Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
by Haruki Murakami
English translation by Alfred Birnbaum
Published in 1991 (Japanese); 1993 (English)
Published by Vintage Books
ISBN: 0-679-74346-4

The Hard-Boiled Wonderland: Our protagonist is a Calcutec. He has been trained to use his subconscious mind for encryption of sensitive information. The bad guys are called Semiotecs. They are criminals who deal in stolen information for profit. The setting is a slightly surrealistic Tokyo. The plot is set in motion by the protagonist's meeting with an eccentric elderly scientist with an underground lair, and his oddball granddaughter.

The End of the World: Our protagonist arrives in the city and takes up work as a Dreamreader. He is separated from his shadow, which is put to work and will eventually die. The city is home to a herd of unicorns. Our protagonist starts work reading dreams in the library.

Confused? Don't be. Haruki Murakami shows us through the startlingly well-formed world of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland in the odd-numbered chapters. He never quite gives us enough exposition for us to be certain of the contours and rules of this world, and yet he relates our nameless protagonist's story with enough confidence that I assumed for a while that this novel took place in a universe Murakami had established in earlier books. (It doesn't.)

And in the generally shorter even-numbered End of the World chapters, the nameless protagonist (presumably the same man as the hero of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland chapters, although it's a while before we find out for sure), devoid of memory or knowledge of why he has come to the City at the End of the World, develops a regular everyday routine in his new surroundings.

I've been aware of Murakami's name for some time, but this is the first time I've read his work, or experienced this particular sort of surrealism. The protagonist of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland has lived something of a humdrum existence, despite his unusual occupation, and as the plot progresses he sees his life torn to pieces. But Murakami keeps us at an emotional distance; I felt intellectually engaged, but never really cared much what happened to him or the other (equally nameless) main characters, or how much worse his life was going to get.

Instead, it was in the far more fantastical End of the World chapters, in the world of furry unicorns and shadows that can talk, where I felt much more emotionally interested in what was going to happen. Somehow Murakami manages to make the novel work as a unitary entity, even in the early chapters, before the reader has a clue how the two settings are going to be connected.

Blue Mars

Blue Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published in 1996
Published by Bantam
ISBN: 0-553-57335-7

And so the trilogy reaches its end. Blue Mars opens with a newly independent Mars. Earth is a royal mess, having been hit by a horrific ecological disaster that was, surprisingly enough, actually not the fault of human beings. The Martians took advantage of the chaos and broke away at the end of Green Mars. As Blue Mars begins, the pieces are just beginning to be put back together.

I find it difficult to summarize a traditional plot for Blue Mars. It's the story of the evolving political situation on Mars, in the planet's first few decades as an independent entity. And it's the story of Mars' relations with a devastated but still powerful Earth, vast and varied and impossible to describe glibly with throwaway descriptions, home to many who view Mars with wary curiosity, and maybe, just maybe, would like to get off Earth and move there one day. (This is the source of much consternation and controversy among the Martians.)

But events are always seen through the eyes of individual characters. Each novel in the Mars trilogy covers several decades of in-universe time, and by the end of Blue Mars more than 150 years have elapsed since the beginning of Red Mars. Thanks to medical advances, we end the trilogy with the same core group of main characters, members of Mars' First Hundred, that we began with (although there has been attrition due to deaths).

There are new, younger characters, the descendants of the First Hundred, who dominate the narrative for whole sections of the book at a time, but in the end the story always shifts back to the perspective of one of the over-200-year-old protagonists.

As a result, we never stop seeing Mars from the point of view of approximately a half-dozen slightly astonished old people who have seen massive change in their lifetimes. These oldsters are practically immortals, symbolic of particular ways of thinking, of points of view, of ways of seeing the universe, and they remind me of the protagonists of Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt, who keep getting reincarnated into new bodies over the centuries as history progresses. (But they are not literally immortal. As it turns out, humans over the age of 200 have an alarming tendency to drop dead suddenly of no clear cause.)

Although the author has acknowledged that the terraforming of Mars happens more quickly in the Mars trilogy than is strictly speaking realistic, the technology of the Mars trilogy never strays far into the fantastical. (As opposed to, say, Greg Bear's superficially similar novel Moving Mars, another story of Martian politics and independence, in which the level of technology is realistically advanced for the novel's first half, but then leaps into 'indistinguishable from magic' territory.)

This just makes the expansion of humanity throughout the solar system all the more exciting. By the latter half of the novel's timeframe, there are permanent human cities from Mercury to Neptune and Pluto, and the first starships are beginning to leave our solar system for lands unexplored. (One of our principal characters departs on one of them, never to return). Humanity has escaped Earth for good, and it's all the more exciting when it happens in the hands of an author who treats space travel realistically. Robinson uses the phrase 'accelerando' for the phase of humanity's existence when we are spreading through the solar system and technology is developing at a rapid clip, teaching me that it was not, in fact, Charles Stross who was the first to use it this way.

One thing I want to say about the Mars trilogy here that I didn't say in my entry on Green Mars is what a fundamentally optimistic work it is. Humanity has its problems, we squabble with one another and are unforgivably short-sighted, we can be cruel and petty and mean, but this is a universe where by joining together and being civil to one another, we can muddle our way through. The Mars trilogy ends on a note of hope. The future's going to be bright.

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster
by Dana Thomas
Published in 2007
Published by Penguin Books
ISBN: 978-0-14-311370-6

This book is about a topic that is entirely foreign to me. I am indifferent to luxury goods, and I am equally indifferent to what is fashionable and what is not. I'm not saying this because I'm proud of it; I'm just objectively reporting on what my brain finds interesting and what it does not. My brain still insists on misreading 'Louis Vuitton' as 'Louis Mutton'. If handbags were a unisex item, it wouldn't occur to me to see them as anything but practical and utilitarian.

