W/e Poetry Slam: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Pity)

The second poem, another by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was inspired directly by the first and shares its title. Ferlinghetti updated the language of Gibran’s poem eighty years later and gave it a bit more wry wit (Ferlinghetti’s hallmark), but the basic message in 2006 is much the same as it was in the 1930s.

Pity the Nation

BY: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerers
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

Weeaboo, and Otaku Too

Several years ago, in a world history survey, I was using Dezaki Osamu’s 2009 animated adaptation of Tale of Genji to introduce the Heian era classic to my students. It wasn’t the first time I had used it, and in general the move had received positive reviews (if for no other reason than it meant a break from me droning on at the front of the room). This time around, as soon as the credits for the show started to roll, a student yelled out, “Oh man, professor is a weeaboo!”

“Weeaboo,” for the uninitiated, is a stinging neologism used to describe someone not of East Asian descent (usually a young, white American male) who shows what is considered to be an inappropriate affinity for East Asian culture (usually anime and manga). The guy who used the term was a good student, one who had established himself as a good source of non-disruptive comic relief during particularly dull lectures. The comment wasn’t mean-spirited, even if the term is, and I laughed it off. But I found myself later questioning whether or not I should keep using the clip; something about being called a “weeaboo” subconsciously cut to the heart of my legitimacy as an instructor.

There is a decided stigma attached to being what is now known on both sides of the Pacific as an “otaku.” The word “otaku” is derived rather benignly from the Japanese word for home, but–when applied to a person–it refers negatively to someone who is a fanatic about (usually) his hobbies. One could be a stamp-collecting otaku or a baseball otaku, but most often in Japan it is used to refer to fans of anime and manga. In the US it is used exclusively this way.

The term became something of a bête noire in Japanese cultural discourse at the end of the twentieth century after the Japanese economic bubble burst. Otaku were considered to be socially inept, a drain on the economy, incapable of operating normally in Japanese society, and for all these reasons somehow inadequately Japanese. Intense interest in anime and manga was assumed to lead to a variety of undesirable outcomes; it was, in essence, a kind of gateway cultural drug. Otaku were more likely to become hikikomori, shut ins who have become at once an increasingly real problem in Japanese society and at the same time a bugbear that Japanese conservatives trot out to scare parents. Otaku were more likely to become herbivorous males (a term for men who had no interest in or no capacity to navigate the requirements of sex, marriage, and reproduction) or, for women, parasite singles (a term for women who out of selfish motives or lack of ambition continued to live with their parents rather than getting married and moving out).

Most frightening, however, was the assumed potential of otaku for criminality. This burst dramatically into the Japanese public consciousness in 1989 when Miyazaki Tsutomu was arrested for the murder and subsequent sexual violation of four elementary age girls. Like rock music after Columbine, the media seized on the presence of anime in his home to dub Miyazaki the “Otaku Murderer” and to question the role of anime in warping his mind. This created a stereotype about the violent (often pedophilic) otaku that tarred all devoted fans of anime and manga. It also created a useful framework for explaining (and therefore minimizing the psychological impact) of future crimes. When Kobayashi Kaoru murdered a seven-year-old girl in 2004, otaku culture again became the scapegoat. Since 2010 the tide has been turning, particularly now that the Japanese government has embraced the “Cool Japan” image and the economic and soft power potential of Japanese anime and manga. Even so, the cultural stereotypes linger.

Some of these are shared by Americans who deploy the term “otaku” derisively. American fans of anime and manga are typically depicted as in some way socially handicapped and sexually impotent. Yet there are important differences in the way that these stereotypes are constructed, and the American deployment of the term “otaku”—and to an even greater extent “weeaboo”—draws from an older and substantially darker historical tradition. In many ways, it is a modern repackaging of the Victorian notion of “going native.” During the high point of nineteenth century imperialism, major global powers sent merchants, bureaucrats, and missionaries to all corners of the world out of Europe and the United States. These figures were supposed to be an enlightening vanguard of a superior civilization for the backward parts of the world. They were supposed to model higher culture to lesser peoples and act as quotidian agents of cultural conquest wherever they went.

