[the] ecstasy would soon give way to reality. The international community would be left with a stabilization and state-building nightmare bigger than Afghanistan and Iraq and much more dangerous than German reunification 20 years ago. Indeed, if unification were to come about this hastily, the cataclysmic event could well go down in history as one of the biggest missed opportunities of our century…. When one considers the massive economic disparities that would also be in play because of a South Korean economy more than twenty-fold that of North Korea’s, the technical end of the Korean War could well mark the beginning of another…. Similarly, sudden unification could produce fateful new geostrategic fault lines. Recall that in 1945-1947, US patience and diplomacy were slowly overtaken by a congealing animus and strategic competition that remained frozen in the 40-year-long Cold War. In addition, mistrust and miscalculation could catalyze a Sino-American rivalry that might polarize all of Northeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific region.

There would be much to plan for in the event of sudden unification. Hard security issues, for instance, would include the disposition of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery; the movement of military troops and major combat platforms like aircraft carriers; the disarmament and reintegration of the 1.1-million Korean People’s Army; and the future location of alliance bases and forces.

Meanwhile, a raft of state-building issues would ensue, with perhaps the biggest being an unrealistic expectation in northern Korea for a massive economic transfer for which the world would have to be ready to help pay for. That would require new infrastructure, including regional energy grids, all in the midst of turmoil over migration, property rights, educational reform and environmental cleanup. Retributive justice could follow and might well spill over into the region. Things certainly wouldn’t go smoothly.

I don’t think I agree with the author that Korean unification would be a “bigger nightmare than Afghanistan and Iraq.”  North Korea, despite its deep seated political and social problems, is still more or less an “organized society” built around the concept of statehood, and South Korea (who would more than likely take responsibility for a large portion of the costs for economic development and integration) is a highly developed nation with a strong sense of nationalism and Korean solidarity, which extends, in many ways, to the North.  Modernizing the decrepit economic, social, and political institutions of North Korea certainly ins’t a light task, but I don’t see it worse than Afghanistan and Iraq.  Nevertheless,  the condition of a post-unification Korean peninsula is still potentially disastrous.  I can’t help but to think that South Korean economists and economic planners see the unification of the two Koreas as a potential killer of South Korean economic prosperity.  As for military planners, the potential for a 21st century cold war-type standoff between China and the U.S. over Korean unification must certainly be a top concern.  As for re-knitting the ocean-wide gaps between North and South Koreans on issues such as national identification, political ideology, recognized norms of behavior and other social issues, I wouldn’t even know where to start.

I don’t intend any of this to be read as reasons not to seek unification.  There are, however, more than enough things that could turn a huge opportunity for good into an unbelievably bad situation.

I did, however, want to note something that I’ve been thinking more about lately:  the rise of China and alternative worldviews.

I’m obviously more aware of China now than I was while living in the United States.  China is just a short plane ride to the east.  However, another reason why I’m probably more aware of China is the rise in Chinese power and influence.  I suppose that China isn’t all that more powerful now than it was 2 years ago, but the reality of a world divided between Chinese ideas and American ideas seems more palpable in the post financial crisis world.  China is moving towards a more definitive stance regarding the east Asian regional balance of power and seems to be positioning itself to take a more assertive role in global politics than it ever has.  America, in the meantime, is in no position to directly challenge China; it’s no longer in vogue, politically, to confront China on matters such as Human Rights, Tibet, or other issues politically sensitive to China.  There seems to be a shift in the global balance of power; or, if not a shift, a shuffling of the cards.  China isn’t likely to play soft-spoken developing giant anymore.  It’s high time to exchange some of its latent power in for the real stuff.

Amongst other things, this got me thinking about how differently the Asian view of things is from the Western, particularly American view.  The notion of inalienable (God-given) rights, private property, and certain political rights is seen through a fundamentally different lens out east.  Or, look at it this way.  Among the great struggles of  man – good/evil, reason/unreason, right/wrong, better/worse, etc there is a certain way that societies define and give answers to these struggles.  Deconstruction notwithstanding, there is a supposed solution to resolve these dichotomies.  The question I have is, how does the “East” approach these problems?  Does the East even perceive the dichotomies like this?  Do they even perceive dichotomies?