However, I find business case studies interesting (probably a relic of my years teaching business English), so I was interested to read Dana Thomas' account of how the great luxury houses got their start in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, often as the creation of a lone genius, such as Coco Chanel or Louis Vuitton. The latter focused on making trunks for the travelling upper classes during his lifetime; his namesake company still continues to make old-style trunks today at the workshop in Paris, not that you'd know it by walking through a modern LV store.

The major luxury brands went into a decline in the 1960s and 1970s, but experienced a resurgence in the 1980s as the nouveau riche in Europe, North America, and most importantly Japan took to them to show off their wealth. Now mass-produced, mass-marketed items (with declining standards of quality, purists grumble), the luxury groups are no different from any other multinational.

Am I fooling myself about my supposed indifference to luxury brands? Thomas' book focuses on clothes, perfume, and handbags, which I (happy to smell like cheap aftershave) barely notice in my everyday life. But my wife and I chose to shell out the money for a new MacBook rather than a much cheaper alternative to replace our aging machine (another MacBook). Isn't Apple just another luxury brand?

Maybe in some ways, but it'll take a lot of convincing to make me believe I bought an Apple just to be seen with an Apple. Maybe my impression is skewed by the sort of cafes I hang out in, but Apple computers aren't nearly uncommon enough in this city for me to perceive them as a luxury item. And if I was under the impression that someone thought I owned a MacBook to be seen with a MacBook, I would be embarrassed more than anything. Am I fooling myself?

Typhoon and Other Stories

Typhoon and Other Stories
by Joseph Conrad
Originally published in 1903

I promised myself that this year I would read ten novel or novel-like entities written by people who died before 1950. The first of my ten classics is Joseph Conrad's Typhoon and Other Stories, a collection of four stories, ranging from short story to novella length, which have been consistently published as a consistent unit since Conrad originally wrote and published them that way back at the beginning of the 20th century.

Conrad's an interesting figure in the globalization of world history. He was a European who wrote with his heart in Asia and Africa. By standards of the time he was remarkably unconvinced of Europe's inherent right to manage the world. And yet to a modern eye his fiction is influenced by 19th-century notions of European superiority -- he was, after all, only human -- and I've never come across a point in his fiction where we see the world through the eyes of a non-European, or even meet a well-developed non-European character.

Of course, it is worth noting that despite his British citizenship, he was actually a native of Poland, a country that, for most of his lifetime, did not actually exist on maps. In other words, he himself belonged to a colonized people.

He's also respected in English-as-a-foreign-language circles for his near-unique status as a great English prose stylist who couldn't speak English at all until he was in his 20s. (Vladimir Nabokov, among others, is also well-known as a nonnative English speaker who wrote respectable English prose, but Nabokov learned his English as a child.)

Possibly as a result of his linguistic background, Conrad's got an odd prose style, a strange rhythm to his long sentences, that many readers find difficult or maddening. I just happily accept it as part of his particular style. Read Conrad, deal with his sentences. It's part of the package.

---

Typhoon, the lead novella, is a straightforward adventure story, as a British ship, under a Thai flag, is sailing not far from Taiwan, transporting a boatful of coolies to Fu-chau. (And here I was, thinking the correct old-timey Romanization of the city now known as Fuzhou to be 'Foochow'. I'd be hopelessly lost as a late-19th-century expat.) The ship manages to plot a course straight through a particularly nasty typhoon, providing an opportunity for a host of character portraits of various members of the crew.

In Amy Foster, a peasant from Eastern Europe intending to emigrate to America is the lone survivor of a shipwreck off the English coast and finds himself in a bucolic fishing village. He's not in America, but he doesn't care; he stays and marries the one girl who had been kind to him. Cultural tensions emerge. The story ends tragically, drowned in a sea of irony. Decades later, Hollywood outputs a product that is not intended for my demographic.

Falk takes place in a large East Asian city that is never specified (based on geographical clues I assumed Bangkok) and deals with a cast of characters who are entirely European. The narrator is a sailor who runs into trouble with the local tugboat captain, Falk, who incorrectly believes our narrator has designs on his girl. The girl in question is a Western woman, a relative of a German captain.

(Try as I might, I could find no sign in the narrative that the woman had actually returned Falk's advances, other than blushing and demurely looking down at her knitting when he came over to visit. Presumably, at that time, such a response was considered equivalent to crying, 'I love you, my dashing Captain Falk! And yes, I will marry you!')

And then Falk confesses that there is something about him, an episode from his past, which the woman and her family ought to know about before accepting him as part of the family. Let's just say I did not see that particular plot twist coming, and leave it at that.

To-morrow (the title's got the old-fashioned hyphen and everything) deals with a young woman who lives with her blind father in a seaside village, and her crazy old landlord who lives next door. The old man's son vanished overseas several years ago, but the father remains convinced that not only is his son alive, but he is returning home 'to-morrow'. (No matter how many years pass, the old man is always certain his son is returning 'to-morrow'.) He intends to marry his phantom son off to his young lady tenant when that happens.

Then one day, the son actually shows up. The father, of course, doesn't recognize him (after all, he's not supposed to appear until to-morrow). Drama ensues.

---

I do have to admit that on one level I feel like I read Conrad more for the history than for the literary qualities. Yes, the man was a literary genius, and I don't find him difficult. (To give you an idea of where I'm coming from, most 19th-century British literature I've read, I found to be easy to read and engaging. However, despite repeated attempts, I absolutely cannot stomach Jane Austen. I don't know why. Other people can have her.)

However, there's the pervasive sense that, more than his contemporaries, Conrad's writing is 'good for me', in both the positive and the negative senses of the phrase. Immersing my mind in Conrad's context of 19th-century globalization is good for me. That is why I read him. Enjoyment of what I'm reading takes a back seat.