For the most part, this worked. Euro-American cultural forms became an important avenue of imperialism, as Western sartorial norms, time keeping, language, food, and architecture have now become truly global. There were, however, a group of Westerners living abroad (real people and rhetorical constructs) who refused to play the roles they were assigned. They dressed in the clothes of their host country. They ate the cuisine of their host country. They learned the language of their host country. They even committed the cardinal sin of marrying (rather than just bedding) the people of their host country and bearing legally legitimate but racially mongrel children. These defective Victorians had to be excommunicated from the imperial cultures, and so they were said to have “gone native,” to have given up their core Western identity in favor of a decidedly lesser form of culture and civilization.

Fast forward a century and a half, and the same implications are embedded in the dismissive and derisive treatment of otaku in American culture. The implication of calling someone a “weeaboo” (what had me so subconsciously alarmed when my student said it of me) is that you have somehow become unmoored from your own identity in favor of a caricature of a lesser people. To be a weeaboo is to somehow be inadequately or inauthentically American—which is to say inadequately or inauthentically white. The racially coded nature of the message is made all-too-explicit in the Urban Dictionary definition of the term:

A person who retains an unhealthy obsession with Japan and Japanese culture, typically ignoring or even shunning their own racial and cultural identity.

The parallel to “going native” is evident when we realize that there is no corresponding slur for people of East Asian descent who eat McDonalds, speak broken English, wear clothes from Forever 21, and watch “Friends.” It is considered normal, inevitable, even desirable for American culture to seep into and overwrite the cultures of other people. In more benign terms, it is called acculturation, assimilation, or globalization; the Victorians would have called it civilization. Only the opposite motion is stigmatized.

When my student called out in shock that I was a “weeaboo,” I’m quite sure he wasn’t intending to call my racial identity into question. If asked outright, I’m sure he would never say that I was inadequately white or even inauthentically American. He certainly would never say that Japanese culture is inferior to American culture and therefore unsuitable for admiration or adoption. But he was accusing me of “going native” nevertheless. Those terms sting precisely because they speak to actual fears about national, racial, or cultural integrity. The term would not exist and it wouldn’t be deployed if Americans (myself included) didn’t harbor fears about the legitimacy of an identity that, in many ways, is indebted to our Victorian predecessors. Breaking that dependence on a nineteenth-century mindset involves people like my student no longer throwing those terms around blithely and derisively. Importantly, though, it also involves people like me not being bothered by them. If we’re talking about a respectful appreciation and productive blending of cultures, there are worse things than going native.

The Problem of Equality

In the introduction to a collection of his essays, political theorist George Kateb makes this jarring and insightful point about the notion of equality and how it really functions in societies (including the much vaunted American democracy):

The general point is that though equality may suit the imagination of an autocrat or an elite when the many are equal in subjection or slavery, the many themselves strive to become unequal. There is something unlovable about equality; so much so that it often feels like a condition accepted for want of a better one, and a consolation for those who cannot break out of it. If people cannot be better than those around them, they will lend themselves to the efforts of those who run their society to dominate other societies. And those who run society will always dream of plans to achieve a finer, more coherent or organic pattern of political relations elsewhere. One ingredient of imperialism is the desire of leaders to shake off the restraints imposed by democratic politics at home and treat other societies, especially non-democratic ones, as fit for the dictatorial imposition of democracy or some other rule. Imperialism provides the aesthetic intoxication of destroying and remaking customs and relations, rules and institutions. The leaders could not get started unless the many craved some of these same aesthetic gratifications and were willing to settle for vicarious triumph over others. Athens was democratic and imperialistic; America is the same.

I did not read the whole book, Patriotism and Other Mistakes, or even, with any vigor, the whole introduction, so I cannot really make a recommendation for the work as a whole. This point, however, seems to me to strike on two vital and related truths which are often ignored. First, the lower classes of society idolize and pursue equality only because inequality (i.e. dominance), while more desirable, is even farther outside their grasp. Second, even in societies where equality is enshrined as a theoretical ideal, the whole society, rather than merely the easily demonized master class, engages in imperialism as a way of grasping at the desired inequality which is inaccessible in an ostensibly democratic nation. Both combine to play with common notions of who the villains are in our narrative of injustice and whether or not even those who espouse the right ideology are fully aware of their motives.

