StarWrighter's Open Salon Blog

An Asian Man Wishes that America Would Stay (Mostly) White

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 09:11:03 -0500

White America is passing. Browse the analyses of the Republican Party's presidential defeat, its two decade long trend of overall loss. Read the stories, and one theme emerges insistently, inexorably : demography. America is becoming less white, and therefore less reactionary. In a few decades, it won't be a majority white country at all.

I mourn. Not for reaction, but for race. I do so even as a Chinese-American, as an Asian person who has been a victim of vicious schoolyard racism, who bears the weight of the scorn, however, subterranean, that this culture views Asians with, especially Asian men.

Before I'm tarred and feathered for this by my fellow liberals and minorities, and before any racists seize on my sentiments to justify themselves, let me explain.

I grew up in the 80's, a decade whose dawn saw an America that was still 87% white. America to me is what it has been for all of its history
history so far : a mostly white country with a strong mix of minorities.

And I resist the change of that. For the same reason that someone might resist painting their childhood bedroom a different color : sentimental attachment to the home where they grew up, where they discovered life, where they found themselves, where they loved and lived.

Perhaps you think that I have absorbed the Euro- and caucasian-centrism of our culture, and that this leads me to elevate white people above others, in some kind of reverse-upside-down-inverted racism and self hatred?

Let me ask you this : supposing that, through immigration and assimilation, that China were to cease to have an overwhelming majority of Han Chinese, and become, say, 51% caucasian. Let's even say that these white people were assimilated, so that they were culturally Chinese.

Put aside the fact that this could never mathematically happen, or that assimilation of other races into Chinese culture (most cultures, in fact) is problematic. Put aside practical issues, and just do the thought experiment. What if this could happen, and it did?

Wouldn't something just feel off? Isn't China supposed to be a certain way, one which does not include being majority white? The color of a person's skin, the shape of their eyes, none of these things should matter in interpersonal relations. But they do make a difference in the identity of a culture. Of cultures.

I'd prefer China remain Chinese and not caucasian, and I don't think this is wrong. I'd prefer that Egypt retains its current racial composition rather than becoming racially Asian, Kenya black rather than white, and I don't think any of that is wrong either.

One can take these understandable sentiments and twist them into justifications for racism and Apartheid, but I hope it's apparent by now that this is not where I'm coming from.

America is a different creature than most other countries in that it is a nation of recent immigrants, and the American identity is accessible to anyone regardless of race. This is an unusual and attractive proposition, and I do not propose to undo it.

In fact, I'm not proposing any course of action, because in our national context (as opposed to the context of a long established traditional culture such as China or Egypt trying to preserve its identity), any such action would be racist.

Rather, I'm acknowledging my sadness at the changing of something familiar to which I am emotionally bonded, something intimate and comfortable, and grappling with the fact that this might be politically incorrect.

I am not, of course, bonded to the unbelievable and backward conservatism that white voters as a demographic show. If European socialism arrives on American shores on a demographic tide, a tide which makes this country a more tolerant place, if that's what it takes, so be it.

But that doesn't stop me from feeling a sense of loss, the kind that always comes when something you love changes beyond recognition.

Basically, I want my world to stay the same, just without the bad stuff. This is not racist or self hating. It's human.

No, You Are NOT Surrounded by Penises and Vaginas

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 07:06:45 -0400

Well, you are, in the sense that you are surrounded by human beings, who possess these things. But contrary to what you think, you are not in fact surrounded by objects which look like penises and vaginas.

You don't think that, you say? Think again.

Americans suffer from penis-vision. We see penises everywhere. Every building, every rocket or missile, even breakfast meat, every kind of every elongated object will sooner or later be compared to a penis. We have penis on the brain. I can't even think to myself the word "shaft" without its sexual connotations bouncing somewhere through my mind, however faintly, even though it is not a sexual word. And I bet the same is true of you.

This is true to a lesser extent of vaginas. See this picture below?

It's a flower. I'll bet many of you thought it looked like a vagina. I found it, as a matter of fact, on a blog someone dedicated to what she refers to as her "Pokey".

And I state categorically that this is a culturally specific phenomenon. There are other cultures whose members would look at that picture and think "flower", and not in a million years think "vagina". Skeptical? See this news story below.

Chinese farmers found a sex toy, a fake vagina, and thought it was some kind of weird mushroom. "Well," you think to yourself, "a bunch of hayseeds, of course they don't know what it is." But then they called in a news crew, and the local TV station did an entire news story on this strange new mushroomwithout ever realizing what it is.

No-one from the reporter, to the news crew, on through the people who edited and worked on the video, all the way to the news anchor, realized what it was. It never occurred to these sophisticated, well educated Chinese.