Politeness, Privilege, and Political Correctness

OK, here it is, my contribution to the Expatosphere dialogue revolving around Debito Aruduo's broadside in the Japan Times.

(My wife's opinion is here. I don't disagree with her, but I have a different take on it, because I am a different person from her and if we were the same person then the legalities of getting married would have been difficult and headache-inducing.)

I have never lived in Japan and will not opine about that country. I have lived in Korea and Taiwan.

First off, I've never once been asked if I can use chopsticks in five years of living in Taiwan, nor have I been complimented on my chopsticks use. I don't think I'm being too oblivious to notice it's happening, because I got it all the time in Korea. (But I'm not going to be the jerkoff who says 'That never happened to me, therefore it couldn't possibly have happened to you.' After all, human beings are funny and unpredictable creatures.)

If I ever actually got 'Can you use chopsticks?' here in Taiwan I'd naturally assume that I was being involved (against my will) in a piece of performance art concerning interactions between Asians and Westerners. And I would respond that I was uninterested in playing that role, I have my own life to live, sorry.

But that leads into the first point I want to make: people in Taiwan, Korea, and probably China and Japan (I haven't lived in the latter two places) have things they say to foreigners to be polite that aren't meant to be taken literally. Koreans are infamous for complimenting foreigners on their chopsticks use. It's a running gag among the expat population. But I never, ever felt that there was the assumption that, as a foreigner, I wouldn't be able to use chopsticks.

I used to joke that Koreans did this because they knew it was a national stereotype and, as patriotic Koreans, they felt they had to do their part to keep up appearances and keep asking foreigners if they possessed chopstick-utilizing skills. But in reality, it's all about polite conversation.

Politeness.

It's small talk. It's polite chatter. Koreans feel as if they're missing out on a useful conversational gambit if they see you using chopsticks and they don't compliment you on it.

I suspect complimenting a foreigner on being able to make themselves understood in the local language is done out of similar politeness. I always feel like I'm in the minority when I say so, because it seems to be an article of faith among many expats that East Asians are uniformly astounded when white people can speak their languages coherently. But I honestly believe that these expats are misunderstanding people due to cultural differences. (I discussed my feelings about this a little more deeply in a post last year; perhaps my next post will be to explain why I have an oddly strong set of views on this issue.)

But I'd like to turn to a more fundamental issue. I like to reduce what seems like cultural differences to first principles, perhaps unfortunately for people within earshot of my pontificating. I honestly get the feeling that the source of a lot of the 'microaggressions' aggravation stems from the fact that these Westerners, for the first time in their lives, do not have in-group privilege.

Privilege.

The notion of 'privilege' was clarified for me some time ago by a blogger (I do not remember who) who lived in a city somewhere in the USA. He was a white man returning home late at night when he was stopped by police. There was some kind of trouble in the neighborhood, and the cops wanted to make sure he wasn't up to no good. Afterwards, he reflected that because of his Euro-American looks, he didn't have to wonder afterwards if he'd been a victim of racial profiling. He didn't have to wonder if the cops had made assumptions about the kind of person he was due to the color of his skin.

That's privilege. And it's worthwhile to be conscious of being the beneficiary of it. That way, you don't respond like a jerk when you find yourself without it.

Nobody's talking about police in Taiwan racially profiling white people. But the concept remains. In-group privilege means, when a stranger makes an odd assumption about you, you don't have to wonder if it's because of your ethnicity (or other social group). On this point I suspect there isn't such a huge gap between countries like the USA and countries like Taiwan.

Yes, the USA is more multiracial, but I've heard anecdotal evidence of people not of the dominant racial group in the USA experiencing much the same kind of 'microaggressions' that expats here complain about. Not from everyone, of course. But from people. It happens. On the flip side, I interact with people in Taiwan every day who are probably interacting with me in precisely the same way that they would if I were native Taiwanese and had the ethnic features to match. And that's me with my pretty poor level of spoken Mandarin.

If someone starts talking to me in a way that seems to serve no purpose but say, 'Hello. You look like you're a foreigner, you know', then first I need to remember in-group privilege, and then I need to not smear my mental impression of that person across the whole of Taiwan and go complaining about how annoying Taiwanese people are.

And finally, I'd like to move on to my final topic...

Political Correctness.


'Political correctness' could have been a useful term if it hadn't been hijacked by culture warriors.

In the USA, we have a history of race relations which is fraught with difficulties I need not go into here. As a result, we've developed a vast and subtle set of taboos and social conventions around the public airing of race and ethnicity that are thought to minimize the possibility of racial strife (and I'm not convinced it does a good job of that). Don't believe me? Go to a culturally diverse American city, interact with people of differing racial backgrounds, find ways of overtly and klutzily bringing up the other person's ethnicity every single time, and just see how many friends you make.

There's so much tension surrounding race in America that we turn to comedy to relieve it. The USA's  full of comics who take our inability to squarely face the issue of race and turn it into comedy. It's a rare foreigner who possesses the cultural knowledge and understanding to fully understand what's so funny.

And that's an important point. Every culture is complex, and I suspect every culture has its own set of conversational taboos that surround difficult issues (that local comedians probably mine to be edgy). But they're different from culture to culture.

But the thing is, if you grow up entirely within a single culture, your culture's political correctness is invisible to you. You don't think it's something particular to your culture. You think it's just the way things are in this universe.

What I'm saying is, if you travel outside of the West with the idea in your mind that it's dreadfully rude to make reference to a stranger's racial background, even obliquely, then you've got a lesson coming your way.

And if you think you've reached enlightenment on this issue and you go around saying, 'Don't get angry at the locals if they say insensitive things about race. They don't know any better', then you've learned the lesson wrong. Differing cultural sensitivities do not constitute 'not knowing any better'. (Unless you're a culture of one.)