There is, of course, substantial room for argument, but the approach and the conclusions in Kateb’s quote demand engagement.

#400

Once upon a time, I believed reaching one hundred posts was a momentous occasion, one so memorable that I would want to do something, for myself, to mark it.  The commemoration has become a personal tradition, and so, on this my four hundredth post, I offer you once again my favorite ten quotes from the previous ninety-nine posts.

10) An interview on Talking Philosophy with Alain de Botton proved to be my most interesting interaction with any atheist thinkers in the past hundred posts.  His thoughts pointed to dangers in atheistic thinking and proposed, in deliberate critique of New Atheists, various senses in which religion was a good thing, even as an atheist.  From Leading Atheist on What’s Wrong with Atheism:

Attempting to prove the non-existence of god can be entertaining…Though this exercise has its satisfactions, the real issue is not whether god exists or not, but where one takes the argument to once one decides that he evidently doesn’t. The premise of my book is that it must be possible to remain a committed atheist and nevertheless to find religions sporadically useful, interesting and consoling – and be curious as to the possibilities of importing certain of their ideas and practices into the secular realm.

9) I am deeply enamored of the thought of Eugene Genovese, a fact which will probably become evident over the next few weeks.  In a criticism of southern support for American imperialism, I quoted Genovese, among others, to demonstrate the hypocrisy of Imperialism in the Imperialized South:

The history of the Old South is now often taught at leading universities, when it is taught at all, as a prolonged guilt-trip, not to say a prologue to the history of Nazi Germany…To speak positively about any part of this southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity – an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white southerners and arguably black southerners as well, of their heritage, and, therefore, their identity.

8) Of the critical series I have written in this cycle, the one I most enjoyed researching and producing was my exposition of complementarianism in response to Roger Olson.  The great quote, on the other hand, likely came from the Founding Father’s series.  In Illusions of Innocence, I applied Richard T. Hughes and Leonerd Allen’s thesis about primitivism in American Protestantism and applied it to American political primitivism.  To conclude, I quoted their evaluation of Roger Williams primitivist thought, a historically unsustainable but ideologically more appealing variety:

For Williams, the radical finitude of human existence, entailing inevitable failures in understanding and action, makes restoration of necessity an open-ended concept. The absolute, universal ideal existed for Williams without question. But the gap between the universal and the particular, between the absolute and the finite, was so great that it precluded any one-on-one identification of the particular with the universal…the best one could do was approximate the universal, an approximation that occurred only through a diligent search for truth.

7) Though most of the series on Christianity and Jain occurred earlier, the day after the three hundredth post, I added to the comparative study Christ, Jain, and Mutual Forgiveness.  Here is some wisdom from Mahavira on the subject:

If, during the retreat, among monks or nuns occurs a quarrel or dispute or dissension, the young monk should ask forgiveness of the superior, and the superior of the young monk. They should forgive and ask forgiveness, appease and be appeased, and converse without restraint.

6) Long overdue, I finally shared a selection of quotes in The Wisdom of the Pilgrim connecting my longstanding love of fourteenth century hesychasm with a more recent text:

[O]ne of the most lamentable things is the vanity of elementary knowledge which drives people to measure the Divine by a human yardstick.

5) For Easter–that is East Easter not West Easter–I shared a few notes from the Ecumenical Patriarch about the meaning of life in Christ made possible by his death and resurrection and the destructive attempts of people to secure life apart from him.  From Christos Anesti!:

There is no need for some nations to be destroyed in order for other nations to survive. Nor is there any need to destroy defenseless human lives so that other human beings may live in greater comfort. Christ offers life to all people, on earth as in heaven. He is risen, and all those who so desire life may follow Him on the way of Resurrection. By contrast, all those who bring about death, whether indirectly or directly, believing that in this way they are prolonging or enhancing their own life, condemn themselves to eternal death.