"Well," you think smugly to yourself, "what a bunch of sexually repressed and backwards people these Chinese are."

Actually, no. It's just not a part of the culture. American culture specifically, (and I'd say Western culture in general, based on my experience with Europeans), is sexually obsessed. It's not just the ubiquity of sexual images in our media, or the prevalence of pornographic conventions and thinking in our recent culture. It's ingrained at a more basic level than that.

It is true that up until recently, cultural and societal factors prevented Chinese from expressing themselves sexually outside of marriage. I would even characterize this as sexual repression.

But pre-marital sex is becoming increasingly common in China. Levels of cohabitation are rising among young people. And yet, even with all this liberalization and opening up, people aren't suddenly starting to see genitals all over the place. They are not even gradually starting to see genitals all over the place.

Here is how big and basic this difference is : penis size is not an issue in China. The size of a man's penis is not considered to indicate anything about his manliness.

You are no doubt feeling surprise and disbelief at this. I am Chinese-American, have spent much of my life moving around in circles of recent Chinese immigrants, and have spent a year teaching English in China. I speak fluent Mandarin, and have never once heard penis size referred to as an indicator of masculinity in Chinese conversation, and rarely hear penis jokes.

The size of what this reminds your Western

brain of is not important in China.

(Perhaps you are thinking : Haha! Of course it doesn't matter! They all have small penises! Well, go ahead and get that out of your system and then keep reading.)

(Also, I have been with non-Asian women and have heard no complaints. Including your girlfriend, your mom, your wife. Also, your not-yet-conceived daughter. I did her last night, in fact. How is that possible? Ask her yourself in 23 years.)

To understand how ridiculous this genital obsession seems to cultures who do not have it, do the following thought experiment.

Imagine that you know a person who loves lettuce. Just can't get enough of it. And they see lettuce everywhere. Every vaguely round thing looks like a head of lettuce to them, they're always making lettuce jokes, their humor is shot through with lettuce references. They see the world through a lettuce lens.

Your first reaction to this person would be, should be : "What is your problem? Why do you see this one utterly random object everywhere?"

A Virgnia class submarine, not a penis firing another penis.

The surprise that you likely feel when told that other cultures are not necessarily obsessed with penises and vaginas is a reflection of an American and Western ethnocentrism. It is true of all cultures that many of their ways of thinking are idiosyncratic and do not hold in other cultures. It is also true that people tend to experience their own culture's ways as natural and obvious, even when they are aware of differences with other cultures.

But there is a certain blindness to this in America about American culture. Many aspects of American culture, from the irony heavy style of American humor, to the body language of Americans, is unconsciously assumed to be human, rather than specifically American. Much of it, in fact, wasn't even true fifty years ago in the United States.

It is frankly very dull, uninteresting, and unimaginative that every single thing in life should be viewed through the prism of sex. I can only hear so many penis or vagina references in a given amount of time and not feel bored by it all. This includes what I hear from my own self, in my own mind, as I too grew up here and have internalized all of this.

So just remember, as you walk around all day thinking that everything around you is phallic or vaginic (a word which I just made up) : it's in your head. The penises and vaginas do not have you surrounded. You may relax.

Whose Environment Was Worse? The US, USSR, and Our Media

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 12:06:11 -0400

Colorado writer Kristen Iversen has recently published a damning expose of US government malfeasance at the former nuclear weapons plant in Rocky Flats, Colorado. The book was profiled yesterday by Fresh Air on NPR. In a nutshell, the government and the private contractors running the facility completely disregarded the safety of the public, allowing it to seriously contaminate the surrounding area, including the city of Denver, for decades, producing serious public health consequences.

As I listened to this, two things crossed my mind. First : I am never going to Rocky Flats. The plant was closed down in 1989, and they are now going to reopen the place, after a controversial "clean-up", as a wildlife refuge and public park. In fact, I'm going to be wary of visiting Denver from now on. Maybe I'll even stop listening to John Denver songs. No more Country Roads for me.

Secondly, as all this happened during the Cold War, it struck me how differently this has been treated by our media compared to the Soviet Union's environmental record, and how our media treats the world in general.

But before I go into that, let's look at what went on at Rocky Flats.

1.) In 1969, a horrific fire in the plutonium facilities sent a radioactive cloud over the Denver metropolitan area. It is unknown how much radioactive material was released into the atmosphere because the fire destroyed all filters and sensors in the building. The building's roof bubbled and expanded like a marshmallow. Had the roof blown, which it came very close to doing, the incident would have become a Chernobyl scale disaster. That it did not was due to both luck and the brave actions of the firefighters who fought the blaze.