Differing cultural sensitivities do not constitute 'not knowing any better'. I want to take that sentence and repeat it in 96-point typeface, but instead I'll just end the blog post here.

The meaning of a word

The word "China" means two different things, related but distinct:

Definition 1. A large country in East Asia. It was founded in 1949 and the capital is Beijing. In this sense, 'China' is short for 'People's Republic of China'. You can also use this word for now-defunct countries. In 1900, for example, 'China' referred to a large country in East Asia which was ruled by Manchus from their capital in Beijing (or Peking).

Definition 2. A civilization centered in East Asia. Despite a high level of diversity and large regional differences, it is considered a fairly coherent entity. It is distinct from Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese culture, although it has influenced them a great deal. It is much, much older than the People's Republic of China.

The two definitions above are distinct. I propose that if you use the word 'China' (or 'Chinese') in a sentence, it should be easy to discern whether you mean definition 1 (the country) or definition 2 (the civilization). If it's a weird amalgamation of the two, there is an excellent probability that you are using language to obfuscate and muddle. Shame on you.

You might argue that one could say something similar for every country in the world. (France the entity headed by Nicholas Sarkozy vs. France the culture, and so on.) You would be right.

But China is a particularly important case. As Martin Jacques said in the one bit of wisdom in his TED talk otherwise filled with dubious assertions, China isn't a nation-state; it's a civilization-state. It can be thought of as something akin to Europe, if we had an odd parallel Europe where the centuries-old political trend was toward unified empires, and there was a single language so dominant that all the other languages were reduced in people's minds to the status of 'dialects'.

But that's definition 2 above. There's also definition 1, where 'China' refers to a country that's just one country in the world out of 200. There are plenty of ways the two definitions do not overlap perfectly, and as a result you see both innocently sloppy thinking and deliberate obfuscation based on the fact we've got one word with two meanings.

For example, take the idea that China has 5000 years of history, while American history started in 1776. It sure sounds like China's got a long head start on the USA from those numbers, but they're derived entirely from the obfuscatory power of muddled language. If we're talking about countries (definition 1), the PRC was only founded in 1949, so the USA is actually a great deal older. If we're talking about civilizations (definition 2), there was no civilization that started in 1776. It's not as if Thomas Jefferson was some sort of legendary culture hero who invented the Roman alphabet as he scratched out the words We hold these truths to be self-evident which was the earliest recorded Western writing. [1]

But that's just sloppy thinking, really. People use this sort of semantic vagueness to deliberately muddle issues as well. Let's think about the distinction between definition 1 and 2 in this sentence: 'Taiwan is Chinese'.

If we go by definition 1, that means 'Taiwan is a part of the People's Republic of China'. Which, despite what Beijing would wish, is obviously not true.

But if we go by definition 2, we get 'Taiwan is a part of Chinese civilization'. You could argue about that, but simply on its own merits I don't have a huge objection to it. Taiwan has plenty of native-born Taiwanese who consider themselves Chinese. (And the vast majority would be horrified if Taiwan suddenly became part of the PRC tomorrow. They don't think China = PRC.) [2]

If you think of China as a civilization akin to Europe, you'd have to agree that if the EU was a country and (say) Ireland was not part of the EU, it would still be culturally European.

But we live in a universe where people who wish Taiwan was ruled by Beijing have no qualms about telling Westerners 'Of course Taiwanese are Chinese! Taiwan is a province of China and the Taiwanese people identify as Chinese!' and thinking up terms like 'Chinese Taipei'. They are well aware that when the vast majority of human beings hear 'China' or 'Chinese', they think of that large country in East Asia, whose capital is Beijing.

In other words, they're playing with language, preying on the fact that to most Westerners 'China' means only one thing: "The People's Republic of China". I don't like it. It grates uncomfortably against my brain. I want people to stop doing it.

That's the context for why, until advocates for Taiwan's absorption into the PRC stop playing with words, I will never be entirely comfortable hearing about how Taiwan's culture is Chinese.

[1] Which doesn't even get into the fact that you only get 5,000 years of Chinese history if you count about 1,800 years of tradition and legends that predate the earliest surviving Chinese written records, which stretches the word 'history' rather far for my comfort.

[2] Even so 'Taiwan is culturally Chinese' is still an imperfect assertion, as Taiwan's got aborigines who are not culturally Chinese.

Of Jokes, Chimpanzees, and Teleprompters

A while ago I thought about writing a satirical little piece about a guy during the George W. Bush administration who misunderstood jokes about Bush being some sort of monkey or chimpanzee. He was very confused. After all, Laura Bush appeared to be human, and Bush's two daughters sure looked fully human, and human-chimp crossbreeds are biologically impossible. So George W. Bush wasn't the biological father of his two children!

Why was the national media not asking questions? Why hadn't liberal bloggers picked up on this? Why did nobody care?

It never occurred to anybody to explain to him outright that Bush being a chimp was a joke. Democrats played along with it (huh huh, yeah, he's a chimp) and Republicans dismissed it as Bush-bashing. No one ever told the poor guy that he wasn't supposed to take it literally.

And that's what I feel has happened to a huge segment of the Republican party over this "Obama needs a teleprompter to speak" meme.

Okay, it's not an exact comparison. Obama really does use a teleprompter, just like a huge number of other national politicians and other public figures.

But some people in the GOP seem to have accepted it as a given that Obama is reliant on a teleprompter in ways that George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, et al. were not. They've dug up precisely as much evidence for this as Democrats did for the assertion that George W. Bush was a chimp (none, because you're not supposed to think it's literally true). But politicians have actually woven it into their stump speeches and use it as a rhetorical cudgel against him.

This may not be such a great tactic for the Republicans, since they're as teleprompter-dependent as Democrats. Recent clips of Mitt Romney speaking without a teleprompter suggest that maybe this really isn't the line of attack against Obama that Republicans ought to be making.