4) Buried deep in the recesses of a response to a Fox News article, Invade Iran (et al) for Christ!, is perhaps one of my favorite short quotes from any of the early church fathers.  Here is Justin Martyr’s response to persecution:

You can kill us, but you can’t hurt us.

3) Of all the wonderful cow stories–and I had options this time around–that have been shared here throughout the years, none had me more excited than finding an archival story about Grady, the cow who got stuck in a silo and captured the imagination of a nation.  On This Day in Cow History celebrated her generations old story, and its very happy ending:

What’s in store for Grady? “Well, I believe she’s earned peace and quiet the rest of her life,” Mach [her owner] said. “She’s had more excitement than most cows.”

2) My commentary on J. W. McGarvey’s sermons offered throughout the month of his birth was littered with excellent quotes.  McGarvey was, however, perhaps most poetic and profound when he recorded his thoughts On Prayer:

If God was a God who did not hear our prayers, or care anything about our prayers, He might as well be made of ice. He is a living God; a God who has friends, and loves His friends; and this is the reason that He will do something for them when they cry to Him. Don’t think of God as mere abstraction, or as a being who keeps Himself beyond the sky; but think of Him as one who lives with you, who is round about you, who lays His hand under your head when you lie down to rest. So in praying, pray with the confidence of little children…Pray in the morning; pray at the noontide; pray when you lie down to sleep…Pray often; pray earnestly; and in order that your prayer may amount to anything, be righteous men and women.

1) The Anarchy in May series is perhaps the most fun I have ever had here, and selecting a single quote from a month of my favorite thinkers is exceedingly difficult.  More than anything, this selection from Tolstoy on Moral Culpability, is appropriate because of Tolstoy’s preeminent place in the history of anarchism:

[W]e are responsible for our own misdeeds. And the misdeeds of our rulers become our own, if we, knowing that they are misdeeds, assist in carrying, them out. Those who suppose that they are bound to obey the government, and that the responsibility for the misdeeds they commit is transferred from them to their rulers, deceive themselves.

I can only hope that the next hundred posts flow as easily and are as much fun to write as the last hundred were.

Imperialism in the Imperialized South

Historian Joel Williamson wrote of William Faulkner that he had been “born into and reared among an imperialized people…IN writing about their plight, he met the plight of the imperialized people of the world, the people whose land had been raped and labor taken to supply raw materials for the factories of the industrial powers.” It is a too often forgotten, ignored, or suppressed truth of American history that the South is in fact a territory of the imperialistic North. That sounds reactionary, superficial, and tribalist. I’m aware. Nevertheless, on purely empirical grounds, it is difficult to contest that the Civil War–without commenting on the justness of its motivations or outcomes–was the exaltation of national interest over regional autonomy such that a territory and its population were nationalized by force of arms rather than consent from the governed. That is the essence of imperialism, and its effects have been felt in the South for more than a century and a half. It was the context that produced Faulkner and it is the silent force that is at work in shaping southern identity still.

Consider Eugene Genovese’s account of the intellectual imperialism which dominates the history of the South as a discipline:

The northern victory in 1865 silenced a discretely southern interpretation of American history and national identity, and it promoted a contemptuous dismissal of all things southern as nasty, racist, immoral, and intellectually inferior. The northern victory did carry out a much too belated abolition of slavery. But it also sanctified northern institutions and intentions, which included the unfettered expansion of a bourgeois world view and the suppression of alternate visions of social order. In consequence, from that day to this, the southern conservative critique of modern gnosticism has been wrongly equated with racism and white supremacy…

The history of the Old South is now often taught at leading universities, when it is taught at all, as a prolonged guilt-trip, not to say a prologue to the history of Nazi Germany…To speak positively about any part of this southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity – an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white southerners and arguably black southerners as well, of their heritage, and, therefore, their identity. They are being taught to forget their forebears or to remember them with shame…It is one thing to silence people, another to convince them. And to silence them on matters central to their self-respect and dignity is to play a dangerous game – to build up in them harsh resentments that, sooner or later, are likely to explode and bring out their worst.