2.) Plutonium particles from the fire were found in elementary schools 12 miles away. Millionths of a gram of plutonium are enough to cause cancer if those micrograms manage to enter the body (through, for instance, inhalation.) The fire left contamination of various levels all throughout the Denver metro area.

3.) From 1959 to 1970, 5000 barrels of radioactive waste were stored in poorly managed, unsafe conditions on site. The bottoms rusted out from many of these, leaking waste into the soil, the water table, and finally the local water supply. Levels of radiation beneath the barrels were found to be 15 million times the level considered safe.

4.) Oh, there was a another big fire in 1957.

5.) The bottom of nearby Stanley Lake is contaminated with plutonium laced sediment. Yet it is still used a a source of drinking water for local communities. The rationale is that as long as the particles aren't stirred up, they won't flow into people's taps, therefore it's safe. The lake is off limits to swimmers, because swimming, you know, moves water around and churns stuff up.

6.) It got so bad that the FBI and EPA raided the plant and shut it down in 1989, but only after four decades of operation.

7.) No-one went to prison. No-one was even indicted. Rockwell, which ran the facility in 1989, was fined $18.5 million, which seems like a lot of money until you consider that that is how much the company was paid that year as a bonus for running the plant.

8.) The grand jury report and all related evidence and exhibits were sealed on national security grounds. The grand jurors were infuriated by the outcome of the legal process, and would very much have liked to have made a great hue and cry over the matter, yet were and are unable to disclose most of what they know because they could be thrown in prison for revealing state secrets.

9.) The author grew up in Rocky Flats. Her family as well as those of her friends and neighbors have long faced abnormally high cancer rates, without any apparent explanation, until all this came to light.

And that's just a taste. The litany of incompetence, cover-ups, and blatant not-giving-a-damn about the public's well being just goes on and on.

Might we at least get some mutant turtles

out of this whole thing?

Now all that's bad enough. Imagine that this had happened in the Soviet Union. (Or even Russia today, since many of the same stereotypes are being revived.) Just imagine it. Now see how much worse that seems, without my having to say anything else? It seems that way because we're accustomed to hearing about those countries talked about a certain way in our media.

I grew up in the 1980's. And I began paying attention the news in 4th grade. (Yes, I was that kind of kid.) And I remember quite clearly how often the Soviet Union's enviromental record was trotted out, how it was depicted as being very bad, and how that was framed as evidence that their entire system was rotten and corrupt.

Now, I am not an expert in these matters. I do not know whose pollution was worse. But I do very clearly remember the types of abuses that our press documented in their country, and can't help but notice that they're often the exact same ones that our same press documents in ours.

On the one hand, our media says theirs was much worse. That could be true for all I know. On the other hand, there is this 1974 paper from the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management which says otherwise. (Confession, I just now Googled that, as I am not an expert in this field.)

Also, I remember very clearly reading in the 80's that Soviet air pollution then was no worse than American air pollution before the Clean Air Act. (I read that in a mainstream American news source, something along the lines of Time - I wish I had had the foresight to save the reference for twenty years later, but I didn't, so you're going to have to take my word for it.) That's bad, but America before the Clean Air Act is not depicted in our media as a toxic waste dump, in contrast to how they depict the Soviet Union.

I also know quite a few people who grew up in the Soviet Union or in Communist Eastern Europe. Whatever their other complaints, what they have told me doesn't make it sound like they lived in a toxic waste dump.

I am not saying that I would prefer a Soviet system to ours. I rather like actually being able to call a plumber and not having to wait two months for him to show up, and also easily being able to find a restaurant that has decent service. Not to mention that we have decent video games. And the whole democracy thing.

My point is that our media has a massive double standard when reporting on the Soviet Union. Government corruption and malfeasance here is simply a phenomenon, a thing that exists, part of life, and does not reflect poorly on our entire system. The exact same corruption and malfeasance over there is presented as evidence that they generally sucked. The Soviet Union is gone, but when speaking of that past era, the prejudice persists.

And this is important for the present day because our media is still biased against countries and movements that the people who have power in our country don't like, and don't want the rest of us to like.

Big recent example : Libya. Muammar Ghaddafi is consistently presented as a thoroughly evil person with no redeeming qualities. The rebels who overthrew him are usually depicted as the good guys, fighting for human rights.

Our media manages to depict things this way even as they occasionally acknowledge that the rebels frequently murder, torture, and terrorize their political opponents. And this is done in the same way that the USSR was demonized. The other side's faults and atrocities are reported repeatedly and frequently, and the reporting is framed as evidence of their general evil. Our allies' and our own faults and atrocities are only occasionally reported, and when they are reported, they are at the least not taken to be evidence of general wickedness.