The notion that politicians can't speak coherently without a bevy of speechwriters and a teleprompter has a long history in American political humor. I was familiar with it long before anyone outside of Illinois knew who Barack Obama was. It's not a new thing. This particular attribute got applied a lot to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. In both cases it was just one aspect of a more comprehensive insult: 'This guy doesn't have the brainpower to be president, which would be obvious if he didn't surround himself with advisors and prepared speeches'.

With Obama, though, when the teleprompter thing came about during the 2008 campaign it seemed a reaction to the uncomfortable fact that (a) Obama was much more eloquent on the stump than George W. Bush or John McCain, and (b) this eloquence was a big force behind the enthusiasm of his supporters. If you joke that Obama's only eloquent because of his teleprompter, he's not so intimidating any more. That's just basic human psychology.

I mean, you could ask the for evidence that Obama is uniquely dependent on the teleprompter. You could also ask Democrats for DNA evidence proving Dubya's simian origins. But that would just be kind of dumb.

Somebody fill me in here. What am I missing? Is there actually evidence that Obama is uniquely dependent on his teleprompter? Do Republicans actually have a smarter strategy here than I'm giving them credit for ?

(No comments that boil down to 'Republicans are dumb', please. I've already seen speculation that the teleprompter thing is basically playing to white racists who like to think that the dark-skinned guy can only say eloquent words which have been fed to him. But I'd like to see if I can sort out the meaning of the teleprompter thing while also assuming the best of people. Can it be done?)

One, Two, Three, Many

I have a theory about a hypothetical guy named Bob. Bob represents a substantial proportion of the population. Bob has no sense of numbers.

It's not so much that Bob is bad at math. Rather, he has no mental framework to handle numbers beyond the ones he deals with every day. Bob sort of knows that a billion is more than a million and a trillion is more than a billion, because he learned it in 8th grade. But he has no idea of how much more. As far as Bob is concerned, all those ' -illion' words are interchangeable and mean 'a really big number, like ten thousand or something'.

Bob's problem isn't a lack of knowledge; it's a lack of any appreciation of scale. You can correct him, you can explain the difference between a million and a trillion countless times, and it won't matter. Bob thinks you're just being pedantic. He's mentally filing you with people who correct him on 'your' vs. 'you're'.

Bob's not a particularly religious person; he doesn't go in for young-Earth creationism. He knows the world is ten million years old, or ten trillion years old, or something like that. He even heard somewhere that cavemen and dinosaurs didn't actually live at the same time. But his mental image of Dinosaur Times still includes woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers as members of the ecosystem. Okay, a more scientifically-minded person might get all pedantic and nitpick that picture, but Bob's no paleontologist, okay? He has his own life to live, his own worries to worry about.

A couple of years ago, a story circulated about a survey that asked Americans whether the government was spending too much, too little, or just the right amount on foreign aid. Definitely too much, said Americans. How much should the government be spending, the survey asked. About five percent, said Americans. The punch line is that the actual amount the government spends on foreign aid is far, far less than five percent. This survey was generally spun to mean that Americans know far too little about how their government allocates money.

I wouldn't argue with that, except that Bob and like-minded people formed a substantial portion of the survey respondents. Bob doesn't know the difference between 5%, and 0.5%, and 0.05%. Well, okay, on one level he knows the difference, because he managed to pass eighth-grade math all those long years ago.

But he doesn't really know the difference. He wasn't having a flashback to eighth-grade math when he took the survey. He was talking about government. Not math. They're different things. He was reaching for an expression to mean 'a small amount of', and he came up with 'five percent'. Now you're going to tell him he picked the wrong expression? You nitpicky pedantic twit.

I don't know if Bob's lack of familiarity with scale is innate, or if better math education at a critical point (long before college) could have helped him.

But years of reading Internet comments from a wide swath of humanity has convinced me that Bob represents a fairly sizable proportion of the population. They're out there, and simply correcting them isn't going to solve the underlying issue.

Monkey: A Journey to the West

Monkey: A Journey to the West

Originally by Wu Cheng'en

Retold by David Kherdian

Published in 2005

Published by Shambhala

ISBN: 1-59030-258-3

Journey to the West is one of the central books in the East Asian literary canon. If you're an educated East Asian the book has almost certainly left some kind of impact on your brain. Even if you've never read a version of it, you probably know of key episodes in the story. Even in the unlikely event you're not familiar with the plot, you certainly know of other works of fiction that were strongly influenced by it.

You can't be a consumer of media in East Asia and remain untouched by Journey to the West (or other central works of East Asian literature, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Dream of the Red Chamber), any more than you can be a media consumer in the Anglosphere and be wholly untouched by Shakespeare or the more important Greek myths.

Journey to the West is an episodic adventure story heavily influenced by Buddhist and Daoist philosophy and sensibilities. The Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang has the task of venturing to India (a fantastical, made-up India) to retrieve Buddhist scriptures. Although Xuanzang is the nominal protagonist, the story is really about his sidekick, the powerful supersimian Monkey. Monkey is the focus of the narrative, Monkey is the truly memorable character, and Monkey is the name by which the book is better known outside of China.

In David Kherdian's abridged retelling, the focus is squarely on Monkey. The first half of Kherdian's retelling is devoted to Monkey's origin story. The narrative describes Monkey's establishment as Monkey King, his spiritual training, and how he acquires great powers and powerful weapons. Finally, at roughly the book's halfway point, Xuanzang (called Tripitaka here) shows up and the Journey properly begins.

(Don't turn up your nose at the thought of reading an abridged version. A completely faithful Journey to the West would be immensely long, and what's been cut is apparently more episodic adventures, not intellectual or spiritual complexity. If you want to read the whole thing, there are two very well-regarded complete English translations; one is three volumes long, the other four volumes.)