Genovese’s picture is convicting primarily because it speaks so directly to the experience of all Americans who have, at some point, sat through a variety of academic courses and participated in a public discourse which sees the South as the ideological punching bag of the dominant cultural and intellectual forces. But my interest here is not to bemoan the ongoing cultural, intellectual, and economic marginalization of the South. It is, instead, to draw attention to the hypocrisy which the realization that southerners are an imperalized people brings to light. In spite of more than a century of being told that its systems of power, its culture, its values, and its economic models are inferior and even evil (and in some cases they assuredly were), it is now the South which has taken up the baton and is leading the charge for ever greater pursuits of American imperialism overseas.

Certainly, America is no longer acquiring new territory by force as it did a century ago at the height of the Age of Imperialism, but our imperialism is nevertheless as vigorous as ever. It is now commonplace to justify our foreign wars (and various other interventionist efforts) as attempts to spread freedom, democracy, and capitalism. Freedom, of course, is understood only in terms of American individualistic libertinism, and alternate theories of freedom are not considered. Democracy, even as it throws countries into fits of political turmoil, war, and mob violence, is never questioned as a universal imperative. After all, it works here–except that it seems that everyone agrees it isn’t working at the moment. There is no need to even consider how often a jingoistic devotion to capitalism has brought the world to the brink of annihilation in the past seventy years. During recent decades and in contemporary discourse particularly, it has been the Republican Party with its primary base in the South which has promoted this brand of cultural and economic imperialism.

So be it, if that’s what Americans want. After all, the essence of almost every great civilization in history is the ability to devise a culture, economy, and government that is easily and profitably exported by coercion for the benefit of the originating state. The problem with that model is that the South is not the origin of these ideas. It is within living memory that the last Civil War veteran died. Southerners remember that war, right? That is the one that was fought because Southerners rejected New England concepts of the scope and nature of freedom, the balance in republican democracy between central and regional interests, and the virtue of “Mammonism.” The ideas that Southerners are now attempt to violently export these values internationally after having them violently overwhelm their own culture would be comical if it weren’t so unsettling. The deepest irony comes when we realized that–just as once Southerners opposed government involvement in marriage laws–the original anti-imperialists were Bourbon Democrats, the Redeemers who had saved the South from Northern domination during Reconstruction. How quickly we forget.

If only the South would stop to remember what it felt like and what it continues to feel like to be forcibly conformed to foreign modes of thinking, southerners would be more reluctant to make American imperialism an ideological pillar in the new architecture of southern thought.

On the Occasion of the End of Iraq

Well, with the American military presence in Iraq winding down–as much as American military presence in the world every really winds down–we can officially say this war is over. As we prepare to begin a new year, which will most certainly bring us new wars, it seems especially appropriate to share the words of Mr. Dooley, the satirical voice of nineteenth century humorist Finley Peter Dunne, as he offers up his conversational wisdom on another, similar American imperialistic endeavor in the Philippines. (The following has been edited from the original for readability.)

“I know what I’d do if I was Mack,” said Mr. Hennessy. “I’d hoist a flag over th’ Ph’lippeens, an’ I’d take in th’ whole lot of them.”

“An’ yet,” said Mr. Dooley, “tis not more then two months since ye learned whether they were islands or canned goods. Your back yard is so small that your cow can’t turn round without buttin’ th’ woodshed off th’ premises, an’ ye wouldn’t go out to th’ stock yards without takin’ out a policy on your life. Suppose ye was standin’ at th’ corner of State Street an’ Archy Road, wud ye know what car to take to get to th’ Ph’lippeens? If your son Packy was to ask ye where th’ Ph’lippeens is, could ye give him any good idea whether they was in Rooshia or jus’ west of th’ tracks?”

“Maybe I couldn’t,” said Mr. Hennessy, haughtily, “but I’m f’r takin’ them in, anyhow.”