It was to answer questions like these that I decided to stay in Asia.  Disappointingly, I must say I’m not sure how to even start an answer to questions such as these.  I can talk, briefly, about the notion of “Asian Values” (as discussed by Amartya Sen and Francis Fukuyama), but it’s nowhere near a definitive answer.  When reading through some of the literature I’m making my way through I make notes on the side that read:  and in Asia…?

I am fairly taken aback by the rash of ethnocentric and fundamentally sexist responses in these comments. There are so many mentions of “saving” and “freeing” these women from the tyranny of their own religion, side-by-side the proposal for an obliteration of their agency. A woman’s body does not need to be policed by the aesthetic preferences of the West.

At the core of the burqa ban is a deeply rooted fear of the ‘other’, and the traditionally heroic Western desire to salvage the dignity of those unfortunate enough to have been born low on the scale of cultural hierarchy.

Those poor girls from the East.  Only the enlightened wisdom from males and feminist in the West can save them!

Or not.

Comments and controversies such as these remind me why people like Edward Said are important.  I’m also reminded of a quote by Karl Marx that has a troublesome connection to the burqa ban controversy:

“The Orient [re:  Muslim women]  cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”

In its first year, the Obama administration envisaged a two-pronged foreign policy. The first prong—cooperative strategic engagement—sought to build and sustain cooperative partnerships with states and non-state actors who operated within (or hoped to join) the international order.

The article goes on to describe how quite the opposite happened.  China is becoming increasingly resilient to any overtures by the U.S. to join “liberal international order,” and has instead taken advantage of an over-committed, relatively weaker U.S.  Attempts made by the Obama administration to ease pressure on China and lay a foundation for a “multi-partner” world have been meet with either ambivalence or blatant defiance.  China is using its nascent super power status to challenge the status quo in east and southeast Asia, regardless of what the U.S. thinks.   The author of the Diplomat article calls this a “backfire” to the original idea of Chinese inclusion in the U.S. lead world order.  However,  if the U.S. is able to shake itself free of the futile and counterproductive ideas that lead it into two foolish state-building operations and a loss of a considerable amount of global power and influence, the rise of China as a direct challenge to U.S. global primacy could end up being a very positive thing for America.  Two things come to mind:

1.  Liberal internationalism and its radical cousin Neoconservativsm cannot be the foundation upon which the U.S. maintains its current global role.  (Neo)Realism, given all its shortcomings and inadequacies, is probably still the best theory for statesmen to follow – at least when it comes to great power competition.  Realizing this will help silence those who are still clinging the chimera of a prefect liberal order based maintained and insured by U.S. dominance.  Given the U.S.’s relative decline in power, its fruitless overseas commitments, and its uncertain economic condition, returning to a more rational policy of strategic-only commitments and a focus on domestic nation building can put America back on solid ground.

2.  Competition with China is probably the one thing that will (or at least could) push more rational ideas about foreign policy and statecraft to the forefront.  Mearsheimer warned at the end of the Cold War that we would soon “miss” it.  He wasn’t implying a nostalgia for being on the brink of nuclear holocaust but merely that a bi-polar world is more secure and better directed.   A bi-polar – or more bi-polar world – will force the United States to focus on rebuilding and re-strengthening America and to forgo silly expeditions in alien lands.  Either policy makers will readjust or the U.S. won’t realize its mistakes thus hastening its decline towards the great powers cemetery.  U.S. History suggests otherwise, but I’m not holding my breath.

I don’t worship the concept of the “free-market,” but I do agree with the notion that competition makes for better quality, cheaper, and more efficient products.  Products here being wiser U.S. policies.  Such concepts imply an evolutionary take on progress.  Like a discarded projection television, those who fail to adapt to a changing environment are left behind.  The international environment is changing, and the U.S. is not.  Conventional wisdom suggests stagnation inevitably precipitates decline.

Just a moment ago I came across this quote in Rushdie novel I’m reading.  It’s post-colonial in genre and I’d like to do some more with it.  But, for now, I’m just going to put it out there.

… again the curious possessive fascination of the hedonistic West with the ascetic East.  The arch-disciples of linearity, of the myth of progress want, from the Orient, only its fabled unchangingness.

More later.  I’m tired.

Life Doesn’t Deliver, It Doesn’t Even Cook

If what we know is really socially and historically contingent, then the famous observation by Soren Kierkegaard that the individual is solely responsible for giving life meaning finds a comfortable seat at the constructivist table.  There is a highly dynamic interaction between environment and the individual.  What makes this dynamic tick is the interaction of the individual with her environment.  Nothing else is satisfactory.  The power of human volition is active agent of creation, alteration, and destruction.  Material barriers notwithstanding, life is what we choose to make of it.  Our ideas are constructed through our experiences with life.  We give meaning and are thus giving meaning.