As always when I read premodern fantastical literature, my mind tries to apply the logical rigor found in modern genre fantasy. I ask myself questions like, if two combatants are locked in a deadly duel and one of them magically grows himself to a height of 10,000 feet, is that really such an overwhelming advantage? I can think of lots of tactical reasons why being that tall would be a major disadvantage in battle. And seeing how battles between strong supernatural beings in this universe generally play themselves out as duels between shapeshifters, I wonder what would happen if one of the combatants got creative and transformed himself into a horror not found in nature or legend but something uniquely shaped to trap and kill whatever form his opponent happened to be in at that moment.

This is the same kind of thinking that also makes you wonder why it was so damn impossible for Achilles' mother to make her kid's heel invulnerable, too.

At one point we meet Laozi, the legendary old Daoist said to have written the Dao De Jing. He's running an alchemist's lab up in Heaven, full of bubbling cauldrons and various potions and concoctions. Suddenly it dawned on me: according to Journey to the West, the famed old philosopher and central figure of Daoism is actually a celestial mad scientist.

There's a lot of other memorable imagery in Kherdian's book, and I feel not only has my Asian cultural literacy been bolstered, but I also might one day seek out one of the unabridged versions.

My advice to the GOP

I feel as if I should have some sort of opinion about Rush Limbaugh, or our society's reactions to him. So here goes.

People say Rush is a political commentator, but he's primarily an entertainer. I don't mean that to be necessarily negative. We're deep in the Information Age now, the number of possible distractions available for any given person at any given moment is so high that it might as well be infinite, and so the ability to make people want to pay attention to you is a useful skill that society should value.

Rush is a good entertainer. He's a comedian. Based on what I've heard of him, he's got a great voice for radio, knows how to tell a joke, and has a natural gift for comic timing.

There. Now I'm done complimenting him.

I've never regularly listened to Rush, so the following can be filed in the vast category of Internet ramblings known as 'complaining about media you don't actually watch or listen to'. So be it.

I suspect the recent dust-up that cost Rush a good deal of advertising money took him by surprise because Rush believes the universe exists in order to supply him with material. As this way of thinking goes, if a certain Georgetown University student hadn't wanted Rush to say outrageous things about her, then she shouldn't have existed in the same reality as him. From Rush's point of view, his comments coming back to bite him are just as surprising as if he was sitting at home, mocking a movie on TV, and the characters in the movie turned and started mocking him. And then persuaded his sponsors to withdraw their support.

I can't be shocked or offended by anything he says anymore. He passed the moral point of no return back in October. After Obama pledged to send 100 American troops to Uganda to fight the murderous, regionally destabilizing thugs of the infamous Lord's Resistance Army, Rush decided to frame the issue as Obama sending American troops abroad to 'kill Christians'.

Of course you can criticize Obama over this. I can think of plenty of ways to make the case that Obama shouldn't be sending US troops to central Africa at all. But none of them involve framing the issue in quite the morally and intellectually repugnant way that Rush did.

(Not to Godwinize this post, but I wonder if it has occurred to Rush that back in 1941 a Democratic president sent not one hundred, but hundreds of thousands if not millions of troops overseas to fight people who were nominally Christians.)

It's true that a few days later he did (sort of) back down and lamely explain that he would have to 'do more research' on the issue. Really now? That's bad enough if you see him as an ordinary comedian. It's much, much worse if you take him as a political and cultural commentator with serious things to say.

I didn't like Rush before, but as far as I'm concerned his LRA comments pushed him past the point of no return. Nothing he says now is capable of offending me. He could call on all Americans to tithe 10% of their income to the Ku Klux Klan. Or accuse President Obama of eating grandmothers. Or he could call on all Americans to eat grandmothers. I wouldn't care. I'm beyond being shocked. I'm done.

What does offend me is the pretense that Rush (and people like him) are remotely serious public figures who should be treated like they have serious things to say. Now we've got three GOP Presidential contenders who are afraid to say anything stronger about Rush than maybe he shouldn't use such intemperate language.

It's said that these politicians are terrified of insulting Rush's 20 million loyal listeners -- the vast majority of whom, by the way, almost certainly don't exist.

In the unlikely event that any Republican leaders happen to be reading this, I have some advice. You're making a very, very bad strategic mistake.

Here's why.

I remember the Tea Party. It seemed to me that the core of Tea Party beliefs were that (a) the government was too powerful, (b) taxes were too high, and (c) personal liberties were being infringed on. I'm not a libertarian myself and I didn't think much of the core Tea Party beliefs, but I recognize that they were based on a very strong strain in American political discourse which has deep roots and didn't exactly spring into being from nowhere in 2009. There was a real opportunity for them to find common ground with those who culturally identified as liberal. Those pundits last fall who found commonalities between Tea Party rhetoric and Occupy Wall Street rhetoric had a real point.

But what actually happened was that the Tea Partiers got stereotyped as reactionary racist loons. And the Tea Partiers let it happen.

Sure, there were some people in the media who selectively quoted the looniest anti-Obama crap they could find and used it to make generalizations about the whole movement.

But even in a movement as nebulous and lacking in formal structure as the Tea Party, there should have been a couple of respected figures within the movement who had the power to make their voices heard, who could have distanced themselves from the wackier side of the rhetoric. That could have made a real difference in public perception.

But if it ever happened, I never heard it. It got lost in the noise.

I'm still nursing the conspiracy theory that this was a deliberate tactical move by some master strategist. If the American mainstream thinks your movement is a bunch of racist hillbillies, then that creates the impression that elitist snobs are looking down on you. Promoting the feeling of being victimized and put upon is a great way to build group cohesion.

Except that it marginalized the Tea Party brand and made it anathema to a huge swath of America.

