, man. Maybe the arcades only exist because people need some excuse to get away from their smoke-averse significant other and puff away.
Later, we read:
Chances are, if you’ve only spent a short time in Japan, you might have found it endearing. You really came to feel like you were in Asia, what with people screaming everywhere, like they would in an epic Chinese marketplace scene in an adventure film. This atmosphere is completely manufactured. Like, the biggest electronics stores actually keep ladders on hand so that certain employees can climb the ladders and scream indecipherable words down at the customers, through megaphones.
I do not use the word “indecipherable” lightly. Very seldom are the words actual words. A friend let me in on this secret. “You know, aside from ‘irasshaimase’, they’re not using actual words, most of the time.” He had prior job experience, see. Apparently, some stores actually demand that employees enlisted as barkers absolutely refrain from using actual words. That’s a little weird. I don’t like knowing things like that.
Look. There are a lot of legitimate cultural complaints one can have about Japan (or any other foreign culture)—specifically ones regarding negative social practices. And Rogers does touch lightly on a few of these, including the destructive drinking habits of salarymen, the social dysfunctions of the young hikikomori, and the domestic subordination of Japanese women. In all these areas and more, Japan has a lot of work to do.
But on the other hand, tradition is tradition. “That’s just how they do things” may sound like a cop-out, but its also a justification for bits of rituals that have slowly materialized over the course of years, decades, or centuries. And these bits, when brought together, make up a unique culture that is objectively different from other cultures. Yes, your cube-mates may chafe when you don’t say “Hello” in the morning. Yes, customer service may seem overly aggressive. And yes, people may smoke more in Tokyo than on Telegraph Hill.
But listen, that’s their culture. It’s different. It’s not “creepy” or “idiotic”, and certainly not “terrifying”. Please. Cannibalism is terrifying. Making a scene in public for the sake of office solidarity is, at least, jarring, and at most…Japanese. “I don’t like pachinko” is not legitimate cultural criticism.
Other parts of this article aren’t even remotely unique to Japan. You’re going to find tons of people who “agree to do things that they obviously hate doing” all over the world. American popular music is arguably equally as repetitive—and its subject matter much more offensive—than J-pop. And copy-cats, imitators, and up-givers are a dime a dozen in our contemporary society.
One advantage of a globalized world is the opportunity to celebrate different cultures while working to improve our own. This article, on the whole, simply denigrates one culture while imagining others’, including our own, as unquestionably superior. Which, as the world grows closer, is exactly the wrong way to look at things.
Rising in the East
Articles and commentary touting the accelerated rise of Asia in the face of global economic calamity are easy to find. But this WSJ piece in particular tucks away a crucial, nuanced point:
The global financial crisis has accelerated Japan’s increasing orientation toward Asia, economists say. High unemployment and personal debt have made typical American consumers less of a focus for Japanese companies, compared with their increasingly wealthy Asian peers.
Granted, as James Fallows has pointed out, there is lingering uncertainty about China’s true heft due to the inconvenient fact that most Chinese lack basic domestic necessities (running water, for instance) enjoyed by the entire developed world, most notably their South Korean and Japanese neighbors. Regardless, the slow turn of the world’s third-largest economic power towards a billion new consumers is really a huge change worth acknowledging, if not only in the beneficial short-term for China, but also in the detrimental long-term for the United States. If there was ever a way for Japan to avoid another lost decade, this could very well be it.
When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of the summer afternoon on a river bank, we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a real major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he’d like to be president of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.
Weekend Reading
“Year after year, undergraduates and M.A. students find themselves on fire to do research and to teach. Some of them burn for other things as well, and follow other paths. Some discover that their vocations are not deep enough to last out the process of testing. But many stick it out—and finish—only to find that the completed quest leads into Rats’ Alley. These are the people whom our system is now chewing up.”
“Kim Jong Il once told Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, that the bombast in honour of himself and his late, great father, Kim Il Sung, was so much nonsense. Bruce Cumings, an historian, wonders what Mr Kim can be thinking, “standing there in his pear-shaped polyester pantsuit, pointy-toed elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses of malevolent tint, an arrogant curl to his feminine lip…and a perpetual bad-hair day? He is thinking, get me out of here.”’
“But sip a Lagavulin 16 Years. It’s an Islay malt, so it engulfs you with peat, though as the smoke clears, you get a long, sweet finish, something like mille-feuille. Now try a square of Valrhona Jivara. Malt, caramel and vanilla ooze across your tongue, and there’s still just enough peat on your palate to dim the sugar and keep things manly. In an evening of whisky and chocolate tasting, this was the combo that got my guinea pigs oinking with glee.”
I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
Health and Federalism
The Corner notes that despite the White House’s comments, the Republican Health Coverage proposal has been available online for months. But there’s a big problem with it. And it lies with the states.
Stepping back, while Republicans have asserted—for a long time—that they’ve had a usable plan of their own on the table, there is not a single mention in their proposal regarding universal coverage to all citizens who lack it. (Which has always been the president’s core goal for a health care plan.)
The closest we find is in Division B, Title 2:
PAYMENTS TO STATES. — FOR PREMIUM REDUCTIONS IN THE SMALL GROUP MARKET. — If the Secretary determines that a State has reduced the average per capita premium for health insurance coverage in the small group market in year 3, in year 6, or year 9 (as defined in subsection (c)) below the premium baseline for such year (as defined paragraph (2)), the Secretary shall pay the State an amount equal to the product of — (i) bonus premium percentage (as de-fined in paragraph (3)) for the State, market, and year; and (ii) the maximum State premium payment amount (as defined in paragraph (4)) for the State, market, and year.
So basically, their primary incentive mechanism for reduction in uninsured citizens is…financial gifts to states. The bill then tasks the states with “reducing the average per capital premium for health insurance coverage in the individual market.” If a state somehow manages to cut the cost of private insurance plans in their state, they get a reward. In the form of federal dollars. This is as close as it gets to “expanding coverage.”
The rest of the bill deals mostly in boilerplate, like tort reform (which is included in a watered-down form in the current bills), a reduction of funding for comparative effectiveness research, and a reiteration of party commitment to…Medicare.
What’s really more interesting, however, is the concept of a federalism that is meant to somehow coexist with two overtly anti-federalist proposals: 1) the expansion of insurance companies’ influence across state lines, which would inevitably (as evidenced by the evolution of American telecommunication, communications service, and retail industries over the past 20-30 years) lead to less competition due to intra-industry mergers and acquisitions, and 2) the intrusion of state governments into local free markets. The contradition is totally unresolved in this bill. Yet it’s meant to be the crux of a novel insurance coverage program. How is this supposed to work? And, when all is said and done, how would this leave the states, other than overburdened and quite possibly bankrupt?