The realization of the complete freedom in life to do, create, or destroy whatever we please is the defining existential quality of uninhibited human agency.  Of course this doesn’t preclude limitations and constraints placed on us by our material surroundings, but neither does it preclude the freedom to act within the confines of constructed reality – in fact it requires the individual to take an active role in defining what is considered real.  Everyone is, to borrow Satre’s phrase, “condemned to be free.”  Suicide notwithstanding, there’s no escape from the reality which the individual is required to create.  We are the chefs; we set the flame, chop the vegetables, and boil the stew.

As Sartre makes clear in his novel Nausea, “things in themselves” have no inherent meaning or role.  This has the effect of accentuating the freedom and uninhibited human agency of individuals to “make themselves” – a characteristically existentialist trait.  As an important side note, the idea of total freedom doesn’t draw a red line through the materialist theory of behavior, it simple complements it by positing the idea that within one’s material existence one has the freedom to do anything.  The result of choices made by living people is the reality that we know.

“natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense upon stilts.”

The idea that there exists a natural law whose content is set by nature and therefore valid everywhere is hard to believe.  Law – and rights for that matter – are mere human constructs.  They are all positive laws given meaning and substance by the societies in which they are made.  Without a state and its juridical system there is no “right” and “wrong” or “just” and “unjust.”  There just is.  Value judgments are made according to the laws, norms, and standards set by society and generally obeyed by all subjects.  This kind of limited, “rational freedom” is certainly preferable to the alternative – total freedom and anarchy, aka a natural state of war.

However, I can’t help but fancy the idea of “moral practical reason.”  The type of moral philosophy espoused by Kant.  It’s a very progressive view of human beings and an ideal philosophy for any person interested in international development, governance, or those people who like Amratya Sen.  The idea behind moral practical reason looks like this:

People “[are] not to be valued merely as a means to the ends of other people, or even to his own ends, but is to be priced as an end himself.”

Or, in other words, people ought to be valued as people.  They shouldn’t be seen as “cogs in a machine” or instruments of the government.  They ought to be consider as living beings with every reason to value their life.  Moreover, their life ought to be made as pleasurable as reasonably possible.

The problem then of course is how, exactly, are peoples’ lives made reasonably pleasurable?

If your motivated, not perturbed by Asian ethnicities (I know there are plenty of close-minded xenophobes out there), able to learn new languages, and excited to learn and adopt to new cultures, there’s a land of opportunity awaiting.  You must, of course, speak English good well.  Well, not necessarily; but it helps tremendously.  Mainly because it’s a means to a decent living.

This time around it’s Asia.  A region of unparalleled opportunity, characterized by a zealous-like desire to achieve and a history of frenzied, rapid paced development.  It took me only a short time to realize the potential for advancement in this unique hybrid region of the world.  Everywhere one can see the indicators of progress and development:  coffee shop chains, illuminated buildings, fancy cars, and an emerging middle class who’s more concerned with material pleasures than basic physiological and security needs.  Asians seem determined to permanently plant themselves on top of Maslow’s zenith.  There is a palpable determination to succeed here.  You can see it in the work ethic of students and businessmen alike.  Chalk it up to the Confucius education model, the free-market model, or the U.S. security blanket.  Whatever the underlying cause, there is a conspicuously large plate full of freedom and potential.  Land of the Tigers, the behemoth Dragon, and plenty of curious “other” countries to visit, Asia has all the excitement of newness and exploration.

Lest I objective the East as a continuation of the West (which I probably already have), let me give a few words of advice that hopefully reflects my respect for the native population and my argent disdain for mindbogglingly ignorant foreigners.  One, don’t be like most other foreigners living abroad teaching English or some other skill.  Most never care to shake-up their frustratingly euro-centric mindset.  This isn’t America, dude.  This isn’t England, mate.  It’s Korea; it’s China; it’s Japan.  There are rich histories and cultures of prosaic colors.  They’ve been there, done that, decades – in some cases centuries – before Christopher was even a pathetic little zygote basking in the comfort of his Portuguese mother.  Also, in case one’s audible senses haven’t been too dulled by hours of incessant iPod listening, Asians have their own languages.  Try learning them.  If I gotta witness another monolingual American moron get upset at an Asian waitress — who’s giving service commensurate to the kind found at White House receptions — because she put tomatoes on your burger, I might lose all sense of propriety and throw him into the Sea of Japan.  If “no tomatoes” doesn’t register after three or four tries, that probably means 그 사람이 영어를 말할 수 없다.  Fortunately, survival phrases can be learned in a matter of days.  Weeks if you’re slow on the uptake.