So my advice to Republican leaders is this: denounce Rush, then put him behind you and move on. He doesn't deserve better.

Failing to do so will be a very big mistake. Rush is loud. He may not have many regular listeners but media outlets love replaying the outrageous things he says.

Every time a swing voter is reminded of the contraception debate, she'll think of Rush. Every socially conservative Catholic priest on TV talking about birth control will remind viewers of Rush. Independents across the country will look at the conservative talking heads on TV offering support to the GOP candidate and they'll picture Rush. They won't be able to help it.

You really don't want that to happen.

My First Official Election 2012 Rant

First, let me just come out and say it: against all expectations, Barack Obama has turned out to be the most boring President since George Herbert Walker Bush.

That's not necessarily a compliment, nor is it a criticism. And it's partly a function of the modern news media. When you compare what Obama has actually done and how he governs with the ridiculous heroic image his more fervent supporters once had of him, he seems rather... dull.

The same goes if you compare the real Obama with the hyperbole that you hear from his more preposterous professional haters on TV and the Internet. He just can't live up to the image of an atheist elitist snob who wants to impose Sharia law in an effort to transform America into a European socialist state. Maybe nobody could.

And so now a large portion of the people who voted for Obama in '08 are disappointed, and peeved at him, and ready to sit 2012 out.

After all, what's the worst that can happen? President Romney?

In the general election, it'll turn out that Romney's chief advantage is he's perceived as a stereotypical politician. It's hard to loathe Romney, because he's not substantial enough to loathe. He says objectionable things, but that's because these things are what he thinks Republican primary voters want to hear, so the fault really lies with those primary voters, not with Romney himself.

A Romney Administration won't break the country. President Romney will be an excellent foil for the political left, but he won't actually destroy everything they hold dear. (A win-win situation!) Even among Romney haters, the sense is that our country has had worse guys in office, and it came through battered but basically OK.

In other words, the threat of a President Romney won't be enough to get left-leaning voters out of the house to vote for Obama in large numbers on Election Day. This is why, for all of Romney's essential doofiness that often comes across loud and clear on TV, he's still got a good chance of beating Obama.

And what do I, personally, think? I'll dutifully go and vote for Obama, but the idea of a Romney presidency doesn't exactly keep me up at night quivering with fear. I don't like Romney, but our country really has had worse presidents, and has recovered.

And that brings me, of course, to Rick Santorum.

Unless something extraordinary happens, such a major third-party challenger, I do not believe Santorum is capable of defeating Obama. Remember all those lefty voters who couldn't be bothered to vote for Obama against Romney? If Santorum wins the GOP nomination, they'll be tearing open their checkbooks and writing checks to Obama's reelection campaign, their fingers shaking with abject terror. And they will go home at night and pray to God to help Obama win and to stop Santorum. That includes most of the religious Catholics I've known back in the States.

So it sounds simple. If you want Obama to have at least a semblance of a fight on his hands this November, root for Romney. If you want Obama to have an easy reelection, root for Santorum (or Gingrich, whom Obama would also squash). Right?

Also, you've got the view, articulated most recently by John Helleman in New York magazine, that if the GOP runs Romney and loses, the crazies are likely to take over the party and nominate someone truly unacceptable in 2016. But if Santorum runs and loses, the GOP may well return to sanity.

What that would mean for the GOP would differ wildly depending on which of the two current front-runners, along with the coalition that elevated him to the nomination, is blamed for the debacle. “If Romney is the nominee and he loses in November, I think we’ll see a resurgence of the charismatic populist right,” says Robert Alan Goldberg, a history professor at the University of Utah and author of a biography of Barry Goldwater. “Not only will [the grassroots wing] say that Romney led Republicans down the road to defeat, but that the whole type of conservatism he represents is doomed.”

Goldberg points out that this is what happened in 1976, when the party stuck with Ford over Reagan, was beaten by Carter, and went on to embrace the Gipper’s brand of movement conservatism four years later. So who does Goldberg think might be ascendant in the aftermath of a Romney licking? “Sarah Palin,” he replies. “She’s an outsider, she has no Washington or Wall Street baggage, she’s electric—and she’s waiting, because if Romney doesn’t win, she will be welcomed in.”

But if it’s Santorum who is the standard-bearer and then he suffers an epic loss, a different analogy will be apt: Goldwater in 1964. (And, given the degree of the challenges Santorum would face in attracting female voters, epic it might well be.) As Kearns Goodwin points out, the rejection of the Arizona senator’s ideology and policies led the GOP to turn back in 1968 to Nixon, “a much more moderate figure, despite the incredible corruption of his time in office.” For Republicans after 2012, a similar repudiation of the populist, culture-warrior coalition that is fueling Santorum’s surge would open the door to the many talented party leaders—Daniels, Christie, Bush, Ryan, Bobby Jindal—waiting in the wings for 2016, each offering the possibility of refashioning the GOP into a serious and forward-thinking enterprise.

Only the most mindless of ideologues reject the truism that America would be best served by the presence of two credible governing parties instead of the situation that currently obtains. A Santorum nomination would be seen by many liberals as a scary and retrograde proposition. And no doubt it would make for a wild ride, with enough talk of Satan, abortifacients, and sweater vests to drive any sane man bonkers. But in the long run, it might do a world of good, compelling Republicans to return to their senses—and forge ahead into the 21st century. Which is why all people of common sense and goodwill might consider, in the days ahead, adopting a slogan that may strike them as odd, perverse, or even demented: Go, Rick, go.

That makes a lot of sense. It's logical.

But I can't put my heart behind it. I'm not feeling it.