“So might I be,” said Mr. Dooley, “if I could on’y get me mind on it. One of the worst things about this here war is th’ way it’s makin’ puzzles f’r our poor, tired heads. When I went into it, I thought all I’d have to do was to set up here behind th’ bar with a good tin-cent cigar in me teeth, an’ toss dynamite bombs into th’ hated city of Havana. But look at me now. Th’ war is still goin’ on; an’ every night, when I’m countin’ up the cash, I’m askin’ myself will I annex Cubia or leave it to the Cubians? Will I take Porther Ricky or put it by? An’ what should I do with the Ph’lippeens? Oh, what should I do with them? I can’t annex them because I don’t know where they are. I can’t let go of them because some one else’ll take them if I do. They are eight thousan’ of them islands, with a population of one hundred million naked savages; an’ me bedroom’s crowded now with me an’ th’ bed. How can I take them in, an’ how on earth am I goin’ to cover th’ nakedness of them savages with me one suit of clothes? An’ yet ‘twud break me heart to think of givin’ people I never see or heard tell of back to other people I don’t know. An’, if I don’t take them, Schwartzmeister down th’ street, that has half me trade already, will grab them sure.

“It ain’t that I’m afraid of not doin’ th’ right thing in th’ end, Hinnissy. Some mornin’ I’ll wake up an’ know jus’ what to do, an’ that I’ll do. But ’tis th’ annoyance in th’ meantime. I’ve been readin’ about th’ country. ‘Tis over beyond your left shoulder when you’re facin’ east. Jus’ throw your thumb back, an’ ye have it as accurate as any man in town. ‘Tis farther then Boohlgahrya an’ not so far as Blewchoochoo. It’s near Chiny, an’ it’s not so near; an’, if a man was to bore a well through fr’m Goshen, Indiana, he might strike it, an’ then again he might not. It’s a poverty-stricken country, full of gold an’ precious stones, where th’ people can pick dinner off th’ trees an’ are starvin’ because they have no step-ladders. Th’ inhabitants is mostly naygurs an’ Chinnymen, peaceful, industrious, an’ law-abidin’, but savage an’ bloodthirsty in their methods. They wear no clothes except what they have on, an’ each woman has five husbands an’ each man has five wives. Th’ rest goes into th’ discard, th’ same as here. Th’ islands has been owned be Spain since before th’ fire; an’ she’s treated them so well they’re now up in arms again her, except a majority of them which is thoroughly loyal. Th’ natives seldom fight, but when they get mad at one another they run-a-muck. When a man r-runs-a-muck, sometimes they hang him an’ sometimes they discharge him an’ hire a new motorman. Th’ women are beautiful, with languishin’ black eyes, an’ they smoke cigars, but are hurried an’ incomplete in their dress. I see a picture of one th’ other day with nawthin’ on her but a basket of coconuts an’ a hoop-skirt. They’re no prudes. We import juke, hemp, cigar wrappers, sugar, an’ fairy tales from th’ Ph’lippeens, an’ export six-inch shells an’ th’ like. Of late th’ Ph’lippeens has awaked to th’ fact that they’re behind th’ times, an’ has received much American amminition in their midst. They say th’ Spanyards is all tore up about it.

“I learned all this fr’m th’ papers, an’ I know ’tis straight. An’ yet, Hinnissy, I dunno what to do about th’ Ph’lippeens. An’ I’m all alone in th’ world. Everybody else has made up his mind. Ye ask any conductor on Archy Road, an’ he’ll tell ye. Ye can find out fr’m the papers; an’, if ye really want to know, all ye have to do is to ask a prominent citizen who can mow all th’ lawn he owns with a safety razor. But I don’t know.”

“Hang on to them,” said Mr. Hennessy, stoutly. “What we’ve got we must hold.”

“Well,” said Mr. Dooley, “if I was Mack, I’d leave it to George. I’d say: ‘George,’ I’d say, ‘if you’re for hangin’ on, hang on it is. If ye say, lave go, I drop them.’ ‘Twas George won them with th’ shells, an’ th’ question’s up to him.”