I liked listening to my dad talk about the neighbors because according to him they were all dumb, doltish, and reprehensible to the point that a mosquito would drink the blood from an abscessed hog’s ass before going near one of them.  This was something we could agree upon.  As much as my father was like them in some ways, it pained him to associate with them.  It was excruciating to see, like watching a snail slowly belly across a bed of broken glass.  He had contempt for all of them, and it always registered in the spaghetti smile that he fought to put forward during these encounters.  “Oh, really.  Hmmm.  So how’s Jason doing?  Is he still in 1^st grade?  Again huh.  Well, if there’s anything worth doing, it’s worth doing twice.  Well, he’s a…he’s not a, uhm, dumb kid, he’ll pull through.  A guy at work told me the other day his boy has been in college for seven years now.  I’m pretty sure he can color in the lines and all that dumb shit, he just…well, anyway, tell Jason hello from me and the boy.”

Then aside to me.  “What the hells she feeding that kid, paint chips and Drano.  1^st grade?  Do they actually  let him use scissors?”

My father had a way of talking to me like one of the guys at the bar.  No joke was too dirty and no  gripe too gritty or graphic.  But I enjoyed it, and whenever I heard him refer to someone as a “bottom feeding shit bag” or a “pig fucking bucket of tripe”, I’d wind up and look for the first kid to beam with it.  I had a tongue sharp enough to filet any shithead in my grade.  I could be brutal and leave them gutted for all to see, or “cerebral” and surgical and cut them up neatly like a venetian blind.  As much as my father liked to indulge in that sort of blunt, sharp edged talk, he didn’t approve of me doing it, and whenever word got back to him he would shake his head, take a long sip from his beer, and hiss softly like a cigarette tossed out in the rain.  It wasn’t that he expected great things from me.  I wasn’t going to cure cancer or kick start cold fusion, but he saw how I clung to the other kids like a drier sheet, and it tied his face up into a mish-mash of glowing furrows.

He knew he had failed, he just wasn’t sure at what.    His father was a prominent local lawyer with a loquacity and wit that exuded confidence and success.  My father had no illusions of becoming my grandfather nor did he want to be, but he knew he was better than the lowly position he held.  As he said, his job was for those with no options, those who had  adopted a Sherman’s-march-approach to life and were left with nothing but dark clouds and burned bridges.   It was partly the old American cliché of a father dreaming up a better future for his kid, and mostly my father not wanting me to share the same putrid fate he foresaw for the other little marrow sucking brutes around me.  To him, my friends were nothing more than cacophonous pigeons hell bent on shitting on everything in sight, and like pigeons, he believed one day they would find themselves sleeping beneath bridges and underpasses.  They would eventually become necrophiliacs to dead dreams, masking their emptiness with bitter hatreds and diatribes about “niggers,” indulging in mind numbing talk about the cotton gin and how they weren’t sure exactly what it was, but they were absolutely sure it couldn’t have been invented by a “nigger.”

“Stay clear of those little maggots.  And don’t tell me you don’t hang out with them because I saw you hot footing down the street with them the other day.  They’d throw an old lady out of a wheelchair just to hawk it for a pin knife to go back and stab her with.  Just you wait.  You’ll see.  One day you’ll be walking down the street and see a stony police composite of one of those maggots.”  According to him, if a palm reader got a glimpse of one of their futures, she’d cut their hands right off on the spot out of shear disgust.

But at heart I was a nefarious little bastard  too, with maybe a homeopathic grain of emotion that I could sweat a couple tears out of whenever need be.  The only true emotion I felt was fear.  My nerves were always cracking like horse whips and my mind screaming like a buzz saw, leaving me trembling like a rain drop clinging to an awning.  I was a fly caught between fan blades, dodging one calamity or another.  Danger seemed to appear out of nowhere with the click of a view finder, and what was once just the shadow of my lamp cast against the wall was suddenly a scabrous old man in a sooty slouch hat,  his eyes flung wide open like two bear traps, with a knife clenched between his teeth.  An evil cloud loomed over me which God fluffed malevolently as if he were preparing to smother me.  Solace was a snowflake one caught with one’s tongue, there and then gone.