Part of it is that I have a hard time believing future hypothetical scenarios, especially those worked out by confident experts. The future hasn't been written. We don't know what game-changing unexpected events will happen. Analyses of what a political party is likely to do years down the road in scenario A as opposed to scenario B can be useful food for thought, but perhaps should not be used as the basis of decision-making. Plans and predictions have a tendency to come undone.

And what's more, on a purely visceral, emotional level, I don't want the GOP to nominate Santorum.

I don't want to run the risk of him winning. I don't believe he can beat Obama in a 2-way race, but throw in a third-party candidate who might divert votes from Obama, or some other game-changing event I can't anticipate, and anything can happen.

But more fundamentally, I don't want the media narratives between now and November 2 to be about Santorum's pet issues. I know there are people who say that we need to have a serious national conversation about gay marriage, about church and state, about abortion, about feminism, etc. And I agree. We do.

But we won't if Santorum wins the nomination.

Once you put things into the language of political discourse, you're no longer having a serious conversation. You're just sniping at each other's strawmen. You're talking in the language of emotion rather than rationality. You're making yourselves out to be victims solely for the purpose of making the people you want on your side feel embattled and belittled and defensive. I hate that.

Romney's pet issues aren't really culture war issues. They don't come pre-loaded with emotional resonance for people. Having a Romney-centered general election campaign won't result in millions of dollars being poured into unnecessarily tearing apart American social fabric.

Moreover, if Santorum wins the nomination, everything he says until the nomination is going to get reported around the world with the weight and gravitas of a major-party nominee for President. Yes, every national politician in the United States has said some, irresponsible, crazy stuff, and maybe I am getting a skewed view of Santorum's vocal utterances because the media tends to focus on the more objectionable things he says. But the thought of the news media around the world running Santorum's talking points with the implied weight of half the American electorate behind it makes my skin crawl.

But then, maybe it doesn't matter if the GOP nominates Romney or Santorum. Maybe, to appease the base, Romney would need to pick a Santorum-like VP, if not Santorum himself. Which would result in just as unpleasant a general election. In which case, all I can do is watch from my perch outside the USA, enjoy the wild ride, and remember to send in my absentee ballot for Obama.

Green Mars

Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Published in 1994

Published by Bantam Books

ISBN: 0-553-57239-3

Green Mars is the middle book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.

Green Mars begins around the turn of the 22nd century. Mars has been settled for several decades. Terraforming projects are incrementally inching the planet's atmosphere (and, increasingly, its developing biosphere) towards a more Earthlike new normal. New settlers are arriving and more Martian natives are being born. Meanwhile, Earth is a mess, dominated by a dozen or so 'metanationals', mergers of 21st-century-style multinationals and nation-states. These same metanationals are in charge of exploiting the natural resources of Mars.

The surviving members of the First Hundred -- the first permanent settlers on Mars and the trilogy's main protagonists -- have mostly taken up the cause of a Free Mars, sovereign and independent of Terran metanationals' meddling. This is not, of course, to say that they agree with each other, or that there aren't deep philosophical disagreements that threaten to tear the cause of Martian independence apart.

Green Mars is about the Martian people's decades-long march towards revolution.

It's been a long time since I read the first entry in the trilogy, Red Mars. (I don't even remember what year I read it in -- I think it was 2008 or 2009.) It was probably a mistake to let my knowledge of the characters and backstory to lie dormant for such a long time, especially as when I began Green Mars I wasn't sure where to turn online to refresh my memory without inadvertently spoiling myself.

If you are the kind of reader who must always have a good grasp of who each character is, what they are talking about, and what the past events they are obliquely referring to are, then you'd better read these three books in order, and (unless you have a good memory for details) without significant breaks in between. These books are vast, they are full of details, and nothing is ever forgotten. And Green Mars offers the casual reader no help at all. There's no helpful list of dramatis personae, and no introductory passage from the Encyclopaedia of Mars about the early years of Martian history, full of exposition to catch the reader up.

On the other hand, if I were the sort of reader who always had to feel cognizant and in control, then I never would have gotten through Lau Siew Mei's Playing Madame Mao. I cheerfully got myself slowly back up to speed by quietly assimilating the references to what had gone before -- all of which, of course, seemed to assume the reader was already familiar with the events of Red Mars.

Working my way through my stack of Kim Stanley Robinsons was practically a New Year's resolution for me. Robinson is a brilliant author, wields very well-thought-out concepts, and his books make me feel smarter. But I'll never call one of his books a 'page-turner'. It's clear throughout Green Mars that the installment will end with the people of Mars throwing off the yoke of their colonial oppressors, in an extraordinarily messy revolution that will require another 700-page novel to pick up the pieces. And Robinson sure takes his time getting there.

Green Mars's sizable pagecount is devoted largely to two things. One is politics, and I just ate that up. I love a realistic depiction of political struggle when it's written as an exploration of human nature, and not for the author to advance some stupid agenda of his own.

The other thing he writes about at great length is Mars, and this is where I found the book a bit of a struggle. And I feel bad about that. It's not like I can complain. I'm not going to write in an Amazon review, Robinson's book about Mars, Green Mars, is pretty good except for the parts where he writes about Mars.

But one of Robinson's main goals in this trilogy -- in Red Mars, in Green Mars, and I expect in Blue Mars too -- is to make the reader feel the natural beauty of the Martian landscape. And he sets out to accomplish this through text. Lavish textual descriptions, filled with geological terminology. And to be honest, they left me rather cold. They are what make the books a long slog for me.

I don't want to harp too much on the dryness of the 'Martian beauty' sections. They're obviously a central part of Robinson's vision. And he always gets back around to human beings and their psychologies and the march of history, which I enjoy reading about far more. My problem might just be that my brain's not wired to easily picture a visual image based on a text description. If I'm to appreciate something's visual beauty, I have to actually see it.

And on that note, go look at this high-resolution picture of Victoria Crater taken from Cape Verde by the Opportunity rover.