And it frequently goes beyond that, as these abuses are often minimized. "Waterboarding" is given a neutral and innocuous name when we use it, and whether it is even torture is a subject of serious debate in our media. Yet the United States and its allies executed Japanese military commanders after World War II for using the exact same technique on Allied servicemen because it was considered a war crime.

All of this is simply a way for people who have power in our country to get everyone to support the policies they want us to support, and when they want to drop the bombs, to fight the battles they want us to fight. It's very similar to what the Soviet Union did, in fact. In their case, the people who had power were essentially the small group of leaders at the top of the Communist Party.

In our case, it is much more diffuse. It's a class of people who have both money and power, whose interests align, rather than a highly visible organization. These include politicians, their rich backers, the rich owners of our media. This is not a conspiracy theory. Rather, it's a statement that people whose material interests align are generally, though not always, going to work towards the same goals in a general way. No central conspiracy is required. And what they want to defend is our system, something which rewards them so richly, from a competing system, the Soviet system. (Again, I'd rather live here than the USSR, but my point still holds.)

And until we recognize this, there will be more Iraqs. There will be more Vietnams. In fact, we may soon be facing a Syria or an Iran. If there is, it will be because people will be duped into going along with it by our media.

It will be because our media can look at Rocky Flats and say (rightfully) that America is not evil, while concluding, in blatant contradiction, that the same abuses show that the Soviet Union was evil. It will be because our media disseminates propaganda. And most of our citizens don't even realize it.

The Importance of Voting Democratic, Even If They Suck

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:05:53 -0400

As I have already blogged, on Tuesday "North Carolina voted to enshrine discrimination against gays and lesbians in its state constitution. Amendment One, banning gay marriage, passed with the approval of 59% of voters."

This whole episode reminds me of just how important it is to vote Democratic. Even if Democrats majorly suck.

Democrats, who cringe when called "liberal" and outright cower when called "socialist", as though those are bad things and the Republicans are actually right. Democrats, who couldn't even give us a public option in their health care reform law. Democrats, who insult their own base while pandering to the other side's.

I was considering staying home in November rather than having to vote for Obama again. Others apparently feel the same.

(Note : I wasn't seriously considering staying home. It more like a child's revenge fantasy. But it sounds more dramatic to say I was.)

But no. This poll result reminds me that even though Democrats are Republican-Lite, that the "Lite" is very important.

Democrats blocked Amendment One when they had the legislative votes to do so. It was only with Republican gains in the state's General Assembly that the measure went through to a referendum.

Don't get me wrong. If there ever comes a serious presidential candidate of the left, I will vote for that person in the general election even if he or she cannot win, so long as the candidate stands a realistic chance of changing the conversation.

Even then, however, I would weigh that against the damage that might be done if another George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan makes his way into the White House. (Though a President Sarah Palin might be kind of entertaining.)

I am very willing to vote my conscience, to vote for socialists and Occupiers, for non-presidential offices. We need more Bernie Sanderses . And I do in fact vote that way even in Democratic presidential primaries (Yes, I'm a registered Democrat. Barf.)

But the presidency is too important not to vote strategically at times (and frankly, that's going to be true for "lesser" offices as well.) At the very minimum, one must consider the fact that presidents get to appoint Supreme Court Justices, and that these appointments outlast the presidents themselves by decades, and the decisions that these justices hand down may do so by centuries.

That Lite difference between Democrats and Republicans made the difference between Amendment One and no Amendment One, just as it made the difference between the Civil Rights Act and segregation in 1964.

That is why I will vote for President Obama in November, even if I'm holding my nose when I do so.

Because he sucks.

Conservatives Win Gay Battle, Lose Gay War

Wed, 9 May 2012 12:05:20 -0400

Yesterday, North Carolina voted to enshrine discrimination against gays and lesbians in its state constitution. Amendment One, banning gay marriage, passed with the approval of 59% of voters.

Even so, anti-gay conservatives are losing. They are losing badly. They are losing so badly that they have to resort to state constitutional amendments in order to stem their losing tide of losing loss.

Consider demographics. Young people are in favor of gay marriage by a margin of two-to-one. Young people are the future. Conservatives have lost the future.

Consider culture. I can remember a time when there were no gay characters on TV. Then there was Will and Grace. And now, from Modern Family to Glee, positive gay characters are no cause for comment. (Well, in the case of Glee, gay characters which are no more screwed up than the straight characters.)

Conservatives have lost the culture. And they know it.

Consider the country as a whole. According to nationwide polls, the majority of Americans now favor gay marriage. Here is one by Gallup , which shows not only present day attitudes, but a quite obvious long range trend, one which tracks closely with the aforementioned cultural shifts.

These state constitutional amendments are a rear guard effort to fend off impending defeat. Fingers in the dike.