I was scared of everything.  I was scared of my wobbly ceiling fan, and how the blades circled above me like drunken vultures.  I was scared of spiders and was convinced one morning I would wake up in a strait jacket knitted by them.  I was scared of our electric can opener, fearing it might get a hold of my finger and pull the flesh right off me in one clean swipe like a table cloth.  I was scared of our deck, and every time it gave a geriatric groan I’d jump as if it were going to cave in and swallow me (although this might have been a valid fear).  I was scared of the corn fields and the snake I thought was out there waiting for me.  I imagined it striking swiftly and then dislocating its jaw and slowly pulling itself up my leg like a tube sock.  In many ways I had the same fears as other children, just exaggerated with chilling detail and a feeling that every one of them was an inevitability.

I tried to conceal my fear of the kids around the block, not so much from them, but my father.  If Ryan raised his hand to dab his nose my heart and mind began to race like dueling banjos.  If he hit me the best I could do was paw back weakly like a kitten batting a mobile.  The alacrity, precision, and sensitivity of my nervous system was stunning.  My heart was like a fly caught in a spider’s web; its most subtle changes echoed through my nerves all the way down to my toes.  In response I became just as truculent and capricious, but I had about as much bite as an eyelash crimper.  And that is where my skill as a wordsmith came into play.  I fortified myself in false words and acquired a stilted confidence that helped ameliorate my anxiety.

My innate ability to hatch devious, juvenile plans to disturb and disrupt our neighborhood also lent me a general-like status within my unwholesome group of friends.  There was always some bitter old fuck whom I deemed worthy of a broken window, a shit swiped door handle, or a midnight fusillade of knocks on the door.  There wasn’t anything particularly creative about my plans, I just had a way of instilling everyone with a heliocentric view, where they were at the center of all the world’s hate.  I would grab a pair of egg beaters, rev them up like an outboard motor, and violently stir up the mob’s emotions until they were frothing like blood thirsty cannibals.

“Yeah, well that’s what old man Benton said about all of you.  He called all of us shits and blamed us for his stupid cat dying.”

“I didn’t kill ith!”  Jason always had to interject and relieve some pressure before his head exploded.  “I juth poked at it with a thtick, but it wath already dead.  I don’t kill nothing unleth it needs thit, and old man Bentonth’s cat never did nothing to me.  It uthta kill mith beneath the deck and leave them at the door acthually.  I kinda liked it really.  I wathn’t even poking it hard, I-“

“That’s the point, none of us killed it.  But he-“

“Wathita boy or girl?”

“What?”

“Wathita boy or girl?  I never looked.  I can never tell anyway.  They got peckerths like meal wormths.”

“I don’t know, I never saw it.  Which is my point, none of us-“

“Maybe I did kill it.  It mighta been alive when I wath pokin’ it.  I never thought of it before.  Thould I feel bad?”

“Well…no…no… you shouldn’t!  Of course not, that old bucket of tripe got what he deserved!  He-”

“Yeah, he did!  Dotthe have a dog?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, if the doth, I get to kill it firtht!”

It was hard to control this mob.  It was like trying to tame Cerberus with one muzzle, constantly juggling it from one snarling mouth to another.  As for old man Benton, he was a son of a bitch.  He was a hedge apple on spindly legs, who walked around the neighborhood once in the morning and once at night wilting flowers with his odious breath and silencing birds with his head-on-a-swivel scowl. His gait was awkward and unsteady like a dog  on its hind legs, but it never stopped him.  He was completely bald except for a sparse patch that garnished the top of his pate and narrowed his lactescent eyes on you murderously if you even glanced at it.  In short, old man Benton had not aged well and he dared you to notice.

Just like any good war, no one remembered how this one started and no one cared how it would end as long as we won.  We had traded spit on the sidewalk, barbed words, and brow busting stares, until it had escalated to the point that anything less than a snake beneath the pillowcase would seem congenial.  He was ready to decapitate us and string our heads across his porch like Chinese lanterns, and we were willing to spur him on till his sides split open.  We had no choice but to bring out our secret weapon, the retard.